The 2023 WGA Strike Has Ended: What This Means For ‘Star Wars’
After nearly five months of picketing, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Writers Guild of America have reached a tentative agreement for better working conditions for writers. Here’s how the new deal impacts the future of Star Wars.
Both parties have been negotiating since Wednesday, and on Saturday, industry trades reported that lawyers were being brought into the room to iron out the legal language for what they had discussed, essentially meaning they had reached a deal and now it was just a matter of time before they made the official announcement. Sunday night, on the 146th day of the strike, that deal was finalized, pending guild approval, and picketing is to be suspended effective immediately. With the deal yet to be ratified by the WGA membership (which is scheduled to happen this Tuesday) and the point where writers will return to work not yet established (also set to happen on Tuesday, should the deal be ratified), it looks like this is going to be the second-longest strike in WGA’s history, potentially tied or beating 1960’s 148-day stoppage, and narrowly falling behind 1988’s 153-day pause.
As of right now, details on the deal remain unavailable. The WGA indicated that there were “meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership” in the final version of the deal – and, in all likelihood, their praise of the deal likely means that it will soon pass. However, early reports point out that the guild got significant protections against the use of AI (though the studios kept some wiggle room for experimenting; getting the legal terms down to paper is what stretched the negotiations for so long), a minimum TV staffing number that is lower than they were expecting (but still a small victory on their end), and some sort of residual compensation for streaming content that reaches a certain level of success. Details for all of the above might be disclosed in the coming weeks.
Since our site is angled toward a Star Wars focus, we’ll move away from the specifics of speculating what might be in the new deal and shift our focus to what this means for the development of new projects in the galaxy far, far away. We’ll be covering the rest of the WGA strike and, hopefully, the end of the SAG-AFTRA stoppage on our sister site, MovieNewsNet.com.
What the WGA deal means for future Star Wars movies
On the feature film side, the WGA strike halted development on at least three projects – Steven Knight’s script for the New Jedi Order-era film, starring Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker, Taika Waititi’s mysterious project that he may star in, which may have enlisted additional writers over the past few months (prior to the strike), and the Lando movie that was retooled from a Disney Plus series by Donald and Stephen Glover.
Screenwriters behind all three of those projects are confirmed to have been actively working on them prior to May 2, so they are expected to resume development in the immediate future. Also in very early development are films by Dave Filoni, James Mangold, and Shawn Levy, though all three of them are focused on another project at the moment (with Filoni being a random variable in this equation, see below).
What the WGA deal means for Star Wars TV series
The Mandalorian
On the Disney Plus side, the strike halted development on the fourth season of The Mandalorian, which was in the middle of pre-production and hoping to get in front of the cameras by October. That date is no longer happening, of course, but it’s possible the team managed to do some work elsewhere over the past few months and, if the actors’ schedules allowed it, it could start filming in early 2024.
This is, of course, assuming the studios and the actors also manage to close a deal soon. Jon Favreau, as usual, wrote the majority of the new season, if not all of it – because he did so in 2022, when Filoni was busy shooting Ahsoka, we assumed he didn’t have much day-to-day input from his creative partner.
However, The Mandalorian and potentially a second season of Ahsoka are the most interesting TV shows to watch in terms of the new contract. As explained above, early reports suggest that there will be some mandatory minimum staffing for TV shows, which will depend on the number of episodes. (Again, details are scarce as of this posting, so this could be deemed obsolete later this week.) This would mean that Jon Favreau or Dave Filoni won’t get away with writing new seasons of The Mandalorian or Ahsoka on their own, and they’ll need to hire additional hands.
Since The Mandalorian season 4 was likely approved under the previous contract, it’s possible it won’t be affected, and production may proceed with the scripts that are already in place. But future seasons will be different, should they happen. And yet, we understand that there is some form of a writers’ room assembled at Lucasfilm during the writing process, which is where names like Noah Kloor emerged from (he worked on The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian season 3). Favreau isn’t forced to credit them if their contributions didn’t make it into the final draft, but he will have to pay them.
Andor
Tony Gilroy also had to step out of the Andor set due to his conflicting duties as writer, showrunner, and executive producer, and the show was forced to spend 2.5 months shooting without any writers on set nor the ability to communicate with them. Gilroy will now be able to catch up with everything that’s happening, though the production will have to wait for the actors’ strike to be wrapped up before they can start rolling again.
They have between 4 and 6 weeks left of shooting, and it’s unknown how they will schedule them. We assume they’ve been working on post-production on all the material they have available at the moment since mid-July.
Star Wars: Ahsoka
WGA strike rules forbid their members from promoting any projects they wrote for, which meant Dave Filoni couldn’t do any press post-May 1. This will no longer be the case, which will allow the showrunner to do spoiler-filled interviews now that the show is coming to an end. But of course, there is one more thing on the “to do” list for him, as it’s been widely reported that Lucasfilm wants to do a second season of Ahsoka before the culmination film event comes out, as long as the viewership numbers are there.
The jury is still out on that one, though we anticipate this will happen. We also assume Filoni has laid out the story for the second season, but we don’t know how far along the writing is at the moment. Unlike The Mandalorian season 4, though, we understand that scripts aren’t yet done for the new season, so should it be signed under the new contract when it’s ratified, Dave Filoni would have to bring in additional writers as part of the minimum TV staffing clause. Of course, having worked on The Clone Wars for seven seasons and Star Wars: Rebels for four seasons, he’s no stranger to this.
Star Wars: The Acolyte
Production on the first season of The Acolyte wrapped up just a few weeks after the writers went on strike, so it wasn’t severely impacted by it. However, we know there are plans in place to go beyond the first season, as court filings from a lawsuit producer Karyn McCarthy filed against Lucasfilm and Disney over breach of contract revealed the company anticipated the show to run for multiple seasons.
We anticipate a second season of the show to go into production sooner rather than later, as Lucasfilm tries to strike while the iron is hot, but we don’t know if any writing has been done beyond the series overview that was in place before the first season started production. As far as the minimum TV staffing rule goes, this should be no issue here, because Leslye Headland isn’t writing the show by herself. A writers’ room for the series was assembled at some point in late 2020 or 2021, and multiple writers will receive credit for the show. Some of those names have already been disclosed: Charmaine DeGraté, Jason Micallef and Jocelyn Bioh.
No release date has been set for The Acolyte, and though we once expected it to come out on Disney Plus during Q2 of 2024, we wouldn’t be surprised if that turned into late Summer. Because the actors are still on strike, post-production work that involves them – like ADR work, recording for CGI roles, or even reshoots – cannot be done.
Not all Hollywood strikes are over
As you may have heard by now, this was the summer of the dual strike, as Hollywood actors joined the writers on the picket lines in mid-July. (Directors were also potentially on the docket to join the strike, but the Directors Guild of America reached a deal that their members signed off on before a strike began.) Live-action productions that need actors for scenes, or animated productions that still need voice actors to finish their lines, ceased production in the middle of the summer; work on them is unable to resume for the time being, as the actors’ guild has not yet closed a deal with the studios.
As far as Star Wars goes, this affects the fourth season of The Mandalorian, which as explained above, was getting ready to start production this Autumn, but it may also impact animated series. The Bad Batch may have wrapped recording voice acting for its third season before the strike began, meaning that it will most likely not be affected by the start of the strike earlier this year. That may not be the case for the second season of Tales of the Jedi, which was confirmed at Celebration to be coming out next year – if voice actors have not yet started on that work, then they cannot until the strike is over. The same goes for Star Wars: Visions Volume 3, though given the international aspect of that show, we don’t expect it will be impacted by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Animators are not striking at this time, so any and all Star Wars animation productions that don’t need additional voice work to complete should keep moving forward.
There will be plenty of things to consider in the weeks ahead, since a major strike is still left unresolved, but for now, it is a time to celebrate and to look forward to the future ahead. The Force is with the WGA.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
