This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Holiday Cheer, 2024 Lineup, and When Will Shawn Levy Make His ‘Star Wars’ Movie?
Welcome back to “This Week, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away” and Merry Christmas to those celebrating! If you haven’t noticed because you’ve been traveling back home this week, it’s been crickets out there. For that reason, and so we can all go back to spreading some holiday cheer, this will be a shorter piece than usual. But the fact that there hasn’t been a lot of Star Wars news out there doesn’t mean we have nothing to talk about.
It was a busy week elsewhere in entertainment, from the Netflix release of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, DC’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, or Zack Snyder’s Star Wars wannabe Rebel Moon Part One, to the reporting of Paramount Global possibly merging with Warner Bros. Discovery. But it was Stranger Things that sent me down the rabbit hole we’ll be discussing later. For now, let’s do a quick recap.
Three Things That May Have Flown Casual
- Remember that report from a couple weeks ago that didn’t include The Bad Batch and Tales of the Jedi in Disney Plus’ 2024 lineup? All’s good now, as the company has updated it and included both animated series. But it’s now more clear than ever that Andor season 2 will likely be moved into 2025. Specific release dates have yet to be determined, but The Bad Batch season 3 could be the first Star Wars show next year.
- Weekly Ahsoka news: Dave Filoni teases a rematch between Hera and Thrawn, and a team-up between Captain Pellaeon and the Grand Admiral. Also, Hot Toys continues with their Ahsoka line, revealing Captain Enoch and Night Trooper figures.
- A New Hope is working on its second Native American dub after being translated into Navajo 10 years ago. Next year, recordings in the Ojibwe language will begin.
Star Wars Anniversaries This Week
No “Quote of the Week” today, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the several anniversaries that the franchise celebrated this week. On Monday, December 18, The Force Awakens turned eight years old, and on Wednesday, we marked the fourth year since The Rise of Skywalker opened in theaters — the last Star Wars movie (and the source of the biggest shock of this week for me, when our tweet commemorating the anniversary crossed 450k views).
It’s not that I needed a new movie this Christmas season (Rogue Squadron was originally supposed to come out this weekend), but knowing that one is about to start filming would be nice.
More anniversaries: the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian came out on Dec. 18, 2020. That was the episode in which Luke was digitally recreated and brought Grogu with him. The Book of Boba Fett was also announced as a mid-credits scene in that episode. And also on the 18th, Steven Spielberg turned 77. Happy birthday!
An Early Preview of Shawn Levy’s Upcoming Schedule: When Will He Make His Star Wars Movie?
Putting aside the possibility of The Mandalorian season 4 becoming a movie, Lucasfilm has officially confirmed five Star Wars feature films in development. We know Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s New Jedi Order-era project is the most far along, with Taika Waititi also actively working on his script. The Glovers are also said to be working on a Lando film, and that’s definitely one to study up close, while James Mangold is waiting for A Complete Unknown to shoot to start writing his Star Wars film. And there’s, of course, Dave Filoni’s culmination event.
But one name tends to escape that list, maybe because Lucasfilm hasn’t confirmed him yet, or maybe because he’s currently associated with another brand. It’s Shawn Levy, of course, but we know he is tied to Star Wars because he, himself, has confirmed it multiple times. One of his first statements on the matter was about his decisiveness to make the film, despite Lucasfilm’s track record with creatives. (Fast forward to two years from now when Kathleen Kennedy tries to Jedi mind-trick us into thinking it was never real.)
Levy has a few weeks left to shoot on the London set of Deadpool 3, before he rushes to the post-production bay and tries to get the movie finished by its July 26, 2024, release date. It’s going to be an intense first half of the year for Levy. At least he’s supposedly already edited half the movie. But the tight schedule probably means he won’t be able to work on the fifth season of Stranger Things before the summer, and since he’s already confirmed he’ll be back as the director on at least one episode, it seems logical to assume it will happen on the second half of the year.
The hit Netflix series is supposed to start shooting at the beginning of January, and the Duffer brothers have already confirmed it will be a year-long production. Now, Levy has always done episodes 3-4 of past seasons, so it seems plausible to assume he’s been given those now as well. So that should keep him busy for another couple of months after Deadpool 3, and we’re now in the fall.
This is where things get interesting, though. Levy recently signed on to direct another Netflix movie starring Ryan Reynolds, but it’s unknown when that will film. The Hollywood Reporter said about it: “The project isn’t happening anytime soon as it is still in early development.” But the package was hot enough to spike a bidding war that Netflix won, so I can’t imagine Levy will move on to make Star Wars before that. That’s putting it on the back burner for another two years at least.
This makes me wonder if he’s actually been told by Lucasfilm he’s not needed for now. At first glance, it seems like Lucasfilm’s #1 priority for 2024 would be to get Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s film up and running. But they also have Lando deep in development, and I have a feeling we’ll learn a lot more about that one during the first two months of the year, when Donald Glover’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith series debuts on Prime Video.
Mangold will be busy with the Bob Dylan biopic, but if he can wrap that in the first six months of the year, he could start writing Dawn of the Jedi (wt) after the summer. So they can easily have two more films they can shoot in late 2024/2025. And we can also add Dave Filoni’s name to the list, with the asterisk that we don’t know if he’ll be doing Ahsoka season 2 first. All things considered, it looks like Shawn Levy and Taika Waititi will not be part of Lucasfilm’s first wave of new films, and they probably won’t start filming before 2026.
No reading list this week, but just a shout-out to our awesome team who have been covering the publishing side of Star Wars every week. We review pretty much every comic and book that comes out from a galaxy far, far away, which is one of the many reasons I’m so proud of this site. This week, we had reviews for:
- Doctor Aphra #39 (by Josh Atkins)
- The Essential Legends audiobooks of Survivor’s Quest (Nate Manning) and Outbound Flight (Sydney Watsek)
- Shadows of Starlight #3 (by Tyler Bradshaw)
- Revelations (by Jay Goodearl)
We’ll be back next week with a recap of the full year. Look forward to another article coming soon recapping the biggest news headlines of 2023, and another with a preview of what to expect from 2024.
Have a great holiday break, and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!
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.
