(Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
The live action Star Wars television series is still in development, but it seems executive producer Jon Favreau is already four episodes into writing the program, presumed to anchor Disney’s upcoming streaming service.
While speaking at the premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story Thursday night, the live action Jungle Book and Lion King director revealed several details about his upcoming Star Wars series, including its setting – three years after Return of the Jedi – and his deep-dive into scripting before he had the job. “I wrote four [episodes] to show them what the show would be,” he explained to Nerdist on the carpet. “It’s all-new characters, different planets. But it still fits into the timeline.”
That timeline, between Return of the Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will also be the focus of Resistance, a new animated series from Star Wars Rebels executive producer Dave Filoni. Centering on young Resistance pilot Kazuda Xiono, the series will occur closer to the Sequel Trilogy with Force Awakens stars Oscar Isaac and Gwendoline Christie set to reprise their roles as Poe Dameron and Captain Phasma.
And, of course, the post-ROTJ era will be familiar to fans of Star Wars‘s former Expanded Universe, who still lament the removal of those stories, video games, and ideas from Star Wars canon.
The writing of Favreau’s Star Wars series coincides with the continued production of his live action Lion King remake, which suggests the series will go into production closer to Lion King‘s release on July 19, 2019. Once it does, it seems the show will feature a number of alien creatures as Favreau said they are “figuring out new techniques” and looking at “all the stuff that I’ve been learning on Jungle Book and Lion King” to realize some of the characters he devised.
Meanwhile, Favreau also appears in Solo as Rio Durant, an alien in Beckett’s (Woody Harrelson) crew. While the alien is realized with CGI, Favreau performed the character with various performance capture technologies – his first time despite directing others with the tech. He said both acting in a Star Wars film and taking creative reigns of an aspect of the mythology is “a dream come true.”
Solo: A Star Wars Story opens on May 25.
