Skip to main content

Jon Favreau reveals the setting of Disney’s live-action Star Wars series

Everyone expected Disney to leverage its most popular movie franchises for its planned streaming video platform, and now  we know that a live-action series set in the Star Wars universe is in the works. The series will be written and produced by The Jungle Book and Iron Man director Jon Favreau, who has offered up some information on the status and setting for the show.

Recommended Videos

In an interview with Nerdist, Favreau revealed that the series will be set seven years after the Battle of Endor in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi and feature new characters via the sort of cutting-edge CGI and motion-capture technology used in The Jungle Book. The series is also relatively far along on the writing side, too.

“I’ve written half of the season already for the new Star Wars show that I’m working on,” Favreau told StarWars.com during an interview at the Solo premiere May 10.

Lucasfilm announced the project on StarWars.com, making the untitled series one of the first projects to reach this stage of development for Disney’s streaming video service, which was first announced back in November 2017.

“If you told me at 11 years old that I would be getting to tell stories in the Star Wars universe, I wouldn’t have believed you,” said Favreau in a statement accompanying the announcement. “I can’t wait to embark upon this exciting adventure.”

Favreau is no stranger to the Star Wars universe, having voiced characters in both the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series and the upcoming live-action film Solo: A Star Wars Story. He also has a long history with Disney as one of the original architects of Marvel’s cinematic universe, serving as the director of the first two Iron Man movies and as an executive producer on all of the Iron Man and Avengers movies. Recently, he directed and produced the live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book that won an Oscar for its visual effects in 2017.

Favreau is currently working on a live-action adaptation of The Lion King for Disney, scheduled to hit theaters in July 2019.

“I couldn’t be more excited about Jon coming on board to produce and write for the new direct-to-consumer platform,” said Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy in the announcement. “Jon brings the perfect mix of producing and writing talent, combined with a fluency in the Star Wars universe. This series will allow Jon the chance to work with a diverse group of writers and directors and give Lucasfilm the opportunity to build a robust talent base.”

Disney’s streaming video service is expected to launch at some point in 2019. There’s been no announcement regarding how much it will cost as it’s currently being conceived, but it’s expected to come in below the monthly $11 subscription for Netflix. Whether the live-action Star Wars series will be available at launch is unknown at this point, but casting and production will have to begin soon if that’s the plan.

Updated May 11 with more details about the series and where it fits in the franchise’s timeline.

Rick Marshall
Former Contributing Editor, Entertainment
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew was originally supposed to be a movie
Jude Law sits in a starship's pilot seat in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.

Lucasfilm is on the verge of debuting its second live-action Star Wars series of the year, Skeleton Crew. Set after the events of Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi, the show follows a group of adventure-seeking kids who end up stranded in space with a starship of unknown origin and are joined on their journey home by a mysterious, potentially untrustworthy adult Force-user (Jude Law). The new series comes from the minds of Christopher Ford and Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts, and it has the potential to be the Disney+ hit that Lucasfilm has been in desperate need of over the past two years.

As well-suited as it may seem for the studio's Disney+ model, though, Skeleton Crew was originally pitched to Lucasfilm years ago as a movie, Watts recently revealed. "I pitched it right after the first Spider-Man [Homecoming] movie. It was initially pitched to Lucasfilm as a film, and then I had to go make two Spider-Man movies, because the first one did all right," the filmmaker told TVLine. "Over time, [Jon] Favreau made The Mandalorian and Disney+ came into existence, so it evolved, as the Spider-Man movies were being made, into a show."

Read more
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’s Disney+ release date moved up
Two kids drive a vehicle down the road.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is arriving earlier than expected. The eight-part series will debut with a two-episode premiere at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on Monday, December 2. Subsequent episodes will be released on Tuesdays at the same time, with the season finale airing on January 14, 2025.

Disney also announced the directors for each corresponding episode. Series co-creator Jon Watts will helm episodes 1 and 8. The Green Knight's David Lowery directs episodes 2 and 3. The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, direct episode 4. The remaining three episodes will be directed by Beef's Jake Schreier (episode 5), Bryce Dallas Howard (episode 6), and Minari's Lee Isaac Chung (episode 7).

Read more
Andor season 2 will reveal the origin of one iconic Star Wars location
Cassian Andor looks behind him while he walks in Andor season 1.

Andor season 2 will be an even bigger and more expansive space adventure than its predecessor. In a recent interview with Empire, Cassian Andor himself, actor Diego Luna, teased that the critically acclaimed Star Wars series will go to even more places and planets in its second season than it did in its first. "We move in space more than ever — the amount of planets and sets you’re going to get to see," Luna promised. "There are some familiar and new locations."

According to Andor creator Tony Gilroy, the show's sophomore season will even travel to one of the most important locations in Star Wars history: Yavin 4, the moon where the Rebel Alliance's headquarters are stationed during the first Death Star's destruction at the end of Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. "I mean, we have to end up in Yavin, right?” Gilroy teased. "So, we’ll tell the story of Yavin. No one has quite dealt with Yavin the way we will be doing it.”

Read more