The Mandalorian Executive Producer Dave Filoni recently confirmed that the Disney Star Wars timeline he works with begins with The Phantom Menace and ends with The Rise of Skywalker.
Filoni recently discussed possible Star Wars plans spinning out of The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew given Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy’s comments back in 2020 claiming The Mandalorian and its spinoffs would “culminate in a climactic story event.”
Speaking with Drew Taylor at TheWrap, Filoni said, “I tend to think, as we’ve been working on the The Mandalorian and then writing Ahsoka, and then Jon Watts came in with Skeleton Crew, there is an entire time period that is post-Return of the Jedi. And I look at that time period, which before The Force Awakens, is around 30 years of time.”
He continued, “When you look at the original trilogy, it’s a much less significant amount of time that those three movies take place in. And so, what I like is that we’re really building very slowly an ecosystem of characters and politics and events in the post-Return of the Jedi time period. And that may or may not expand in a bigger way as we add more shows to it and add more characters to it.”
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Filoni then went on to reveal how he attempts to keep track of everything happening within this Star Wars timeline, “The good thing is that we’re all talking creatively together about where these stories are all going. And I love whiteboards, and I whiteboard everything and have timelines. They always start back with The Phantom Menace and they always go out to The Rise of Skywalker.”
“I have all these slots in between and where everybody’s doing everything, so I can look at it all and commiserate with Kathy on what’s going on here, what’s going on there? It’s very fun,” he said.
He then hinted that a big event is likely, “I think that the reality of there being a big event in this time period is very real, is all I would say to that.”
“But yes, if Jon wanted to keep making Mandalorian stories, as long as he does not get bumped off in said titanic event, then they, I suppose, could continue. There doesn’t seem to be any lack of interest in Grogu and Mando, that’s for sure,” he concluded.
This is another confirmation that all roads within Disney Star Wars lead to the abominable Disney sequel trilogy. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Jon Favreau made it very clear that The Mandalorian would be leading into the sequel trilogies before a single episode of the show even aired.
On Instagram he revealed the show “is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order.”
More recently, Favrea was even more explicit. He was asked by YouTube channel Moovy TV, “You spoke about needing to have a team to keep track of all this continuity that you got going. Is it a challenge also as a storyteller knowing where this universe, this galaxy of Star Wars is like 20, 25 years down the road in terms of the sequel trilogy and having to match up with that?”
Favreau responded, “Yeah. It’s a little closer than that now. We’ve been on the air a little bit.”
“It’s interesting because, you know, what’s come before, and then in our time period there’s also been extended universe fiction,” Favreau continued. “There’s characters that have been slowly introduced in [Star Wars Rebels] like Thrawn. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s in canon like canon proper. But I think there’s different tiers of things.”
He later explained how he looks at Star Wars continuity, “So I think that there are certain markers that we have. It’s almost like studying ancient history where you kind of know a few things that happen, but there’s a lot of murkiness in between and we just don’t have archaeological evidence in the real world to know exactly what happened so we kind of connect the dots.”
“If you look at someone like George R.R. Martin and his novels, it’s really interesting to see how he treats these things because he really does treat it like history,” Favreau went on, “Sometimes you have stories told from different perspectives. Sometimes you have flawed storytellers. Sometimes you have different versions. And, of course, you have different media: the books and the shows. And that interplay and that level of sophistication. And I think also having somebody like one author of it really adds to the complexity that you can have.”
He concluded, “So how do we emulate that with the teams that we have both at Lucasfilm, ILM, and on the team of our shows? How do we all work together and try to formulate that kind of consistency?”
What do you make of Filoni’s confirmation that The Mandalorian and the upcoming Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew series lead into the Disney sequel trilogy?