Now that The Mandalorian is an Emmy-winning show, where does Star Wars go from here?
Disney+ isn’t even a year old, and yet it’s already got a few Emmys on its hands thanks to The Mandalorian. Last week, the Disney+ show won a total of seven Emmys, most of it for its creative work. And though it lost out on the big award Sunday night, Outstanding Drama Series, the show was nominated for it nonetheless, which shows how acclaimed the series is. Seriously, to be nominated in a league with the likes of The Crown, Better Call Saul and Succession (which won) says a lot. So what do Disney and Lucasfilm do now?
The plain fact is, Star Wars usually has a lot of free range to do just about whatever it wants. While we don’t always know what decisions get turned down in the board rooms, we do know that Star Wars is Star Wars. So when it comes to risk-taking factors, Disney probably doesn’t have to worry about a new project being a flop. Depending on who you ask, this may have led to some overconfidence on their end when it came to the sequel trilogy, but these are all lessons learned.
The big takeaway, thus far, is that The Mandalorian absolutely killed it. And if that did well in season 1, it’s worth continuing for as long as they can pull it off. Of course, season 2 will begin streaming next month on Oct. 30. But already, Moff Gideon actor Giancarlo Esposito has talked about seasons 3 and 4 potentially already in the works. If you’ve got a good thing going, why stop? The Emmys acclaim only helped to seal the deal.
What’s unknown, though, will be the balance Lucasfilm strikes between the TV world and the movies world. As it stands, Disney does have Star Wars films slated to come out in the future. In July, Variety reported three movies will come out around the holiday season in 2023, 2025 and 2027. But at the same time, Lucasfilm will also deal with producing the mass of live-action TV shows it plans on releasing in addition to The Mandalorian. Already, the Cassian Andor series and Obi-Wan series are in various stages of production. And there are still other rumored series as well.
It’s very possible that with enough people on board, every project can be handled with care. Marvel Studios is in the same position, coming out with more Disney+ TV shows than movies at the moment. But only time will tell what happens as we start seeing TV shows and movies beginning to come out simultaneously from these franchises.
With The Mandalorian’s success, the smart move would be to put all their chips on the TV sector now. With only one show under its belt, it’s still relatively unexplored territory for Star Wars. (At least in the live-action sense. We’re excluding animated series here.) And they’d do good to try to focus their resources on building up this area of their business with all the care and attention they can.
Still, with the Skywalker saga finished, this also means the folks at Lucasfilm are going to have to put a lot of time and attention into building up this new block of movies that they want to create. Not to say they just coasted by when it came to the sequel trilogy. (Or did they?) But it seems like you can only have so many resources spread thin before something starts to give. Hopefully, in their case, quality won’t be sacrificed for quantity. But again, we’ll just have to wait and see how the live-action + movie release cycle works out for Star Wars.
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