This November Disney will be unveiling their brand new streaming service, Disney+, and it will come with their entire slate of movies and shows – but perhaps 90 percent of the reason a lot of people will subscribe to it is to check out the live-action STAR WARS show, THE MANDALORIAN. People are already buzzing about the show we’ve seen very little of, and based on that anticipation alone series creator/director/writer Jon Favreau is already hard at work on the second season.
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The director was speaking with Collider during the press day for his new movie THE LION KING when he started talking about pitching the show to Disney, all before revealing he was doing some writing for season two that very day.
“I keep getting pulled deeper into the orbit of Disney, but fortunately the stuff that Disney’s working on is the stuff that I love. I wanted to do a Star Wars TV show like The Mandalorian and pitched it to them and they were very open to it. I even wrote four episodes before I even was hired to do it because I was excited as a fan to see what these stories might be and see if they were interested in doing what I was interested in, which they were. And I was actually writing Season 2 this morning before I came here.”
He confirmed as much again with talking with Jimmy Kimmel on his late-night show, saying he’s writing season two and “having a blast.” He got into the plot synopsis a bit more, saying, “It’s about a bounty hunter, it’s after Return of the Jedi. The Empire is gone and all hell is breaking loose on the outer rim. It’s about the scum and villainy now that…once you take out the rule of law what happens is chaos takes over.”
While writing is often the earliest of stages before getting into the nitty-gritty of pre-production, Favreau and his team are already getting the gears in motion when it comes to the unique and complicated planning process of the show. Much like with LION KING, Favreau and his effects team are utilizing groundbreaking VR technology and the Epic game engine to map out the environments and use “real-time in-camera visual effects,” all so that they can get the hefty amount of visual effects work done efficiently on a TV show schedule (via Collider).
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That may be a tad hard to comprehend unless you’re familiar with the whole process, basically what it means is that a lot of the work has to be mapped out during pre-production so that effects can be rendered quickly and so that “we know exactly what we need to see,” according to Favreau. He continued, saying, “So if you visited the set now as we’re starting to get into Season 2, it looks a lot like the set of The Lion King as we’re planning how we’re gonna shoot it ahead of time.”
The show doesn't even become available for another four months, but Disney and Lucasfilm don't need to wait until it comes out to see if it's successful to warrant another go. Fans are already pouring over what details they can about the show, and those who saw a small amount of footage at Star Wars Celebration this year say it harkens back to the glory days of the original trilogy.
THE MANDALORIAN debuts the day Disney+ does on November 12, and his new movie THE LION KING is in theaters July 19.