After years of various rumblings and mumblings about potential movies and ideas, Star Wars fans are finally – finally – getting new live-action adventures with Obi-Wan Kenobi, with star Ewan McGregor returning to the role. The upcoming streaming series was confirmed at D23 last week, along with news about all sorts of new Star Wars shows for Disney+, and now we may have a bit of information about when the series will take place since the last time we saw McGregor’s Kenobi. Hint: it set during a long time ago, and in a galaxy far, far away.
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The folks at The Star Wars Show released a video recap of the Star Wars presentation at D23, and to kick things off they mentioned the announced Kenobi series, which McGregor came on stage with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy to confirm. In that recap, they casually slide in that the series will take place eight years after the events of REVENGE OF THE SITH, which saw Kenobi giving Luke Skywalker to his aunt and uncle on Tatooine. You can look at it as eight years after the events of ROTS, or 11 years before the events of A NEW HOPE, but either way, it takes somewhat in the middle of where we left Kenobi and where the original trilogy picks up.
Now, we can start speculating what exactly Obi-Wan will be doing during his stay on Tatooine, or if he ever takes any vacations to other planets. Per the Star Wars timeline (you can see one here), it’s around this time Jabba the Hutt’s gang is acting a mess, and surely Kenobi isn’t just going to sit around and let them wreak havoc. More interestingly, it also takes place during the time when characters we saw in the movie SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY – like Han (Alden Ehrenreich), Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), and Crimson Dawn boss Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) – were doing their things.
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The showrunners could easily find ways to link all these people together in some way, and considering we won’t be getting a SOLO sequel anytime soon, it’s not farfetched to think Kenobi could have some interaction with characters we saw in the movie. At the end of that flick, we also saw the return of the live-action Darth Maul (Ray Park), so that could mean we may even see a rematch between Kenobi and Maul. However, it should be noted that the two already had a rematch in the animated series STAR WARS REBELS, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have had an extra, more cinematic scrap before then.
One thing people are quick to note is the aging of McGregor versus the older Alec Guinness look from A NEW HOPE. McGregor hardly looks any older than he did back in ROTS, but 11 years from the events of his series he's supposed to look like Guinness did in NH? I mean, he may see some terrifying stuff in that time that ages him quickly, or it can just be something we really don't think about. Either way, it's going to be amazing to see McGregor back in the Jedi duds, and whatever he does and whenever he does it, we will be there to tune in.
The Kenobi series is expected to shoot next year, likely for a 2021 release.