We’d known for a while before the shock announcement that The Mandalorian would jetpack-jump from streaming TV to the silver screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu that plans for a fourth season of the show were already well underway. But there’s always been an element of understanding that, once the movie was prioritized, it seemed like whatever season 4 of the show might have been would be cannibalized for the duo’s newfound cinematic prospects. Now, that may not be the case.
Speaking in the latest issue of Empire Magazine (via Star Wars News Net), Mandalorian and Grogu director Jon Favreau briefly touched upon transitioning The Mandalorian into a movie format, before acknowledging that the scripts for the planned fourth season of the show still exist.
“We were planning on doing a fourth season. I had actually written all of that,” Favreau said. “I still have Season 4 sitting on my desk here.” According to the director, The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s movie pivot led to the project becoming more of its own thing, written for a movie structure instead of a TV season’s arc.
“It’s structured around a movie structure, as opposed to a serialized weekly television show,” Favreau continued. “So there’s a larger throw to the whole thing.”
Just because the scripts for the planned season 4 still exist, however, does not necessarily mean a fourth season of The Mandalorian could still happen. Favreau wasn’t clear whether or not The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s plot takes ideas and elements from those season 4 scripts and reconfigures them to make sense in a movie format, or if the movie is its own completely different story altogether, envisioned after the season 4 scripts were completed.
And even if it was the latter, we don’t yet know if whatever happens in The Mandalorian and Grogu renders those scripts as they currently exist moot, necessitating significant rewrites if the characters were to return to streaming TV. Whatever Lucasfilm has planned for Din Djarin and his little green ward going forward remains up in the air.
Should The Mandalorian and Grogu be a success when it hits the box office next year, as the studio would no doubt hope its first return to Star Wars theatrical releases since 2019 would be, it wouldn’t be surprising to see theatrical sequels, and have Star Wars‘ homegrown streaming hero now fully become a movie hero (a somewhat bleak but fitting arc for The Mandalorian‘s storytelling growth since its debut). There is, of course, also eventually Dave Filoni’s plans for the ‘Mandoverse’ movie that would climax the Thrawn plot he’s been building throughout both The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, so there’s at least one more cinematic adventure on the horizon regardless.
But if they’re still standing after all that, could we see a return of The Mandalorian as a TV show? Who can say. Always in motion, the future is, as a certain other little green Force user once put it.
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