Latest news with #ObiWanKenobi
Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why the Star Wars franchise is a poisoned chalice
It's the ultimate Jedi mind trick. Announce a new Star Wars film, generate gigawatts of publicity and then, faster than you can say 'these aren't the droids you're looking for', pretend the movie never existed and the whole thing was a figment of the audience's imagination. Such has been the apparent strategy of Star Wars' parent studio, Lucasfilm, which has unveiled a Sith Lord's ransom in new spinoffs, only to ultimately leave fans spinning in deep space. The latest Lucasfilm associate to attempt an Obi-Wan Kenobi-style mind wipe is Taika Waititi, who has shelved his 'Untitled Star Wars Film' – its quasi-official name – in favour of an adaptation of trigger-happy 2000AD anti-hero Judge Dredd. Who needs a Jedi Knight when you have Judge Dredd? Not Waititi, who is confirmed as collaborating with screenwriter Drew Pearce on a new feature about Mega-City One's trigger-happy law enforcer. The news appears to confirm previous rumours that Waiti's Star Wars feature is on indefinite hold. That would be quite a u-turn from the far-off morning in May 2020 when Lucasfilm – a subsidiary of the all-powerful Disney – revealed that Waititi would be directing a 'fresh and unexpected' take on the galaxy far, far away. Unexpected – or non-existent? With Disney and Lucasfilm, it's increasingly hard to tell the difference. We are living through strange times, when Coldplay end marriages rather than soundtrack them, and in which freshly reformed Oasis are the hottest new band in Britain. Even so, how bracing to think that, at the halfway point of 2025, Judge Dredd has more appeal to a successful director than Star Wars – for so long, the last word in bum-on-seats franchises. With Waititi bouncing into the escape hatch and pressing the 'eject' button, it is worth reconsidering the idea of 'a Star Wars curse'. Like a sort of King Midas in reverse, everything Lucasfilm touches turns to dross. That includes the careers of once-buzzy directors Josh Trank and Colin Trevorrow, who went from the future of cinema to yesterday's story the moment it was confirmed they were to direct new Star Wars films. A similar miasma has hung over the careers of actors Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, up-and-coming stars, until the day they signed up to Disney's big new 2015 – 2019 'Sequels Trilogy'. The first of that sorry triptych, JJ Abrams's The Force Awakens, turned 10 this year, and its legacy might kindly be described as chequered. Boyega has since expressed his misgivings about the 'Sequels' (and pointed out how his character Finn was marginalised as the story went along). Ridley, by contrast, doubled down on the brand when agreeing to front an all-new trilogy about her spiky heroine Rey, to be directed by Pakistani journalist and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, only for that project to follow Waititi's trajectory into permanent limbo. Likewise drifting in the void is Rogue Squadron, a supposedly gritty X-Wing movie directed by Wonder Woman's Patty Jenkins, and a long-cancelled trilogy from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D B Weiss. They are joined by Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who decided he'd much prefer making Knives Out whodunnits rather than being abused on social media by Star Wars fans. Why do so many Star Wars films stutter? Assuming it isn't a curse cooked up by Darth Vader and his fellow Sith Lords, the explanation is probably that the saga is a victim of its own iconic status. George Lucas's original trilogy forms a geek holy grail – here are hokey, flawed films that, over the decades, have come to be regarded as flawless masterpieces, pop art treated with the reverence of a Caravaggio. The weight of that legacy is felt by those hired to continue Lucas's work. When Godzilla director Gareth Edwards was tapped to direct the 2016 spinoff Rogue One, he spoke about the job not as a gig, but as carrying on a sacred tradition. 'You start to wonder whether this is all actually virtual reality. It seems too good to be true, like I'm playing the game version where I get to make a Star Wars film. It's not the sort of thing that should happen to you in your career, like even the best version of where your career could go.' Seemed too good to be true – and ultimately proved too good to be true, as well. Halfway through Rogue One, Disney concluded the production was running away from Edward and brought in unsentimental screenwriter Tony Gilroy. Gilroy, if not a hack, knew how to get a movie over the line. Moreover, he cared not a jot for Star Wars' associated baggage and didn't agonise over wrangling the film into shape. He brought the same indifference to the Jedi fanbase of his excellent Disney+ series, Andor, as he made clear in an interview with the Telegraph. 'The thing about the Star Wars community is they all disagree on everything and the moment they stop chewing on you, they start chewing on each other,' he said with a shrug. The other issue is the influence of Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, a former lieutenant to Steven Spielberg who has become a sort of Galactic Emperor of green-lighting Star Wars projects. It was she who announced Waititi and used her address at the 2023 Star Wars Celebration fan convention to announce that she had reached out to Daisy Ridley about another red-letter day for Rey. Kennedy is passionate about Star Wars – perhaps to a fault. She is certainly not afraid to meddle. Such was the case with 2017's Han Solo movie, from which comedy improvisational duo (and Lego Movie directors) Lorde and Miller departed – supposedly because their improvised approach didn't chime with Kennedy's more straight-laced philosophy. With the pranksters expunged, Kennedy turned to a safe pair of hands, Ron Howard, who delivered what would prove to be the first-ever Star Wars film to post a loss. 'There's one gatekeeper when it comes to Star Wars, and it's Kathleen Kennedy,' an insider told Variety several years ago. 'If you rub Kathleen Kennedy the wrong way – in any way – you're out. You're done. A lot of these young, new directors want to come in and say, 'I want to do this. I want to do that.' A lot of these guys [i.e. Trevorrow] got very rich, very fast and believed a lot of their hype. And they don't want to play by the rules. They want to do sh–t differently. And Kathleen Kennedy isn't going to f–k around with that. ' But Kennedy's track record isn't anything to wave a lightsaber in the air over. She is widely regarded as having damaged the Star Wars brand with subpar TV spinoffs, such as The Acolyte and Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan – expensive shows that featured low-budget production and poor writing. Still, fans will hope Waititi's departure marks the beginning of the end of Star Wars' long nightmare. At least two features are going ahead. Ryan Gosling's Star Wars: Starfighter is set for release in 2027, with Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy directing. Before that, Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda will reunite for The Mandalorian and Grogu, a spinoff of the Mandalorian television series. Kennedy, meanwhile, is due to step down as head of Lucasfilm before the end of the year. There is the caveat that she is to 'continue to produce Star Wars content'. Still, her hand is going to be off the tiller, and there will be a new Star Wars movie coming down the line. After years of disappointment, you might say the saga has a new hope.
Gizmodo
4 days ago
- Politics
- Gizmodo
The Laws That Changed the Jedi and Republic Forever
'For a over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic,' Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker in A New Hope. In the decades of Star Wars storytelling since, countless tales have fleshed out that connection between the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order's service of it, from its highest highs to the lows that tore them both apart in the fires of the Empire's rise. But while a thousand generations span much of the unseen ancient history of Star Wars well beyond the circumstances we find the Republic and the Jedi in by the time of the prequels, the status quo introduced in those films—where the Republic and the Jedi are enmeshed akin to separations of church and state in our own world—is not quite so ancient. In both current Star Wars continuity and (much more extensively) in its former expanded universe material, the transition between the long history of the Old Republic—the ancient entity that had shaped the galaxy for tens of thousands of years, often locked into conflict with resurgent Sith Empires—and our understanding of the 'modern' Republic comes approximately 1,000 years before the events of the Skywalker Saga. And they are both defined by the same name: the Ruusan Reformations. In contemporary Star Wars canon, little is known about the specifics of the reformations, beyond the fact it was a series of legislative packages that significantly curtailed the power of the office of the Republic's Supreme Chancellor—a level of power that would not be granted to that office again until the Clone War. But in the Expanded Universe, the Ruusan Reformations represent a transformative moment in galactic history: a moment that did not just reshape the Republic, but forever changed the Jedi Order's place in it. The period of time prior to the Ruusan Reformations was one of existential crisis for the Galactic Republic. For a thousand years, the galaxy had once again been thrust into a cataclysmic conflict between the Republic and a resurrected Sith Empire, established by Darth Ruin during the fourth Great Schism between the Jedi and the Sith. The New Sith Wars, as they would come to be known, were a series of interstellar campaigns that radically reshaped the power balance of the galaxy. The Sith Empire surged dramatically in power with its re-establishment, taking over swaths of the galaxy as the Republic was beaten back to the brink of extinction multiple times. Thousands upon thousands of Republic member worlds were abandoned to the Sith as the Republic retreated further and further towards the galactic core, and in doing so, the economic and industrial systems that had supported its vast expansion crumbled, as corruption and lawlessness broke down the fabric of galactic civilization. The final century of the New Sith Wars were known in particular as the Dark Age of the Republic. Beyond the impact the Sith Empire's upper hand had on its structure as its size and scope was drastically reduced, the Republic was heavily diminished through layers of political and industrial corruption and outbreaks of disease, as well as a breakdown of key logistical systems like the HoloNet, rendering the vast majority of real-time galactic communication impossible, and the deactivation of hyperspace lanes to the Outer Rim. But there was another significant issue: as a leading faction in the war against the Sith, the Jedi Order itself had increasingly assumed much of the legislative and military branches of the Republic. Jedi served as Supreme Chancellors with sweeping political power, or banded together to form governmental bodies and defense forces across individual sectors of space. Even the Republic's own standing armies and navies came more and more under the direct control of the Jedi, effectively making the order the de facto galactic power against the Sith Empire. By the last decade of the Dark Age, the Sith themselves had similarly diminished, fracturing over a series of internal feuds and civil wars, before the Sith Lord Skere Kaan, a fallen Jedi Master, reforged the remaining Sith into the Brotherhood of Darkness. Launching another war against the weakened Jedi and Republic, the Brotherhood was eventually beaten back into a years-long series of engagements on the planet Ruusan. Culminating in the seventh and final battle of the Ruusan campaign, the Sith were believed to be eradicated from the galaxy once more with the deployment of a catastrophic, Force-attuned Sith weapon known as the Thought Bomb. With the sacrifice of a final hundred Jedi, the New Sith Wars were over… and it was time to reshape the Republic forever in an attempt to assure another galactic civil war between the Jedi and Sith could never happen again. The legislative restructuring of the Galactic Republic that would come to be named the Ruusan Reformations for the world where the New Sith Wars finally came to an end was enacted by the then-Supreme Chancellor, Tarsus Valorum. Born from the same political dynasty that would eventually give us the Republic's final Chancellor before Palpatine, Finis, Tarsus Valorum was the first non-Jedi Supreme Chancellor elected to the office in over 400 years by the time the Sith-Jedi conflict ended on Ruusan. Valorum's reformation did not radically overhaul the structure of the Republic's governing body—there would still be a Supreme Chancellor and a Galactic Senate, as there had been for thousands of years beforehand—but they did significantly redistribute power away from the office of the Chancellor and back into the representative democracy of the Senate. In order to do so, the Ruusan Reformations redrew the Senate's representative districts from millions of sectors into just 1,024. While increased power remained in the galactic core among founding member worlds to ensure they received individual representation, this realignment significantly decentralized the power of the Senate back out through the inner and outer rim of the galaxy. It also, for the first time, allowed both cultural and corporate entities to seek individual representation in the Senate (a move that would eventually see the Republic's decline into corruption once more, centuries later). But while the impact on the structure of the Republic itself was minimal, the Ruusan Reformations radically altered the Jedi Order's position in the galaxy. As part of the process, the Jedi acquiesced to sweeping demilitarization and depoliticization reform, in a bid to prove to the Republic and the galaxy at large that the Order would not become an interstellar military organization in its own right after the defeat of the Sith. As well as blocking Jedi from holding political office as they previously had done, the Ruusan Reformations effectively stripped the Jedi of almost all their martial power. Jedi military ranks and standard battle armor were stripped from the Order, and the vast armies, navies, and starfighter corps under the Order's direct control were disbanded. The Jedi themselves were placed under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Chancellor and the Republic's Judiciary branch, which became the primary law enforcement body of the galaxy and the replacement of the Republic's standing armies leaving the Republic itself demilitarized, heralding an era of relative galactic peace until the creation of the Clone Army almost a thousand years later. In an attempt to stop another resurgence of the Sith, the reformation process also overhauled Jedi recruitment and teaching policies. Not only did the Order enact policies that demanded Jedi be recruited and trained from a young age—ending the direct induction of adults into the Order—those same policies centralized Jedi training on Coruscant, in an attempt to maintain oversight and prevent students from exploring forbidden Sith teachings in secret. Within the universe of Star Wars, the Ruusan Reformations would come to represent a landmark moment in galactic history, the transition of an ancient era into the more familiar time period of Star Wars movies. But in reality, the creation of the Reformations in the old EU largely existed to try and canonically reconcile two lines of dialogue: the aforementioned 'thousand generations' line from A New Hope, and the arrival of the prequel trilogy and Attack of the Clones in particular, where Palpatine states that the Republic had 'stood for a thousand years' when discussing the Republic's attempted negotiations with separatist systems. Before the status quo of the Jedi Order and Republic was introduced in the prequel trilogy, the Star Wars expanded universe had largely only explored the era of the Old Republic in terms of its ancient history, thousands and thousands of years before the events of the movies, through works like the Tales of the Jedi comic series, a period popularized even further through the Knights of the Old Republic video game series releasing alongside the prequels. What is now known as 'Legends' material was informally structured in Star Wars canon through a series of tiers, each one taking priority over those below it. At the top of this structure was the canon of the six Star Wars films, starting with the original trilogy and then incorporating the prequels. This was eventually updated with the arrival of a secondary tier representing the Clone Wars 3DCG animated series when it launched in 2008, which sat over the tier that represented the vast majority of contemporary Expanded Universe material (two further tiers existed below this, representing secondary and retconned EU material and stories deemed explicitly non-canonical). The introduction of Palpatine's line about the Republic existing for a thousand years in the movie canon (and commentary in The Phantom Menace that the Republic had not seen interstellar conflict on the level of the invasion of Naboo since its formation) sat in contradiction with the Expanded Universe's exploration of the Republic era, which had told stories of endless conflict between the Jedi, Republic, and Sith across a period that spanned 25,000 years of ancient history. First explicitly covered in the 2007 novel Darth Bane: Rule of Two—which also introduced the titular 'Rule of Two' concept for the Sith, aligning their status quo in the prequel trilogy with the existence of the Sith Empires of the Expanded Universe—the Ruusan Reformation brought these two tiers of continuity into relative harmony, providing a dividing line between what would be known formally as the Old Republic and the Republic as it was seen in the prequels. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Geek Tyrant
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
OBI-WAN KENOBI Season 2 Gets a Disappointing Reality Check — GeekTyrant
For Star Wars fans hoping for more from Obi-Wan Kenobi , this one's going to sting a bit. A spark of hope lit up the fandom recently when insider Daniel Richtman reported that Season 2 of Obi-Wan Kenobi was in development. But that flicker was quickly snuffed out. According to The InSneider's Jeff Sneider, Lucasfilm currently has 'no plans' for a second season of the Disney+ series. That update will be disappointing to some, especially considering how vocal Ewan McGregor has been about wanting to return. He's previously said the idea of Season 2 was still being 'explored,' even pitching the idea of playing a younger Obi-Wan during the Clone Wars era. That would potentially bring back Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker and dig into some of that untapped storytelling gold between Obi-Wan Kenobi and A New Hope . Obi-Wan Kenobi debuted in May 2022 with a six-episode run that was set after the events of Revenge of the Sith , and the story followed a broken Obi-Wan in exile, watching over a young Luke Skywalker on Tatooine. When Leia is kidnapped by the Inquisitors, he's pulled back into the fight—leading to a brutal and emotional face-off with Darth Vader. The series featured a solid supporting cast, including Rupert Friend as the Grand Inquisitor, Moses Ingram as Reva, Vivien Lyra Blair as young Leia, and Kumail Nanjiani as Haja Estree, with Sung Kang, Indira Varma, and O'Shea Jackson Jr. rounding things out. The show even landed an Emmy nom for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. But it was met with mixed reactions from the fans. So unless Lucasfilm has a surprise up their Jedi robe, it looks like fans will have to settle for one season… and keep hoping the Force eventually pulls McGregor back in.
Geek Feed
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Feed
Is Anyone Even Excited for an Obi-Wan Kenobi Season 2?
Star Wars fans were left with a high with the end of Andor Season 2, and a lot of people are wondering what Lucasfilm is going to be delivering next on their movie or TV slate. We know that some films are underway, but there is a rumor going around that a second season of Obi-Wan Kenobi is in the works… but does anyone even care about that anymore? 'OBI-WAN KENOBI' Season 2 is reportedly in development (via: @DanielRPK) — ScreenTime (@screentime) June 30, 2025 In the comments about a possible Season 2 of Kenobi in the works, people have just been talking about, 'more slop incoming,' and my favorite take: — Denis B. Huppert 🇫🇷 (@dennisbhooper) July 1, 2025 Looking back, Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett were considered low points for Star Wars television. Besides the lackluster storytelling, the series had been criticized for leaning too heavily on nostalgia and familiar characters rather than actually telling a compelling, character-driven story. In the series' defense, Kenobi did end with a cliffhanger teasing more things to come for Ben Kenobi, and both Kenobi and Boba Fett were originally planned to be theatrically released films before they were retooled to be Disney+ shows. As someone who deeply enjoyed Solo: A Star Wars Story, I would prefer if they turned this Kenobi follow-up into a movie; but even at this point, we don't know for sure if Lucasfilm really is planning something. I would rather just get a new season confirmed for The Acolyte or Skeleton Crew . Should Ewan McGregor come back as Obi-Wan, it would have to be on the big screen . At least, that's my opinion. For now, catch Obi-Wan Kenobi now streaming on Disney+.
Geek Tyrant
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Rumor Claims STAR WARS Series OBI-WAN KENOBI Second Season is In Development — GeekTyrant
Star Wars movies started out with a huge following. The first three films were gold, and a whole lot to live up to. Fans were a little let down by the prequel trilogy, which has had a later-found popularity, and the most recent trilogy was flat out disliked in most cases. The one-shot films and series have had some better luck, with hit or miss reviews, and if the most recent rumor is true, we are going to be seeing a second season of one of the shows that was thought to be limited to its original run. According to scooper Daniel Richtman, "A second season of Obi-Wan Kenobi is in development at Lucasfilm." No additional details were provided, but after The Acolyte split opinions and Skeleton Crew passed many people by, focusing on a fan-favorite character seems like a sure bet. At last October's L.A. Comic-Con, Obi-Wan actor Ewan McGregor took part in a Q&A with fans and confirmed that the studio was "exploring" ideas for more Obi-Wan Kenobi . The actor was said to have revealed his desire to wear Obi-Wan's Clone Wars armour and reunite with Hayden Christensen. Season 1 of Obi-Wan Kenobi is currently streaming on Disney+. Would you like to see his story continue? via: CBM
