The Mandalorian: Everything we know about the new Star Wars show on Disney Plus – CNET

“Mandalorian, look outside, they’re waiting for you.” We’ve certainly been waiting for live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian to hit the Disney Plus streaming service on Nov. 12, but the company made that wait a little easier by releasing a second trailer for the Jon Favreau-led show last week. It also tweeted some fresh footage on Wednesday, with a TV spot offering even more.

The previous trailer came during Disney’s biannual D23 convention in August. We also got a poster at that time, and on Oct. 28 the company also tweeted a set focusing on the show’s characters.

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Disney unveiled an awesome poster during D23, featuring the Mandalorian as he walks away from his ship — the Razor Crest.


Disney/Lucasfilm

The show’s title has deep roots in the franchise’s history, with links to bounty hunter Boba Fett.

We’ll get the first episode on Nov. 12, with the launch of Disney Plus. The second will reportedly hit on Nov. 15, followed by weekly installments on Nov. 22 and 29, and Dec. 6, 13, 18 and 27.

Early reactions to 30 minutes of footage have been extremely positive, with one journalist noting that the show “feels more western than sci-fi.”

Who’s in it?

Pedro Pascal (best known for playing Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) will be the man behind the helmet: a lone Mandalorian gunfighter operating in the outer reaches of the galaxy.

Pedro Pascal

Pedro Pascal is the man behind the Mandalorian’s helmet, but we don’t know if he’ll ever show his face in the series.


Gabriel Maseda/NurPhoto via Getty Images

He’ll be joined by a star-studded cast:

At the Star Wars Celebration Chicago in April, Pascal said the Mandalorian is “a mysterious lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy. Some might say he has questionable moral character.”

The Mandalorian will work closely with Weathers’ character, Greef Carga, He’s the head of a bounty hunters’ guild, the actor revealed at Celebration, and “the Mando is a guy who he figures can get the job done.”

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The Client is an intense-looking guy, mostly because he’s played by Werner Herzog. The Imperial medal around his neck hints at his past.


Lucasfilm

The Celebration Chicago panel also revealed that Esposito plays an Imperial — since named as Moff Gideon. Herzog’s character appears to be some sort of ex-Imperial crime boss, known only as The Client, and Abtahi’s is a doctor. 

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IG-11 will team up with the Mandalorian.


Lucasfilm

Waititi will play IG-11, a droid that’s the same model as IG-88 — one of the bounty hunters seen on Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back as the Sith Lord tasked them with tracking down the Millennium Falcon.

We’ve also caught sight of an Ugnaught — the porcine species previously seen working as janitors on Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back — named Kuill, who appears to be an ally of the Mandalorian and is voiced by Nolte.

Wen plays Fennec Shand, an assassin who encounters the Mandalorian, Vanity Fair reported on Nov. 4.

Why isn’t this about the usual Jedi and Sith conflict?

The Star Wars underworld is a very rich storytelling environment, according to executive producer Jon Favreau. He wanted to get back to the tone of the old western and samurai films that inspired George Lucas, and says the show will be Star Wars meets Mad Max

Favreau said that he’s already writing season 2 and that he hopes to direct one of the episodes.


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The Mandalorian is likely to be the streaming service’s biggest draw, even if it’s 20 years too late for some of us. It’s one of four shows set in a galaxy far, far away coming to the Disney Plus streaming service. 

The company announced the seventh season of The Clone Wars over the summer and a Rogue One prequel series focusing on rebel spy Cassian Andor in 2018. And Ewan McGregor will return as Obi-Wan Kenobi in a brand new show, set to start shooting in 2020.

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Gina Carano is playing Cara Dune.


Lucasfilm

What else do we know?

Lucasfilm has steadily drip-fed information about the show since Favreau was announced as its writer and executive producer. It’s not his first Star Wars rodeo. He voiced Pre Vizsla — the violent leader of a Mandalorian splinter group — in The Clone Wars and played pilot Rio Durant in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

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Boba Fett wears Mandalorian armor, but isn’t a true Mandalorian.


Lucasfilm

In summer 2018, Favreau revealed that the show will be set seven years after Return of the Jedi (so six years after the Empire’s final defeat at the Battle of Jakku and 23 years before The Force Awakens) and will focus on all-new characters. We also have a New York Times report that its 10 episodes will enjoy a $100 million budget, which was the rumored cost of Westworld’s first season.

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Giancarlo Esposito, best known for playing the big bad of Breaking Bad, seems to be playing an Imperial officer in the show.


Lucasfilm

Directors for some of the episodes:

Favreau, Filoni, Colin Wilson and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy will be the executive producers. Karen Gilchrist will be co-executive producer.

The Mandalorian will be among the first projects for ILM TV, the newly announced TV division of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic visual effects company. It’ll be run from a new studio in London.

The show’s soundtrack will be composed by Ludwig Göransson, who scored Black Panther, Venom and Creed II. Göransson’s Black Panther score won him a Grammy on Feb. 10 and an Oscar on Feb. 25.

“In these next months I hope to honor the tradition of Star Wars’ musical landscape while propelling The Mandalorian into new and unchartered territory,” he said in a statement posted to StarWars.com. “And I will try to remember that there is no try.”

Waititi mentioned after a Television Critics Association panel that the show will be similar to the original trilogy and that he had to curb the signature comedic instincts he used in Thor: Ragnarok as he directed an episode of the show.

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Taika Waititi decided he couldn’t “put too many jokes” into the episode of The Mandalorian he directed.


Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage

“Star Wars, you know, is just very different to the Marvel style,” he said. “They know that whatever was set up in the tone of the first films really should be kind of adhered to and that’s what the fans like and you can’t really disrespect it, I guess, is a nice way of saying it. Can’t have too many jokes, but there’s a little bit. Definitely my tone is in there, with the dialogue and stuff like that.”

He also mentioned working on “scenes with like 50 or 60” stormtroopers.

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Stormtroopers might have a rough time in the show.


Lucasfilm

Filoni and Favreau also hinted to Entertainment Weekly that the show will reveal how the state of the galaxy allowed the First Order to rise from the ashes of the Empire, with Filoni suggesting that things got messy on the outer reaches of the galaxy after the second Death Star blew up.

“Things weren’t necessarily managed as well as they could have been if [the galaxy] ended up in hot water again like that,” Favreau told the magazine.

The Mandalorian’s ship is called the Razor Crest, and it seems to pay homage to Jango Fett’s original ship — Kuat Drive Yards Amphibious Interstellar Assault Transport/infantry — seen in the Legends canon 2002 video game Bounty Hunter.

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The Mandalorian and ex-rebel shock trooper Cara Dune are available in action figure form.


Angela Lang/CNET

Will there be a bounty of Mandalorian merch for us to hunt?

Merchandise hunting is a complicated hobby, but you know you want it. The Mandalorian stuff hit on Oct. 4, known as Triple Force Friday. That date also brought merchandise from The Rise of Skywalker and Jedi: Fallen Order, so expect to see a whole bunch of new toys, collectibles, books and clothes based on the Disney Plus TV show, the movie and the game.

CNET reporters attended Force Friday previews in San Francisco and New York, so you can check out the toys. Three characters from the show are represented in the six-inch Black Series — The Mandalorian himself (along with a shiny carbonized variant), Cara Dune and the Offworld Jawa. IG-11 is getting a figure too.

What’s a Mandalorian?

Mandalorians are humans from the Outer Rim world of Mandalore, its moon Concordia and the planet Kalevala, whose story was largely told in The Clone Wars and Rebels.

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Jango Fett claimed to be from the Mandalorian world of Concord Dawn.


Dark Horse Comics/Lucasfilm

Their world went through major political upheaval during the Clone Wars and early days of the Galactic Empire’s rule, but many of the clans united under the rule of Bo-Katan Kryze after she took control of the Darksaber. The black-bladed weapon was created more than 1,000 years earlier by Tarre Vizsla (the first Mandalorian to join the Jedi Order) and became a symbol of leadership.

You probably associate bounty hunters Boba Fett and Jango Fett with the term because they wear the cool armor, but they aren’t true Mandalorians. Jango once claimed to be from Concord Dawn, a Mandalorian world, but the government considered him (and by extension, his cloned son Boba) to be pretenders.

Who could be wearing the armor in this new show?

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One of the side stories in the Aftermath trilogy could hint at the identity of a character in the show.


Penguin Random House

Fans have been clamoring for Boba’s return to the Star Wars galaxy despite his fall into the maw of a hungry sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, but there’s been no indication that will happen. Kennedy recently confirmed that his much-rumored solo movie is 100 percent dead,” but that could pave the way for his dramatic return in The Mandalorian.

Fans of the Legends material (developed in novels, comics and games prior to 2014) will recall that Boba escaped the sarlacc in that continuity and went on to become the leader of Mandalore in a very different post-Return of the Jedi galaxy.

In Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy of novels, Mandalorian armor that’s heavily implied to be Boba’s is recovered from the pit and worn by former slave Cobb Vanth. Using the armor as a symbol of power, he becomes sheriff of Freetown (a settlement on Tatooine) and offers sanctuary to anyone willing to battle the world’s crime syndicates.

The character we’ve seen could be Cobb — the area in the first official Mandalorian photo certainly looks like it could be Tatooine — but his armor is much better shape than Boba’s would be; the helmet should be dented and the whole set should show signs of acid damage from its time in the sarlacc. He could’ve cleaned it up, but surely acid marks don’t come out that easily.

Which characters are likely to appear?

We probably won’t see any major characters from the movies, since the actors who play the main human characters aren’t the right ages and they most likely won’t be explored in depth until after Episode 9 is released on Dec. 20, 2019.

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However, we might see characters from the CGI animated series. Sabine Wren from Rebels is a Mandalorian. That show was set before A New Hope, but it ended with a flash-forward to a point after Return of the Jedi. We saw Sabine embarking on a quest with former Jedi Ahsoka Tano to find the lost Ezra Bridger.

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Sabine Wren (seen wielding the Darksaber) could appear in the show.


Lucasfilm

That’s highly speculative, but it’d be amazing to see Sabine (and maybe Ahsoka) in live action for the first time. It’s unlikely to be the show’s main narrative thrust since it’d demand that viewers have a certain level of foreknowledge prior to starting The Mandalorian.

One of the announced cast members, Omid Abtahi, was the voice actor for Mandalorian cadet Amis in two episodes of The Clone Wars, as noted by the Ion Cannon podcast. Given that the Celebration Chicago panel revealed he’s playing a doctor, it seems unlikely that he’s bringing his role from the CGI animated show into live action (which would be a cool link between the Mandalorians of the prequel era and the time following Return of the Jedi).

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Kuill looks like one tough Ugnaught.


Lucasfilm

What other stories could they draw from?

Star Wars 1313 was a video game that got shelved when Disney shut down all projects at LucasArts — Lucasfilm’s game development group — in 2013. We saw an impressive demo for Uncharted-style adventure before that, featuring actor Wilson Bethel (who recently hit the target in Daredevil season 3).

It would’ve seen players exploring the bowels of the city planet Coruscant — the title was a reference to its grimy underworld Level 1313 (which later appeared in The Clone Wars).

After it was canceled, we found out that Boba Fett was going to be the star and that Kennedy later agreed the concept art was “unbelievable.”


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“So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold,” she told Slashfilm in 2015. “And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”

In that same interview, Kennedy noted that Lucasfilm read through the material Lucas developed for the canceled TV show Star Wars: Underworld, which was announced in 2005 and canned in 2010 due to budget constraints. It was to be set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and would have tied into 1313.

Originally published Nov. 14, 2018, and updated regularly.

source: cnet.com