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Star Wars Celebration fetes John Williams, teases 'Mando' S3, 'The Skeleton Crew,' 'Indy 5' & more
Everyone from Dave Filoni to John Williams to Harrison Ford was at Star Wars Celebration today!
The Lucasfilm panel at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim today, attended by SYFY WIRE, had a slew of exciting updates and reveals, and not just for Star Wars fans. In addition to releasing a trailer and a release date for Star Wars: Andor and Willow, the 90-minute event include a Jedi choir, John Williams conducting an orchestra playing Obi-Wan Kenobi’s new theme music (among other songs), and, well a whole lot of other cool stuff.
Here’s a lowdown of the updates we got on a slew of other Lucasfilm projects, including a play-by-play of some footage from Season 3 of The Mandalorian.
About mid-way through the event (after Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Willow got their due), Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni came on stage to give us an update on their respective Star Wars projects. Filoni is currently working on Ahsoka, which he said “is going great,” with the series officially confirmed to come out sometime next year.
The Mandalorian Season 3
Also coming in 2023, Season 3 of The Mandalorian arrives in February, and Favreau gave the audience a tease of what to expect. “When we last left our heroes, Grogu — some people call him Baby Yoda — was reunited with the Mandalorian, Din Djarin,” he said, stating what we all knew before adding, “and then, we’re going to have some returning favorites joining our next season, including someone who’s backstage now.”
The person backstage turned out to be Katee Sackhoff, who plays Bo Katan in The Mandalorian and voiced the character in The Clone Wars. “You didn’t think you’d get rid of me that easily, did you?” Sackhoff teased. “I may have some unfinished business.”
What will the business be? The answer to that is still unclear, but the audience at Celebration Stage did get to see an unreleased sneak peek of the show’s third season. The footage gave us glimpses of several returning characters — in addition to Sackhoff’s Bo Katan, we saw Carl Weathers’ Greef Karga, Omid Abtahi’s Dr. Pershing, Amy Sedaris’ Peli Motto, Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon, and Emily Swallow as the Armorer.
The Armorer tells us in the unreleased footage that Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin is no longer a Mandalorian since he removed his helmet and can only be redeemed by going back to the Mandlorian home planet, Mandalore. We also see Din Djarin (and Grogu) walking up to Bo Katan on a throne (on Mandalore, presumably?) and get voice over confirmation that Din Djarin (and Grogu) are heading to the planet to seek redemption there.
The Jon Watts Star Wars series is called The Skeleton Crew and stars Jude Law
After The Mandalorian update, Jon Watts and Christopher Ford joined Favreau and Filoni onstage to talk about their Star Wars project. While they still couldn’t say much, they did share some additional details. “This is a show that we’ve been working on for a really long time and are so excited to finally get to make,” Watts said. “It’s a story about a group of kids about 10 years old from a tiny little planet who accidentally get lost in the Star Wars galaxy. And it’s a story of their journey trying to find their way home.”
While the show focuses on a group of kids, however, Ford made clear that it was “not a kid show,” and that it takes place after The Return of the Jedi and overlaps with The Mandalorian and Ahsoka timeframes. Last but not least, the duo revealed that the name of this not-a-kid show will be The Skeleton Crew, that it will star Jude Law, and that it will come out sometime in 2023.
John Williams and Indiana Jones 5
The end of the event focused on celebrating the 90th birthday of composer John Williams, who as mentioned above, graced the stage to conduct not only the new Obi-Wan theme he wrote, but the theme to his Indiana Jones as well. Harrison Ford came out at the end to wish Williams a happy birthday, and released a teaser poster for the fifth Indiana Jones film.
“I’m really happy with the movie that we made,” Ford said, after mentioning that his doctors played the Indiana Jones theme song during his last colonoscopy. We'll get to see the fifth Indiana Jones film for ourselves when it premieres on June 30, 2023.
Looking for more sci-fi TV? Check out shows like Resident Alien, Brave New World, Project Blue Book, Eureka, Heroes, Intergalactic, and more streaming now on Peacock. Looking ahead, SYFY has new series The Ark in the works from original Stargate film writer/producer Dean Devlin, as well as Stargate SG-1 producer Jonathan Glassner.
