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WIRE Buzz: Filoni teases Mandalorian S2; why Wonder Woman 1984 has two baddies; more
Our reunion with Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda is still months away, but Mandalorian executive producer Dave Filoni is here to whet our appetites for Season 2.
"I wrote in Clone Wars 'experience outranks everything,' and I need to get some," he told Entertainment Weekly. "So it was a great learning experience, working with a great team of people, working with Jon. I've applied what I've learned into the second season to the best of my abilities."
Filoni (who also serves as a writer and director on the live-action Star Wars series) added that "everything is getting better and better, and everyone was energized from the reaction we got from the first season. We're looking forward to sharing it with everybody when we're finished."
The big draw of the sophomore season is obviously going to be the live-action Ahsoka Tano played by Marvel Netflix's Rosario Dawson. The character's animated arc will come to a close in the Clone Wars series finale (airing this coming Monday), but that won't be the last fans see of her.
"When we started in 2008 giving Anakin Skywalker a young Padawan wasn't at top of mind for a lot of people. It seemed a bit out of left field and risky. George always knew that it would work if we did it the right way," Filoni said. "The great thing about the character is she's proved herself and earned her place among the Star Wars leads out there. So whatever the future holds, who knows?"
The Mandalorian returns to Disney+ this fall. A third season has already been ordered.
When Gal Gadot's Diana Prince returns to the big screen in Wonder Woman 1984, she'll be facing off against two classic DC villains: Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) and Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). Recently chatting with Total Film, returning writer-director Patty Jenkins explained why the sequel warranted the inclusion of an antagonist duo.
“It turned out that the story was the thing that gave birth to the need for both [villains],” she said. “It wasn’t that I thought I needed both. Cheetah was the villain that we were focused on having in this movie, but then Max Lord, throughout the history of Wonder Woman comics – he serves a very mechanical purpose, often."
As we learned in April, WW84 finds Diana working at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Barbara Ann Minerva (eventually Cheetah) is a fellow academic at the museum and envies everything about Diana. That jealously puts Minerva on a path to team up with greedy businessman Lord.
Jenkins once again addressed the return of Chris Pine's Steve Trevor, who everyone thought died at the end of the first Wonder Woman. The explanation for his survival (and why he hasn't aged a day since 1918) is still a mystery. Nevertheless, the director assured Total Film that Trevor's part isn't a gimmick, but an integral part of the plot.
“You all go on the journey together,” she added. “The movie and the characters all go on a journey together. It did not at all come from, ‘We’ve got to have Steve back.’ I was so pleased when I thought of the story idea, and then intrinsic to that story was Steve coming back, because we love Chris. But it just came naturally.”
Wonder Woman 1984 is hoping to hit theaters Friday, August 14.
And lastly, Sony has revealed the official name for its series of films centered on Spider-Man and his greatest foes. Per IGN, the studio officially refers to the web-slinging, symbiote-bonding franchise as the "Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters." or simply "the Spidey-verse."
These monikers were provided to IGN as clarification after the Spider-Man movie Twitter account referred to the shared world as "the Spider-Man Universe of Characters."
The next Spidey-Verse project on the docket is Daniel Espinosa's Morbius. Starring Jared Leto as a scientist gifted (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with vampiric abilities, the film was slated to arrive this summer, but was pushed to March 19, 2021 as a result of the coronavirus.
Then there's Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which now arrives on June 25, 2021. Directed by Andy Serkis, the sequel features Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady, a psychotic murderer made all the more dangerous by a symbiote named Carnage.
The sequel to Spider-Man: Far From Home was moved from July 2021 to Nov. 5, 2021, while Into the Spider-Verse 2 swung over to Oct. 7, 2022 from its original April 2022 release.
