After hearing rumblings that Disney+’s Ewan McGregor-headlined Obi-Wan Kenobi series had been cancelled, and then likewise hearing rumblings that the show was definitely still moving ahead, now comes an update on all of this. And for Star Wars fans, it’s sadly a worrying update.
Via The Hollywood Reporter, Disney and Lucasfilm have moved to put the to-be-titled show on indefinite hold.
Pre-production has been halted on this hotly-anticipated series, with that being down to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy has so far been unhappy with the screenwriting work put forward for this project.
As a result of this, crew members who recently turned up at London’s Pinewood Studios to begin setting up for production were told to go home by the studio.
The Mandalorian and Better Call Saul’s Deborah Chow was previously brought in to direct this Kenobi offering, and Drive and 47 Ronin’s Hossein Amini has been on writing duties. While Chow and star McGregor are still attached to the project, although there’s no concrete news just yet on whether Amini is still on board.
In terms of what we know about the premise of this series, the last we’d heard was that the action would pick things up with Kenobi eight years after the events of Revenge of the Sith – meaning that we’d find Obi-Wan/Ben on Tattoine, where he was residing to keep an eye on a young Luke Skywalker.
This series was initially pegged to be an six-episode arc, although this latest report claims that the episode count has been cut back to four episodes. Remember, this whole thing was originally planned to be a big-screen movie. That was until Solo: A Star Wars Story underperformed, and so all anthology films were thus canned by Lucasfilm.
So, the good news it that the Obi-Wan Kenobi series is still supposedly happening. The bad news is that the planned start date of July looks to have zero chance of happening.
As ever, expect more on all things ‘a galaxy far, far away’ as we get it.