Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau recently confirmed m𝐆y lowest expectations for their upcoming "Mandoverse" movie. The recently announced film will bring together characters from the four shows Filoni and Favreau have worked on together: The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, plus the upcoming Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew.
"I think it's going to be a clamoring of characters saying, 'How do I get in this picture?' And that's what Jon and I have been figuring out," Filoni, who is attached to direct the film, said . As someone who is extremely sick of media that primarily exists to host cameos for characters from other media, I find Filoni's statement has me preemptively exhausted.
Favreau made it worse, though. "We joke that it's like we're playing with action figures, like, 'What's in the box? Let's play with what's in the box!'" he said. "And that's what you do when you're playing and you're a kid."
That makes perfect sense as the duo's approach. Though the first season of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Mandalorian was a fun space western with Mando and Grogu going on a new case each week, the series has increasingly become a vehicle for cameos. When Luke Skywalker showed up at the end of the season two finale, it felt like Favreau and Filoni were holding up their most treasured action figure, just as he was ba💎ck when they were kids in the toy box. The digitally de-aged character even looked like he was made out of plastic.
That love for the characters as icons, rather than people, is what has increasingly made much of Disney Star Wars so deeply uninteresting. It's an ethos that is fundamentally at odds with growth or change, and the ability to grow and change is what defines interesting characters. You can have The Mandalorian's CGI Luke Skywalker or you can have a flesh and blood Mark Hamill giving the performance of his life as an old, embittered version of the character, but you can't have both. They're contrasting visions of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars and I'm much more compelled by the latter. The Last Jedi presented Luke as a person who could grow and change, rather than a lore entry made digital flesh, frozen in carbonite and forever young.
Just as fundamental a problem is that ‘what if we bring a bunch of Star Wars characters together? Wouldn't that be cool?’ seems to be Filoni and Favreau's entire pitch for why their movie should exist. Screenwriters often talk about an idea being ‘high concept’, which essentially means that it has a strong, easily understandable idea that makes audiences want to see it. For Speed, that idea was ‘What if there was a bus that had been strapped with a bomb that would explode if it ever went under 50 miles per hour?’. When you hear that idea, you can immediately begin to think of conflicts and complications, and you get excited at the prospect of seeing how the filmmakers realized the concept on screen.
At this point, ‘What if there were a bunch of characters from different properties on screen together?’ is not a novel or compelling idea. It was exciting when The Avengers did it, because it had never been done before. It was exciting when Infinity War and Endgame did it, because it had never been done at that scale before. But audiences have seen those movies. In what way does bringing a bunch of B and C-liཧst Star Wars characters together compete with seeing Iron Man and Captain America fighting alongside each other for the first time?
It's barely an idea anymore. Judging by Filoni and Favreau's work on the Disney Plus shows, though, that seems to be the only idea they have.