In a major new interview alongside The Mandalorian co-creator Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni discusses how Star Wars: The Clone Wars influences his storytelling in Empire Magazine’s April 2023 issue, out on February 16th.
Take the pivotal Mandalorian Season 2 finale, in which Luke Skywalker re-emerged to take Grogu under his wing. “There’s a big question at the end of Season 2, of what will Mando do next? Is that relationship over? In life, things don’t always come to a perfect ending, I think things can continue on, and your adventure continues every day. I used to think about it with (The) Clone Wars all the time. When is that battle over? When is that struggle over, because it culminates in Revenge Of The Sith? But that can’t be the ending for that show, even though that’s the ending of that era. That took a while to figure out.”
Establishing Luke in The Mandalorian timeline was a major punctuation mark in the story – but this is far from where the stories of Luke, Din Djarin, or Grogu end. “I think that in some ways you want each season to have a feeling of an ending. But in a lot of what I’ve done, I don’t like hard endings,” explains Filoni. “I like reading books in a series and then thinking, ‘Oh, there’s another book, and this is going to keep going.’ It’s always sad for me when an adventure ends and the characters are seemingly done with their journey. So I think there’s always that little bit of hope that something can continue.”
Read Empire’s new interview with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, spanning their entire journey with The Mandalorian so far, and what comes next, in a 20-page Star Wars special packed with interviews, never-before-seen images, fresh concept art, and much more. Empire’s April issue is on sale Thursday, February 16th, and you can pre-order a copy here.
Don’t miss the new season of The Mandalorian, streaming March 1st exclusively on Disney+.
Image: Empire
