Dave Filoni is an extremely talented creator and a well-respected authority within the Star Wars franchise. The former apprentice of George Lucas himself, Filoni got his start in the galaxy far, far away spearheading the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. After working on that series for years, Filoni went on to gradually ascend the ladder of Lucasfilm, even after the company had been sold to Walt Disney Studios. In the years immediately following Lucasfilm’s acquisition, Filoni’s still-running Clone Wars series was unceremoniously canceled, but he was given a new animated series to run; Star Wars Rebels.
Following the success of that series, Filoni graduated to live-action television, co-creating the The Mandalorian with Jon Favreau in 2019. This netted the creative an even larger success, with The Mandalorian becoming both an unproblematic fave for Disney and a flagship series for their streaming service. As a result, Filoni not only went on to help shepherd other live-action series such as The Book of Boba Fett, Skeleton Crew, and his own Ahsoka series, but also was given the chance to loop back around and create a real final season for his Clone Wars animated show. Given his prolific experience with the franchise over the course of multiple decades, it’s no real surprise that Filoni has been chosen to take over Kathleen Kennedy’s role and lead Lucasfilm, alongside new co-president Lynwen Brennan. However it does beg the question: is Dave Filoni going to make Star Wars too insular in the years to come?
For the past several years, Star Wars has been in a weird state of flux as an entertainment franchise. As The Mandalorian lit up the streaming charts in 2019, the final installment of the long-running Skywalker Saga, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, was also releasing, to a decidedly less-than-stellar reception. That film netted the worst reviews of the entire franchise and the lowest box office of any of the sequel trilogy films. Thus, the choice for Disney from a business perspective was a fairly easy one. The company opted to steer clear of the fraught theatrical Star Wars market, and instead transition the brand solely to streaming series. Filoni was a major player in all of this, working alongside Favreau to help architect a series of interconnected shows. However, the ultimate result left something to be desired.
Over the course of a few short years, this plan ran aground. What began with The Mandalorian, a largely standalone episodic season of television that allowed casual viewers to engage with Star Wars without having to know all the ins-and-outs of the background information, quickly became bogged down in extensive amounts of lore. Characters from Filoni’s animated shows began popping up as major players in these shows, the most blatant example being Ahsoka Tano, who even went on to have her own series. Beyond this, the shows themselves intersected in such dense and inexplicable ways, that entire culminations of storylines present in The Mandalorian would be resolved in-between seasons in a different show. The result was that by the time the third season of The Mandalorian was releasing in 2023, it was to much lower ratings and much less fanfare.
People grew tired of the approach, and the interweaving shows became far too insular for general audiences to keep up with. So, the idea of giving one of the chief creatives behind that move the keys to the whole franchise prompts some justified concerns. Star Wars is just now beginning to make real headway in returning to theaters, and attempting to court general audiences once again with fresh “standalone” (their words, not mine) stories like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Star Wars: Starfighter. Now more than ever, the franchise needs a steady hand at the helm that can lead it from the insular doldrums it's been stuck in to a new age of cinematic storytelling. I’m just not sure that Filoni is that guy.