The future of Star Wars live action storytelling has been outlined in a leaked document. From how many films and shows will release each year to AI usage, there’s a lot to take a look at.
Reputable Hollywood insider Jeff Sneider has published mandates from Disney for Lucasfilm have been published in his latest newsletter. The journalist was provided with a 19-page document that outlines the house of mouse’s intentions for Lucasfilm and Star Wars. We’ll be taking a look at all of the relevant parts of the newsletter in regards to a galaxy far, far away.
Audience Focus
According to the document, Lucasfilm should be targeting the wide age range of 10 to 70 year olds. However, a focus will be put on teens and young adults. The project’s age ratings will be of the PG-13 level in terms of content. Speaking of ages, talent that fall in the range of late teens to mid twenty year olds are also a key area Lucasfilm will be looking to bring onboard the Star Wars galaxy. Although this is more of a companywide mandate Disney are pushing across all their studios.
AI Will Be Used
AI tools have been listed for use when it comes to live action visual effects and environments. This makes a ton of sense for Disney who are invested in Epic Games and their Unreal Engine tech that powers The Volume. It was just a few days ago that Epic announced the next iteration of Unreal Engine would be heavily leaning on AI for content creation. We wrote about that here. It is unclear if Disney means generative AI or machine learning.
Disney, Lucasfilm and ILM are still made fun of for their truly abysmal generative AI TED Talk from last year. Sure, things have advanced since then but still, the work humans have had on Star Wars for half a decade trounces anything a computer can spit out.
It’s Dave’s House Now
With Lucasfilm now being co-run by Dave Filoni, any project is said to have to fit under his storytelling framework. The direction is for all of the Disney+ live action shows to continue to be set within the New Republic era. Even if the time period remains the same, there is some experimentation to be had in terms of genre, tone etc. Animation will still continue be made much like it has been alongside the live action media. The target is to have two series a year.
As for theatrical releases, Disney will have them working on the next Star Wars saga. There won’t be more than one film a year. It is still unknown what/if a 2028 will be happening following two years of back to back cinematic releases.
The next Star Wars saga of films require a clear vision and high stakes. There is talk of interconnectivity as well. Where we’ve had standalone stories in the past, going forward you should expect them to be related to other films. The Walt Disney Company wants Star Wars to be special. Can it be if there’s 3 live action projects every single year and AI used to make them? Time will tell.
Lastly, Sneider did remove a small segment after publishing. Sneider took to his show The Hot Mic to clarify this which we reported on here. As always, we highly recommend reading visiting the source of the information, in this case The Insneider, to read everything in full. You can check it out here.
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