Live-Action ‘Star Wars’ TV Show to Cost $100 Million for 10 Episodes, Rumored to Be Set on Mandalore

We’ve known for a while now that Disney and Lucasfilm are planning to make a number of Star Wars TV series to debut on Disney’s upcoming streaming service. There’s Star Wars Resistance, an anime-style animated series that is set before The Force Awakens. But more intriguingly, Iron Man director Jon Favreau is writing and producing a live-action series, which will be set years after the events of Return of the Jedi.

A new report indicates that this will be one of the most expensive shows in history, and elsewhere, a rumor claims that the live-action Star Wars TV show is going to focus on the planet Mandalore, which has never appeared in live-action before.

The New York Times reports that the live-action show “is expected to cost roughly $100 million for 10 episodes.” That would place it near the top of the list of the most expensive shows in history. The six episodes in Game of Thrones‘ upcoming final season are said to cost around $15 million each, but we crunched the numbers not too long ago and found a host of other incredibly expensive shows.

Meanwhile, Favreau told the NYT that “Star Wars is a big world, and Disney’s new streaming service affords a wonderful opportunity to tell stories that stretch out over multiple chapters.” And now it seems we know where at least one of those chapters will take place.

A new rumor from Making Star Wars, a site with a good track record when it comes to getting Star Wars scoops, claims that Favreau’s still-untitled live-action Star Wars TV series will be set on the Outer Rim planet of Mandalore. For those who aren’t fully steeped in Star Wars lore, the Mandalorians are a race of armor-clad warriors, the most famous of which is famed bounty hunter Boba Fett. The site says “when the Empire falls, Mandalore falls into a state of turmoil and the series is about restoring Mandalore to its former self and how Mandalore sways will have huge galactic ramifications.”

As for when the show will take place, that’s a bit more elusive. Favreau himself said in an interview that the show takes place seven years after the events of Return of the Jedi, but Making Star Wars says the show is set only three years after Jedi. It’s possible that’s a mistake, but they may have new intel that conflicts with Favreau’s previous timeline.

Dropping into this middle era between trilogies could please Star Wars fans who have spent countless hours combing through all of the new canonical books and comics that explore that time period, and it could be a nice companion piece for the conclusion of the Siege of Mandalore storyline that’s coming in the newly-announced episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing not only an entirely new batch of characters, but a whole new visual aesthetic applied to this series to differentiate it even more from the stories set later in the timeline, and it sounds like that may be part of what’s in store for us.

Making Star Wars also says that they’ve been hearing that the show’s visual effects will be seen in-monitor on the set using technology provided by ILMxLAB. That would certainly explain a reason for the cost of the episodes, and considering that Favreau has worked extensively with visual effects-heavy productions over the past few years with movies like the Iron Man films, The Jungle Book, and the upcoming The Lion King, that approach makes sense.

Mandalore has a complicated history. The Star Wars wiki says that a huge Mandalorian War began in 3976 BBY (before the Battle of Yavin) and lasted for nearly twenty years. The machinations of the war itself are fairly complex, but in short, it involved characters like Mandalore The Ultimate, a rampaging conquerer, and Revan, a warrior who first appeared in the 2003 video game Knights of the Old Republic, which was also set around that same time. A vocal subset of fans has been clamoring for years for new Star Wars content to be set during that era, and though it sounds like we’re heading to one of that era’s most prominent locations, their wait will have to continue to see a show set during the Knights of the Old Republic time. Perhaps Favreau’s show could make Mandalore more familiar in audiences’ minds, laying the groundwork for a later show to be set during that era. Hey, fans can dream, right?

“We are developing not just one, but a few Star Wars series specifically for the Disney direct to consumer app,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said back in February. There are still a lot of questions about what exactly these series will entail, but we expect to hear more soon.

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