Star Wars just announced Three new movies in three different areas of the timeline. Revealing pretty much what the franchise’s future will be in the next couple of years. So have you wondered where they’re taking the franchise outside of the Mando verse? Then they just told us. It all takes place in very different parts of the timeline.
It’s just the beginning of the Star Wars celebration. There’s more stuff they will reveal in the next couple of days, like who’s playing Grand Admiral Thrawn. I think we’ve already figured that out, though. And what’s going on with the next two years of Star Wars, just in general?
Star Wars Thrawn Movie Will Be Called “Heir To The Empire”
The first big movie that they announced, and it’s a really big deal, is Dave Filoni directing the Mandalorian Thrawn movie that will tie together all the overarching heir to the Empire Grand Admiral Thrawn plots during this part of the Mando verse timeline. They referenced “Heir to the Empire”, the original Thrawn trilogy, during the Ahsoka trailer. So my bet and early theory are that they’ll call that Thrawn movie “Heir to the Empire”. Like Star Wars “Heir to the Empire”.
Dave Filoni is explaining that they’re mining a lot of the expanded universe that they set up in the nineties. In that original Thrawn trilogy, The Heir to the Empire trilogy, basically. Because when Disney bought Star Wars, they just turned everything into legends and said, “No, no, that’s not canon anymore. All this expanded universe stuff, we’re going to skip over and do completely new stuff”.
But if you were around during the very early nineties, like a lot of us, you’ll probably remember that we did not think that there were ever going to be more Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi. We thought that that was it. So when the expanded Universe came along with the Thrawn trilogy, that was our Star Wars sequel.
And it is still an amazing story. If you haven’t read those books, I’d recommend you go back, and you read them. That all started long before George Lucas had ever announced anything approaching the prequels. He hadn’t even started work on them yet.
So now in the present day, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are just taking all that stuff and turning it into movies in a live-action series. It’s all playing out in The Mandalorian, the Ahsoka Series, Skeleton Crew, and all the other connected series during this part of the timeline. And we’re calling it the Mando verse.
Thrawn Movie Will Be The Endgame For Mando-Verse
But the Thrawn movie is meant to be like their version of the Mandalorian Endgame, like the culmination of all the plots during this part of the timeline. But it will not be the end of all the shows in this part of the time. They will continue, but it’ll just be the culmination. Kind of like the way that Avengers Endgame was a culmination of the MCU. And then they continued making Marvel movies after that.
It’s just that now with the announcement of these different new movies, different parts of the timeline, they’re going to branch out to other parts of the timeline, which we assumed they would always do. So, for example, Ahsoka is a Mandalorian spinoff. That’ll be the next place we see Grand Admiral Thrawn. He was featured prominently in the trailer, or the back of his head was.
Lars Mikklesen As Thrawn
As I was writing this article, they literally confirmed all our theories that it is Lars Mikkelsen coming back to voice the character. He did the voice during Star Wars Rebels, and he was fantastic. He’s already been a long-time fantastic actor in live-action stuff. Most of you probably remember him from the Sherlock series with Benedict Cumberbatch.
And yes, he is the brother of Mads Mikkelsen, whose character is constructing the Death Star in a different part of the timeline. However, his character would have been around during that part of the timeline too. But Thrawn didn’t really have anything to do with the construction of the Death Star. He was working on different projects during that part of the timeline.
The Mandalorian And Ashoka Connecting The Thrawn Movie
We’ll be talking a lot about Thrawn this year between The Mandalorian Series and what they’re doing with him on Ahsoka. Those episodes are coming out in August. Of course, I’ll do more articles on that. When we get more footage, we learn more about the series.
But right now on The Mandalorian, because that series is connected, they just screened Season three episode seven a couple of days early. The last two episodes, without giving away spoilers, are total bangers, and they totally save the best for last. A lot of people are complaining about what the overarching plot in The Mandalorian is during season 3.
Well, we find out pretty quickly during episodes seven and episode eight. And they’ll use those episodes to push directly into this grand Admiral Thrawn plot that happens on Ahsoka and then continues on the other series in future seasons and into the Thrawn movie.
So like I said, they’re basically doing Star Wars “Heir to the Empire” with the Thrawn movie, but they’re swapping some of the characters in like Grogu, who wasn’t in the original Thrawn trilogy. Here’s the thing though, that movie will probably be the last of the new three that they just announced. Just because they’ll be so many more new seasons of Ahsoka, The Mandalorian. There’s just a lot of story that they have to do, and they just started to set up Thrawn.
New Jedi Order Movie
The actual first Star Wars movie that’s coming out is supposed to be Christmas 2025. The reports are that it will be the one Damon Lindelof was writing. This will be set during the new Jedi Order 15 years after the rise of Skywalker. They confirmed that it would follow Daisy Ridley‘s Rey, who is returning 15 years later.
Rey has become a Jedi master and is basically doing the same thing that Luke Skywalker is doing right now on The Mandalorian, trying to create her new Jedi Order. That too, with a little bit of help from the sacred text, which she joined when she left Luke Skywalker. So those were not burned when Yoda burned the old Jedi tree.
When they start releasing footage for that in the next year or two, when we started getting trailers for it, we can start talking about the fallacy of the Jedi Order and how it kind of grew stagnant. And one of the reasons why Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Order failed.
When they say Rey’s new Jedi Order, I think the whole idea that she’s going to be basing it all on slightly different concepts, it won’t be the exact same thing just over and over and over. If she were to do the exact same things and teach the exact same lessons as the previous Jedi, that just be repeating the mistakes of the past and it would just lead to their downfall again.
Will Grogu Be In The New Star Wars Movies?
Here’s the thing, though, and a lot of you realize this immediately when they said this further forward in the timeline, Grogu would be close to the same age that Yoda was when Yoda became a Jedi master. Meaning that Grogu would be hitting peak Grogu you force powers around this period.
He would long since have become a full Mandalorian. He probably has some crazy beskar armor too. He was as large physically as Yoda, and he could speak basically normally like Yoda, even though only Yoda spoke that backward speech style.
If you didn’t watch Tales of the Jedi, we got a whole bunch of Yaddle back stories that explain what happened to her during the prequels. She was voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard, who directs many episodes. That just implies that when Grogu eventually starts speaking normally, he’ll speak like everybody else.
The thing about Grogu appearing in movies further forward to the time, like an older Grogu, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni has been very, very cagey about whether they let Grogu appear in other people’s movies because that movie would basically drop between seasons of Ahsoka, and the Mandalorian, like before the Thrawn movie comes out.
And if you see an older Grogu just kicking ass 15 years after the rise of Skywalker, just being a total badass, it would spoil what his fate is during this earlier part of the Mandalorian timeline. Remember Yoda’s race lives for up to 900 years, and he wouldn’t have even hit 100 when that new Jedi Order movie started.
Will Other Star War Characters Be Back For The New Trilogy?
They didn’t say they were bringing Finn back for any more force training or if Poe, the other character in the new trilogy, would return. I assume that a few of them will, but mostly it’ll be new characters, and that’s why they’re setting it up for 15 years after the Rise of Skywalker. If that movie does well, like in Success, they will set up a new trilogy based on the new Jedi Order that would just follow those characters forward.
I think one of the reasons why the new trilogy failed is because they didn’t have a plan going into it. Like they didn’t know how they were going to end the trilogy, and it sounds like they’d fix that problem heading into the new Jedi Order movie, where they know where the story’s actually going before they start working on it.
Dawn Of The Jedi Movie
One of the other more interesting new movies they announced is that they’re planning on releasing a James Mangold movie about The Dawn of the Jedi, set 25,000 years ago. Originally, Dan and Dave from Game of Thrones, you may remember, we’re developing a trilogy of movies set during this time period. But then they left in disgrace, so good riddance.
James Mangold picked up the concept and he announced he was going to write and direct the movie. So it’ll be his original story that he’s writing for the movie. Basically, what this movie, he will try to answer some of our questions, like “Where did the force come from?
Then Mangold said that with the wonderful help of all the brilliant people and brilliant historians of Star Wars universes and the timeline, they came up with some kind of a great story to tell about the Origins of the force. It will be 25,000 years before the first Star Wars movies came. So it’s an exciting story, and Mangold can’t wait to tell us.
Then in an interview, James Mangold said that he wanted to make a “Star Wars Zero”. Like where was the force born? And to him a movie always has to have a question to answer, some singular thing that you can say it’s about, not just connecting the plot of “Who built this, when and who’s going to defeat”, but what’s it about? And to Mangold, this is about discovery.
Mangold just finished doing Indiana Jones 5 Trial of Destiny, so he’ll probably talk more about the Dawn of the Jedi movie after Indiana Jones comes out. It’ll take him at least three years to get that movie out. So at the current pace, I think that’s why Star Wars is finally releasing a movie every two years, which gives them until 2027 to release this first Dawn of the Jedi movie.
They have covered that part of the timeline extensively before in the Legends canon, and there have been references to the original Jedi in the new canon during the Mandalorian, the sequel trilogy, and even during Star Wars Rebels, which they’re now doing in live action during the Ahsoka series. Everybody hoping to see the Bendu show up.
Dawn Of The Jedi Symbol Explained
If you look at the new official Star Wars timeline, the symbol for that part of the timeline where all those movies and those Disney Plus series will take place is the same symbol that was on the floor of the very first Jedi Temple on Oct two that Luke Skywalker had been living at.
The picture is of the being who was the very first Jedi. In the black and white coloration on him, dividing him, was meant to represent the concepts of the light in the dark side of the force and how those first Jedi believed in a more Bebdu like the practice of the force where they will do both the dark side in the light side face.
It enabled them to wield the force in a complete way and be way more powerful than the modern light side Jedi or the modern Sith. But that Dawn of the Jedi franchise, if we’re talking about villains, is probably going to be more like a Jedi Civil War type of franchise. If they do sequels to it and start doing Disney Plus series set in that part of the timeline, essentially they would become their own main villains.
What Happened In The Dawn Of The Jedi Timeline?
What happened in that part of the timeline is there was a schism in that original order, and out of that, the light side practitioners broke from the dark side practitioners. They fought a bitter civil war, and a bunch of people died. Eventually, they both retreated to different parts of the galaxy and fully developed their practice of the force, only wielding either the light side or the dark side.
In the new canon, not talking about legends, the very first Jedi Temple was on Oct two. After that you have the schism, the Civil War, the dark side, and the light side break off and go different ways. The light side practitioners continue calling themselves the Jedi Order and move the Jedi Temple to Tithan, which we saw on The Mandalorian.
That’s where Grogu uses the ruins of the temple to contact Luke Skywalker through force. I believe for a brief period; the original Jedi Temple was also on Titan in the Legends canon too.
While the Jedi Temple was still on Titan, they moved some of the temples to the planet Osis, which is also from the legends canon as well, where they kept the Great Jedi Library, and they used the planet just as a Jedi retreat. That’s where right now in the timeline, Luke Skywalker chose to create his new Jedi Academy. We saw during the book of Boba Fett where he was training Roku. Eventually, we know Kylo Ren destroys it with the Knights of Ren years later.
Then, about 4000 years ago, at the end of the Great Sith War, right at the tail end of the Old Republic era, the Jedi moved the main Jedi temple to Coruson, where it remained until the Revenge of the Sith. Fun fact too, after Order 66 and Revenge of the Sith, the Emperor turned the old Jedi temple into his residence. That’s just his twisted sense of humor.
New Star War Movies Release Date
Right now, the release plans for the new movies are that they’re doing the new Jedi Order movie in 2025. Then the Dawn of the Jedi movie after that. Then the Mandalorian Thrawn, “Heir to the Empire” movie at some point afterward. That’s why I say they will continue to have seasons of the Mandalorian, Ahsoka, Skeleton Crew, and other spinoffs before we do the Thrawn Heir to the Empire movie.
They could always speed up their movie release plans and do one movie per year. But I think when they start out right at the start here, it’ll be one movie every two years. They might ramp up a little bit later in success if things go well. We’re taking baby steps right now. They’ve had a lot of success with the different Star Wars series. So I think they want to lean more heavily on that and then ease themselves back into doing Star Wars movies.
But for those of you that wanted them to cover earlier parts in the timeline, like the Old Republic Era, do series set during that period, set during the Dawn of the Jedi era, it sounds like they do have plans to do that eventually.
Also Read: Star Wars Skeleton Crew: Everything We Know So Far
