Created by headliner director for the company Jon Favreau and intended to be an anchor for its upcoming streaming service, Disney Plus, news about The Mandalorian has been few and far between. Disney has yet to even release a trailer for the live-action Star Wars TV series, but it seems work’s already underway on a second season.
Ahead of Disney Plus’ launch this fall, Favreau’s been awful busy. Aside from a rather important role in Spider-Man: Far From Home, he’s also at the helm of the highly-anticipated reimagining of The Lion King. And in a recent interview with Collider, while promoting the new film – which is set to roar into theaters next Friday – the director revealed that he’s already put pen to paper for a second season of The Mandalorian.
“I keep getting pulled deeper into the orbit of Disney, but fortunately the stuff that Disney’s working on is the stuff that I love. I wanted to do a Star Wars TV show like The Mandalorian and pitched it to them and they were very open to it. I even wrote four episodes before I even was hired to do it because I was excited as a fan to see what these stories might be and see if they were interested in doing what I was interested in, which they were. And I was actually writing Season 2 this morning before I came here.”
But it doesn’t stop there. Apparently, season 2’s already in the pre-production phase. It seems this series isn’t made like your typical TV show – Favreau and his team are using VR technology to visualize how the live-action sets are going to be shot, so that they can incorporate visual effects in real time.
Don’t worry if that sounds confusing. The director went on to explain in greater detail:
“In The Mandalorian because we’re doing live-action production, we’re using the Epic game engine and using that to do real-time in-camera visual effects. So if you visited the set for The Mandalorian you would’ve seen a completely video-wall wrapped stage and we were in there filming the characters in the foreground, and oftentimes either blue screen or full digital versions of set extensions in the background with Parallax, because the positional data of the camera was informing the backgrounds, so it was like a translight that had perspective. So that allowed us to have environments—as long as we could build them digitally and put enough work into planning it, we could have the game engine be used for creating effects in a timeframe that allows us to get a TV season done.”
So, there’s a lot about The Mandalorian that’s unique, if not revolutionary. From the way it’s being shot, to the megalopolis streaming service it’ll be released on, the show’s looking to be something quite special. As such, it’ll be difficult to wait until November 12th to lay eyes on it.