The Mandalorian: Jon Favreau Already Writing Season 2
The Mandalorian may not have arrived yet... but we already know he'll be back.
Jon Favreau, who created the upcoming Disney+ series, recently disclosed in an interview with Collider that he's already drafting scripts for the second season — and that pre-production is already underway.
The first season of The Mandalorian will focus on the adventures of the titular space desperado five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, before the emergence of the First Order. While it's not clear whether season 2 of has even received a greenlight from the House of Mouse, that's not a detail that's likely to bother Favreau very much. The multi-hyphenate — who directed the first two Iron Man films as well as the live-action Disney adaptation The Jungle Book and The Lion King — revealed to Collider that he began banging out scripts for the first season before the series had received the official nod.
"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," Favreau said. "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."
The writer/director went on to confirm that, yes, pre-production on The Mandalorian's second outing is already happening — but there's a reason for that. The series is being filmed much differently from traditional live-action fare, using technology native to virtual reality and video games to render digital special effects in real time. It's a similar setup that Favreau employed to capture the characters and backgrounds of the forthcoming The Lion King, but it's being used to achieve slightly different objectives.
"Because we're doing live-action production, we're using the Epic game engine... to do real-time in-camera visual effects," he explained. "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."
Well, that makes, um, perfect sense to us. Favreau continued, "[The process] 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."
Of course, all of that diligent work and planning must be done before the cameras begin to roll, hence the early jump on pre-production for season 2. The unique method of rendering The Mandalorian's world has been commented on by a few notable people who actually did get the chance to visit the set — people like directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Avengers: Endgame), who dropped by in November of last year and were blown away by what they saw.
At a screening and Q&A panel for Avengers: Infinity War the following month, Joe Russo said of the pair's visit, "It's amazing. We went down there to say hi to Jon. Taika [Waititi, the director of Thor: Ragnarok] was directing an episode, so we went to hang out with them. Jon is always at the forefront of cutting-edge tech, and he is shooting this in a way that no one has ever shot anything ever before. It's pretty astounding."
Given the Russos' proven ability to come with the eye-popping spectacle, that's pretty high praise. The ace directors aren't the only high-profile parties to be privy to the inner working of The Mandalorian; in January of this year, Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk came through to take a few pictures and crack a few jokes, and back in October of last year, Favreau was surprised on his birthday by a guy who happens to know a little bit about the Star Wars universe.
Disney is counting on The Mandalorian to help drive boatloads of subscribers to its upcoming streaming service, and if Favreau is confident enough to start plugging away on the second season already, the studio's brass must be pretty darn pleased with his work so far. The series stars Pedro Pascal (Narcos) in the title role; Gina Carano (Deadpool) as Cara Dune, a "former Rebel shock trooper"; Carl Weathers as Greef Carga, the "head of a bounty hunters' guild that has enlisted the Mandalorian to seek out an item of high value for a client"; Waititi as the voice of bounty hunter droid IG-11; and Nick Nolte (Head Full of Honey), Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad), Bill Burr (F is for Family), Emily Swallow (Castlevania), and the great director Werner Herzog in undisclosed roles.
The Mandalorian will be available on Disney+ on the streamer's launch day, November 12, 2019.