Jon Favreau is working on The Mandalorian’s fourth season and sees crossovers on the horizon…

Star Wars Celebration may be over but there’s still loads of cool Star Wars news coming out.

Jon Favreau is the current flavour of the moment within Star Wars with him and Dave Filoni looking set to take on the role of Star Wars overseers – which is fine by us.

He’s currently prepping The Mandalorian season 3 for release next February (here) but that’s not all he’s developing. Many feared that The Mandalorian was set for three seasons and that’s it but he just confirmed that, no, Mando is going to be around for at least four seasons: “With television, we’re very lucky that we don’t have to rush things through into an hour-and-a-half, two hours. We get to tell stories slowly,” he says.

“So now, as Dave [Filoni]’s doing Ahsoka, it’s very much informing the writing that I’m doing for [The Mandalorian] Season 4. It becomes – how should I put it – more precise.”

We know that Dave Filoni is the showrunner on Ahsoka and will be directing the series too and that – yay! – Bryce Dallas Howard is returning to direct on Mandalorian season 3, so it seems that the excitement has no end in sight.

You may recall that when news of Ahsoka and [the currently on hold] Rangers of the New Republic were announced, many speculated that the end game would be to bring it all together, Avengers-style, for a massive cross-over event and it seems that that might still be the plan: “When I was writing the first season of Mandalorian, I could do anything, set it anywhere. Dave [Filoni] would read it, we’d go back and forth, I would adjust. And there it was.

“Now we have to figure out why there are certain Mandalorians who wear helmets, certain ones who don’t wear helmets, what’s happening on Mandalore, what’s Bo-Katan doing at the time? How does she feel about that? Where is the Darksaber? So it really creates very fertile ground for imagination, for storytelling.”

Yes, but what about the crossover, Jon? The fans want to know! “I think that inevitably, no matter how simple you start, the story threads start to connect and weave and overlap. And with Dave Filoni’s deep understanding of everything around the time period, opportunities will always arise when we have story meetings and conversations about, ‘Well, you know what character would be here now…’ I mean, that’s really how the Luke thing happened.”

The Luke thing is, like we have to tell you, the appearance of everyone’s favourite Jedi, Luke Skywalker at the end of The Mandorian’s second season and, while many called it fans-service, Favreau insists that he and Filoni ensure that appearances and events are loyal to the story and what is happening in the galaxy at that point in time.

“It wasn’t that we necessarily planned to include Luke Skywalker in Season 2. But as we were looking for [Grogu] to get training, we started to weigh out, ‘Well, what Jedi are around? Who’s left?’ And it started to not make sense for it not to be Luke. As we start to tell stories, those stories take on lives of their own, and they have trajectories. And then as those trajectories begin to organically intersect, larger stories with more characters start to make more sense.”

With the announcement of Skeleton Crew, Tales of the Jedi, Young Jedi Adventures and more, it seems that the Star Wars galaxy is set to explode in a way we would ever have been able to imagine a few years ago.

Isn’t it great?