Earlier this week, a Disney+ UK press release appeared to confirm that Skeleton Crew and The Acolyte will be the only Star Wars TV shows released on the streaming platform in 2024.
During April's Star Wars Celebration in London, Lucasfilm announced plans for Andor season 2 to be released next August. That was, of course, before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes which brought Hollywood to a standstill for most of the summer.
Tony Gilroy said he'd finished writing Andor's scripts before the writer's strike started but with the majority of cast members part of SAG-AFTRA, it was clear cameras could only continue rolling for so long. Now, the impact of that is finally being felt.
According to Bespin Bulletin, with The Acolyte slipping to next summer, Andor season 2 has indeed been pushed to 2025. As for Skeleton Crew, the site believes it's being saved for next November, nearly a whole year after we originally expected to see it on Disney+!
On the plus side, Andor won't be alone in 2025 because that's the same year The Mandalorian season 4 is expected to premiere.
Back to Cassian Andor's origin story, though, and you may have recently seen photos on social media of Snowtroopers wandering around London's Pinewood Studios. That immediately led to speculation they would be part of season 2, though the site has now confirmed they were simply there as part of Pinewood's Future Festival and not there to shoot anything.
Andor's next batch of episodes will chronicle the next steps in Cassian's journey as he fights to assemble a fledgling resistance. Kathleen Kennedy, Tony Gilroy, Sanne Wohlenberg, Diego Luna and Luke Hull are executive producing the upcoming season, which stars Luna, Adria Arjona, Kyle Soller, Denise Gough, Genevieve O’Reilly, Andy Serkis, Muhannad Bahair and Joplin Sibtain.
Earlier this year, Luna opened up on what fans can expect from the show's upcoming second season:
"Having 12 episodes to tell a story - it’s a long time; it’s a lot of time. Each episode, more than any other thing I’ve done for TV, has to be something on its own. It has to be something that stays there. And I think we have that in mind much more [in season 2]."
"We’re used to doing more film than anything else. This is the second thing I’ve done in this format for streaming. And the same [thing] with many people from the writing, the directors, the production, so naturally, we ended up thinking in three episodes as a block, because it’s like the time you have for a film."
"Each block of three episodes, in a way, had a beginning and an end. And when we put out the first season, it was when we were about to start doing promotion that we came up with the idea of putting three out [at a time], because it was something by itself, without us even thinking about it."
"Then, in this next season, what we’re doing is blocks of three episodes and each block represents a year. We include that as part of the format in a much more structured way."
Stay tuned for more updates on Andor as we have them.