Yesterday, multiple outlets (first broke by Collider) revealed that the production on Lucasfilm’s Kenobi series has been placed on hiatus with the crew at Pinewood Studios UK told to go home without any idea of when production would resume.
Trades like TheHollywoodReporter expanded upon that delay pointing towards script issues as they reported the first two had been scrapped and the episodes had been scaled-back from 6 to 4.
A search for a new writer was also underway while director Deborah Chow and star Ewan McGregor remained on board.
The news happened to break at the same time as Ewan McGregor was walking the red carpet at the premiere of DC Comics film Birds of Prey.
I wouldn’t be shocked if people had planned on breaking that news ahead of the premiere just to get comments from the actor himself. The timing certainly played a role here as many people held back on the basic information that Collider revealed.
Anyways, Ewan McGregor did indeed comment about the hiccup to ComicBook and confirmed that production has indeed been pushed back from this August to January 2021 (it was announced last year they’d begin shooting in the summer of 2020) and suggests things are still moving forward, while also admitting the writing is specifically part of the project’s delay.
MCGREGOR: “It just slipped to next year, that’s all.”
“The scripts are really good. I think that so now that Episode IX came out and everyone at Lucasfilm’s got more time to look to spend on the writing, they felt like they wanted more time to write the episodes. I read about 80-90 percent of what they’ve written so far and it’s really, really good. And instead of shooting this August, they just want to start shooting in January, that’s all. It’s nothing more dramatic than that. It often happens in projects, they just wanted to push it to next year.”
We’ll have to wait an entire year to know what the true fate of the series will be, considering only a could of days ago plenty of people were pushing the narrative that nothing was going on with the series and now the show’s start has been bounced back almost six months.
A lot can happen over the rest of 2020.
Season 2 of The Mandalorian is currently underway in California and Diego Luna’s Rogue One prequel series Cassian Andor is set to begin shooting this summer.
A January 2021 production start likely means that Kenobi won’t be ready to air on Disney+ until 2022.
SOURCE: COMIC BOOK
