This is probably not what many Star Wars fans want to hear, given some of the recent issues with the direction of the universe as of late, but it turns out the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series was given a directive to be less “dark” than it was, an it was overhauled into being a more uplifting tale in its final version.
This is directly from Star Wars overseer Kathleen Kennedy in a recent EW feature:
“We’re looking, ultimately, to make a hopeful, uplifting story. It’s tricky when you’re starting with a character in the state that Obi-Wan would be in coming off of ‘Revenge of the Sith.’ That’s a pretty bleak period of time. You can’t just wave the magic wand with any writer and arrive at a story that necessarily reflects what you want to feel.”
That is not how the original version of the script was, and Army of the Dead writer Joby Harold was brought in to change things with showrunner Deborah Chow.
Good news? Bad news? It’s hard to say until we see the final product. I’d argue The Mandalorian is an overall “hopeful” series and it’s done just fine being relatively lighthearted as Mando protects Grogu, and vice versa.
However, I think we would be remiss not to recognize that some of the best moments in Star Wars as a series have been when things were especially bleak, namely the ending of The Empire Strikes Back in the original trilogy, Revenge of the Sith being the best prequel film, and more recently, I’d argue that Rogue One, with its doomed central cast, was the best new film of all the new movies they’ve made. So I think darkness does have a place in Star Wars, and I’m not sure how much it makes sense to have a “hopeful” Obi-Wan series given the events that take place before and after the show. But we’ll see how it goes. Dark and gritty does not always mean better, lighthearted and hopefully does not always mean worse, it just depends how it’s handled. But Disney’s Star Wars has been pretty inconsistent at best so far, which is the cause for a lot of the concern. But I think most everyone thought that at the very least, the Obi-Wan trailer looked good.
Obi-Wan Kenobi will debut on Disney Plus on May 25, 2022. Soon, Disney will start ramping up production on its Marvel and Star Wars series, and Star Wars in particular should give us Mando season 3, Ahsoka and Andor, at the very least, pretty soon here. We’ll see how “hopeful” those may manage to be.
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