Over the past week or so, rumours have been circulating online that Disney and Lucasfilm were either a) pulling the plug on the live-action Obi-Wan Kenobi series, or b) planning to rework the project from a Disney+ series back to a feature film for the as-yet-unrevealed December 2022 Star Wars release date.
While much of this appeared to be speculation, Deadline dropped a report last night claiming that the series has been put on hold in order to reshuffle the creative team. The trade went on to claim that director Deborah Chow (The Mandalorian) remains on board but screenwriter Hossein Amini (The Alienist) has exited over creative differences, and that the project “will go back to the drawing board and wait for a new hope to emerge for a show that has a star in Ewan McGregor but no clear battle plans.”
Well, it seems that things may not be as bad as initially feared, as Ewan McGregor has addressed the situation during an appearance at a Birds of Prey promotional event, calling the reports of creative differences “bullshit”:
“We just pushed the shoot to the beginning of next year,” said McGregor. “The scripts are really good. I saw 90% of the writing and I really liked it. All this bullshit about creative differences and all that stuff is, none of it true. We just pushed the dates, they want — [the] last episode Episode IX just came out, everyone had more time to read the stuff that had been written, and they felt that they wanted to do more work on it. So they slid the shoot. It’s not nearly as dramatic as it sounds online. The show starts shooting in January. I think they want to keep the same release date so it’s not really gonna affect the viewer in any way. It just simply gives them more time to write, make the scripts even better.”
SEE ALSO: Rumour: Jar Jar Binks to make Star Wars return in Obi-Wan Kenobi series
So, should we be worried about the Kenobi series? Delays and behind-the-scenes drama seem par for the course on Disney and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars, but at this point in time the project still appears to be very much alive and so we’ll just have to wait and see how it all pans out.
Via The Wrap
