The next Star Wars series on Disney+, Andor, debuts next month. And once that season ends, the show will already be half over.
The series creator, Tony Gilroy, revealed at a press day for the show, that while the series — a prequel that shows the formative years of Diego Luna’s character from Rogue One — was designed with a five-year plan in mind, the show will instead consist of just two seasons.
Gilroy explained that production on a five-season show would simply take too long (via Deadline):
We are covering one year in our first 12 episodes, that we’ve completed, in fact we’re finishing our final mix on [episode] 12 tomorrow. We are going to do another 12 episodes starting in November and the organizing principle for shooting is that we do blocks of three, so last year we were looking at the difficulty of doing five years, which seemed like it would take us the next 30 years
Instead, the next (and final) season of Andor will be broken into four distinct blocks of three episodes. Each one will cover a year in the life of Andor. After 24 total episodes, Gilroy said, the final moments of Andor will “walk the audience directly into the first scenes of Rogue One.” Gilroy co-wrote the Rogue One screenplay, and also did uncredited work on the post-production of the film, overseeing some of its reshoots and editing.
While two seasons is a whole lot less than five, look at it this way: the first season of Andor is 12 episodes. That’s twice as many episodes as The Book of Boba Fett’s season. If that show ran for five seasons, it’d produce 30 episodes; not much more than the 24 we’re getting of Andor. So it’s not a massive loss when you look at it that way.
Andor premieres on Disney+ on September 21.
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