Star Wars unholsters new gunslinger series The Mandalorian

The US studio Disney has unveiled the new live action Star Wars television series that will lead its planned on-demand service Disney+ into the streaming wars.

The Mandalorian will be set five years after the events of the 1983 film Return of the Jedi on a frontier world in the wake of the collapse of the Empire.

Mandalorian bounty hunter Boba Fett.Credit:Lucasfilm

Favreau said the series would take its inspiration from both the film western and Samurai genres, as well as the criminal underworld setting of the iconic Star Wars "cantina", which was described in the original 1977 Star Wars film as "a wretched hive of scum and villainy."

"If you look throughout history, it's fun at first, but it gets very complicated very quickly," Favreau said. "The idea of that world after The Return of the Jedi and what would happen and what sort of characters would survive, and what it was like until the new Republic took over," Favreau said.

"You have vestiges of the Empire, you have only the strong surviving, you have chaos taking over the galaxy."

The series will star Pedro Pascal, who played Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones and Javier Peña in Narcos, as "the Mandalorian".

The still unnamed hero of the new Star Wars series The Mandalorian.Credit:Lucasfilm

"Some might say he has questionable moral character, which is in line with some of our best westerns, some good Samurai, all the good stuff," Pascal said. "He's a badass."

The series will feature two other major characters, Greef Karga, head of a "bounty hunters guild", played by Carl Weathers, and Kara Dune, an ex-rebel "shock trooper", played by Gina Carano.

Other directors working on episodes of the series include Taika Waititi and Bryce Dallas Howard.

While there is still little detail about the series in circulation, Favreau's social media feeds have revealed that the series will deeply mine the Star Wars canon.

Among the characters appearing in the series are an IG-88-style droid; the original IG-88 "assassin droid" appeared with a band of bounty hunters, including Boba Fett, the Trandoshan assassin Bossk and the Corellian bounty hunter Dengar in The Empire Strikes Back.

Another famous Star Wars droid who will appear in the series is R5-D4 – or a droid identical to him – a battered droid encountered in the sandcrawler operated by the Jawas on the planet Tattooine in the 1977 Star Wars film.

The series will also feature the use of a Mandalorian weapon – a sort of high-tech bayonet which resembles a rifle which tipped with energy blades – first seen in an animated short in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

That 1978 spin-off, widely panned by Star Wars fans and often regretted by Star Wars creator George Lucas, does have the unique distinction of introducing the character of Boba Fett, prior to his live-action debut in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back.

Details of the series were unveiled at the Star Wars fan convention, Star Wars Celebration, in Chicago.

Several minutes of footage was screened, including scenes which featured guest star Werner Herzog as an underworld boss who hires the Mandalorian to retrieve a bounty, series regular Giancarlo Esposito, who plays an ex-Imperial officer, scenes involving a squad of black-armored "deathtrooper" stormtroopers and the IG-88 droid who, according to chatter, is named IG-11.

It has not yet been officially confirmed but it is reported that Waititi, in addition to directing duties, will provide IG-11's voice.

Speaking to US media recently, Waititi said the series would adhere to the tone of the "original trilogy" Star Wars films.

Rebel pilot Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and droid K-2SO (Alan Tudyk) in Rogue One.Credit:Lucasfilm

Waititi said the series tapped into the enormous fandom which has surrounded the Boba Fett character since he first appeared.

"That’s what the fans like and you can’t really disrespect it," he said. "I guess is a nicer way of saying [you] can't put too many jokes in."

“For most kids growing up with those films, Boba Fett was one of the most favourite characters, even though he's barely in the films," he said. "The idea of bounty hunters, the helmets … getting to see characters like that and getting to shoot with them is pretty cool."

While The Mandalorian has had a relatively young development life – it was pitched to Lucasfilm by Favreau in 2017 – plans for a live-action Star Wars series have been around for more than a decade.

In 2012 a series titled Star Wars: Underworld, which would have featured younger versions of established characters Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian and Boba Fett, was developed but ultimately abandoned.

Lucasfilm is delivering eight one-hour episodes of The Mandalorian to Disney, and the series will spearhead the launch of the Disney+ streaming service in November.

According to reports, the budget for the series is around $US100 million.

Disney+ will also feature two other Star Wars television projects, a still-untitled series starring Diego Luna as rebel pilot Cassian Andor and set prior to the events of the film Rogue One, and a new season of the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The shift to a focus on Star Wars-themed television projects is also a reflection of what many see as a saturation of the franchise in cinema.

The last film of the original three-trilogy Skywalker story will premiere later this year, however Lucasfilm has trimmed its plan for three "standalone" films back to two, after the modest success of the Han Solo origin story film Solo.

That said, Lucasfilm has confirmed it is developing two possible new Star Wars film trilogies, one with The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and a second with Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

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