It’s been a bizarre time of ups and downs in the Empire. The franchise is of course starting up again with JJ Abrams at the helm, but at the same time Lucas Arts shut down, bringing an end to the (current round of) Star Wars video games, while the Clone Wars animated series was also cancelled.
Clearly, there’s plenty of room for all kinds of Star Wars stories, yet it’s a damn shame to see the video games and Clone Wars stopping, because Clone Wars got good marks from the critics, and The Force Unleashed was considered a major step in video gamestorytelling.
This doesn’t mean either the games or the series could come to an end completely, in fact there’s reportedly another animated Star Wars series currently in the works.
Indeed, Nuke The Fridge tells us a new animated Star Wars series has been “teased” by Lucasfilm, which is now owned by Disney. This story originated from RebelForceRadio.com, who interviewed the supervising director of Clone Wars, Dave Filoni. Filoni was asked if he’s going to continue to create animated stories based on the Star Wars empire, and he said, “Well, that’s my plan!”
Filoni added, “(Star Wars is) obviously important to me and I’ve had a very great time working here. I’ve really helped build the animation division from when I got here and there were only a handful of people…
“At this point, I am involved in some early production discussions and exploration of what we’ll be doing with Star Wars animation in the future…So it’s a transition time, and I think it will lead to an exciting time and hopefully I’ll see things grow again.”
As far as the recent layoffs and shut downs within the Empire, Filoni said, “It’s a function of our industry…It’s not my favorite part. You can luckily grow things and bring on many talented people, but there [are] times when you have to shrink things as well. We happen to be in one of those times right now, but that just paves the way, hopefully, for new things and new creativity in the future.”
Again, there’s plenty of stories in the Star Wars universe, and plenty of mediums to tell those stories, so with the new JJ Abrams directed film coming in 2015, we wouldn’t be surprised to see new animated series and games being made. Hopefully by this point the tsuris that the FX and video game business is going through will have calmed down, and things will keep growing in a strong direction from there.