Jones, who won several awards for his acting during his iconic professional career, portrayed Darth Vader in the original Star Wars series. He performed alongside Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker.
As a tribute to Jones for their time on film together, Hamill referenced one of the most memorable moments in film history when (spoiler alert decades late here) Dath Vader revealed he was actually Skywalker’s father.
He tweeted “#RIP Dad” with a broken heart emoji. This shows the kind of impact Jones had on not only his fans but his film colleagues as well.
The summer’s big Star Wars show has reportedly been canceled after a single season.
Lucasfilm has reportedly decided to end its most recent Star Wars series, The Acolyte, after one season, according to Deadline.
The prequel series set about 100 years before the start of the Skywalker Saga debuted in June and ran for eight episodes, leaving viewers with a cliffhanger ending strongly hinting at more story to tell.
Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung-jae led the series, and Manny Jacinto was revealed as the Sith apprentice of Sith lord Darth Plagueis (who made a cameo in the show’s finale, as did Yoda).
The Star Wars television pipeline will continue on with this December’s Skeleton Crew and next year’s second season of Andor. However, the story from The Acolyte appears to have come to a close.
EXCLUSIVE: The story of ‘The Acolyte’ will not continue, with Lucasfilm opting not to proceed with a second season of the ‘Star Wars’ offshoot starring Amandla Stenberg, sources tell Deadline https://t.co/js3F28IeG6pic.twitter.com/sCzmTvMUhM
Jude Law plays a character named Jod Na Nawood, which sounds extremely Star Wars.
The arrival of the next live-action Star Wars show on Disney+ is almost here, and it looks like an awesome original story starring Oscar-nominated actor Jude Law and a bunch of thrill-seeking kids.
At D23 – Disney’s annual expo, celebration, convention and extravaganza – fans in Anaheim, California, got their first extended look at Skeleton Crew with the release of the first trailer for the show. Lucasfilm then dropped the trailer on social media.
And a lot of fans had the similar reactions. Many are incredibly excited for this show, and a whole lot of them thought that it had the feeling of “The Goonies” – the classic and often-referenced 1985 comedy adventure from Steven Speilberg, Richard Donner and Chris Columbus where a bunch of kids (among them, Josh Brolin, Sean Astinand Ke Huy Quan) try to save their homes from demolition, discover a treasure map and run into trouble with criminals.
The story does indeed seem to be told through a group of youths from around the galaxy yearning for adventure. Midway through the trailer, one says, “I found something buried in the woods,” and it appears to be an old, abandoned Jedi Temple. Chaos, risks, jump-scares and high-flying action seem to ensue from there for the four kids – Wim, Fern, KB, and Neel – and the final shot of the trailer features a hooded Law wielding the Force.
“I fell in love with Star Wars when I was a 10-year-old boy. And what I love most about this series is it’s told through the perspective of the kids. It means a great deal for me to be a part of the Star Wars galaxy.”
A bit like The Acolyte, which recently wrapped up its first season, there doesn’t seem to be many familiar Star Wars characters in this show. It’s supposed to take place around the same time as The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, which are set between the events of The Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.
Skeleton Crew is set to debut on Disney+ on Dec. 3 and will run for eight episodes. The series is also set to star Oscar-nominated actress Kerry Condon, “TV on the Radio” singer Tunde Adebimpe, and Nick Frost, who you may know from the films “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz.”
Behind the scenes are writer Christopher Ford and director Jon Watts, who worked together on “Spiderman: Homecoming.”
Skeleton Crew is the seventh live-action Star Wars show to air on Disney+. Fans at D23 also got some information about the second season of the gritty Andor, which will release at some point in 2025. More is on the horizon for Star Wars too, such as a Mandalorian and Grogu movie.
Nicholson’s video “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” has gone viral for a reason, as the content creator delivers a wholly comprehensive analysis of why the pricy hotel eventually found itself plagued with issues and ultimately closed last year.
The video has been making the rounds for about a week now, and it’s really become a cultural moment in and of itself.
Nicholson’s breakdown comes from the perspective of a fan who can pretty easily call shenanigans on something she’s passionate about, and it’s looking like it’ll be the YouTube video of the summer right now.
25 years later, we’re still talking about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
If there’s anything agreeable about the most polarizing blockbuster in modern movie history, it’s that nobody is ever going to agree on it.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace turns 25 this month, having lived many lives through the pop culture discourse machine to where it’s immortal in its polarization. It’s been a quarter century since the podraces, Jar Jar Binks, the “Duel of the Fates,” the midi-chlorians and the birth of an unmatched phenomenon that we will never see again at the movies.
As much as the Avengers movies and the recent Star Wars films took a vise-grip on audiences, nothing ever arrived in theaters with the sheer blunt force of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. The 16-yearlong anticipation for movie fans to find out why exactly Darth Vader found himself breathing through a mask and atop the Galactic Empire came with such generational force that people actually went to the movies to see the debut of the teaser trailer and got up and left before the actual film they paid to see started.
In an age where movie studios drop teaser trailers out of nowhere that wind up being dissected by the internet within seconds, the tantalizing tease of the literal return of Star Wars could only be watched at your local multiplex.
Of course, the second the John Williams fanfare blared through the THX speakers and people saw exactly what series mastermind George Lucas had in store, it sent a permanent fissure through pop culture that still sends minor shockwaves through people’s lunchtime conversations and Twitter back-and-forths. All these years later, the film remains wildly divisive. Either you love it, you loathe it or you fast-forward through the Trade Federation negotiations and the Jar Jar Binks-as-Buster Keaton slapstick routines to get to the podracing and the lightsaber battles.
If you loved it, you either bought into the radical departure from the original trilogy and ate up the high-society melodrama and the old Hollywood tonal mash-up of Cecil B. DeMille, William Wyler, Akira Kurosawa and Ray Harryhausen, or you were probably about seven or eight, clutching your Pizza Hut tie-in toy and absolutely in awe that this is what Star Wars looked like during the pinnacle of your childhood.
If you hated it, you either felt Lucas was well out of his range to so aggressively mount such a stodgy spectacle built on the back of thick discussions of galactic taxes, democratic failures and erosions of bureaucratic safeguards to protect from tyranny. You hated the pandering to younger audiences, you felt the dialogue was rancid, you abhorred the mysticism being translated into trackable science and the visions from your childhood of what Star Wars might look like one day got “Yippee’d” to smithereens by clumsy Gungans and Eopie farts.
The Star Wars prequels that followed, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, curried roughly the same levels of reactions, varying to the stilted romance of Anakin and Padmé in Episode II to the unreal depths of darkness from Order 66 during Episode III. Trying to find common ground on these films has proven fruitless over the years.
For better or for worse, the prequels were not your daddy’s Star Wars, and the generational clash between “This ruined my childhood!” and “This IS my childhood!” continues to rage on with every Dave Filoni animated series about the Clone Wars to every YouTube film scholar breaking down the mechanics of why this decision works and why this one doesn’t.
Twenty-five years later, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace remains a cultural lightning rod for debate and still brings people into the movie theaters to see it. After being re-released by Lucasfilm for its 25th anniversary, the film came in second at the domestic box office on the first weekend of what’s considered to be the summer months at the movies.
That proves decidedly that, even after sparking the most belabored debate in movie history, Episode I is never going to go away. It’s still one of the most important blockbusters we’ve ever gotten, responsible for so much of what we have now in Star Wars and in general media.
How has it aged? While some of it is a little silly and some of it is a little dry, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace remains thrilling and passionate, the singular vision of a filmmaker who wanted to give audiences something new and expand what these movies could be to a new generation.
It’s impeccably made and outrageously creative, still rousing a sense of awe and excitement once the podracers hit the gas and Williams’ goosebump-inducing “Duel of the Fates” hits the second Darth Maul makes his final entrance behind the palace doors on Naboo. The film is breathtaking and intensely personal in a way so many modern blockbusters are not. Maybe that’s why it plays even better than it did when it was released in May 1999.
However, that’s not exactly gospel among the millions of people who have seen the movie countless times, some of them cursing the ground it walks on and others annually firing it up for their birthdays. We’re never going to agree on this movie, but how fascinating that it remains ever-present in our culture all these years later. The Force is strong with this one, even if you disagree.
For some, it’s the X-Wings and Tie Fighters and dogfights in space. For others, it was the cool, handsome and cocky Han Solo that drew us in – or the beeps and boops from R2-D2, growls from Chewbacca, the heroics of Luke, or the leadership of Leia. And for others, it was the mystique of the Force, the battle between light and dark, mind tricks, wizardry and, as Han says, hokey religions.
And a lot of us remember the first time we saw a lightsaber ignite. Whether it was Luke waving his father’s saber around in old Ben Kenobi’s cave, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan drawing theirs to discard some Trade Federation droids, or Kylo Ren using his crossguard saber to intimidate and eliminate a group of Resistance fighters.
In the movies and television shows, lightsaber duels – or, in the case of The Last Jedi, fights involving lightsabers – are some of the coolest and consequential moments in Star Wars. It’s where fates are altered, destinies are changed, challenges are conquered, and bonds either grow stronger or completely break. These scenes can be awesome and fantastic, and also heartbreaking and emotional. The best ones are both.
In celebration of May the Fourth, what follows here is a completely unscientific and unofficial ranking of the best lightsaber duels on-screen in Star Wars, from live-action and the cartoons.
On Tuesday, fans were treated with a trailer for The Acolyte, and it seems to be delivering what it has long promised: a fresh start for fans of the franchise, and an unfamiliar story that isn’t connected to the Skywalkers or the Empire or even Lando Calrissian.
The show is set in the High Republic era of Star Wars — about 100 years or so before the events of The Phantom Menace — so, we won’t be seeing or hearing anything about Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi or Han Solo. The series is being spearheaded by writer and director Leslye Headland, whose past work includes Russian Doll and the 2015 rom-com Sleeping With Other People.
Judging by the trailer though, this story won’t be filled with comedy.
Disney and Lucasfilm seem to be billing the show as a crime drama of sorts. In an email sent to fans on Tuesday with a link to the trailer, the plot of the series is described as:
“An investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master against a dangerous warrior from his past. As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…”
The series stars the likes of Amandla Stenberg (Across theSpider-Verse), Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game), Manny Jacinto (Top Gun: Maverick), Dafne Keen (Logan), Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim), Dean-Charles Chapman (Game of Thrones), and Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix, Jessica Jones). Additionally, Joonas Suotamo — the former Penn State basketball player who took over the role of Chewbacca in The Last Jedi — seems to be back to play a Wookie.
This is great news for those of you going to Disneyland and Disney World.
The Disney theme parks are an absolute haven for Star Wars fans, even more so in recent years with the addition of the Galaxy’s Edge, a massive and immersive Star Wars area added to both the California and Florida Disney parks.
But despite the billions spent on new, state-of-the-art attractions in recent years, Disney’s best Star Wars-related attraction may still be the beloved, clunky rust bucket of a flight simulator, Star Tours. Opened in 1987, the ride has been a consistent crowd pleaser since Return of the Jedi was less than five years old (!) but Disney has managed to keep it fresh by plugging in new scenes featuring characters from new Star Wars films over the years.
On Tuesday, Disney announced its latest batch of new scenes that will be added to the ride and this time it will feature the stars of the Disney+ shows that have kept the Star Wars universe going in recent years.
Some people think it looks more like a giant Roomba vacuum cleaner, though.
Allegiant Stadium, the host of the 2024 Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers, is a very beautiful place.
Thanks to Raiders owner Mark Davis, the stadium also happens to have a nickname inspired by the Star Wars film series. That is because the first time Davis welcomed the players to the stadium back in 2020, he referred to it as the Death Star. Via ESPN, he said:
“Welcome to the Death Star, where our opponents’ dreams come to die.”
[gambcom-standard rankid=”3011″ ]
ESPN’s Paul Gutierrez said that he told Davis that the Death Star was blown up multiple times throughout the Star Wars series. But that didn’t matter at all to Davis, who still thinks the $1.9 billion stadium bared a resemblance to the Death Star due to its sleek black and grey facade.
Ethan Miller – Getty Images
Despite the unfortunate fate of the Death Star in the Star Wars movies, this nickname is an identity that the team has embraced. During NFL games as recently as this season, the video board at the stadium has read “Welcome to the Death Star” with players holding light sabers.
Lucasfilms
Jon Gruden, who was the head coach of the Raiders (for the second time) from 2018 until 2021, said that it was a “cool name” for the stadium and that he did not “give a damn” about Star Wars.
https://t.co/YXpFoBb2Ua
