Star Wars Rebels EP Teases Live-Action Movie Tie-Ins for Season 3

Star Wars Rebels has enjoyed an interesting relationship with the greater Star Wars universe. Thanks to the Star Wars Story Group, and a new canon to fill-in, both before and after the Original Trilogy, Rebels is able to pull from - and add to - the greater universe of Star Wars like never before.

A large part of that process is Simon Kinberg, executive producer on Rebels and also one of the people working alongside the Story Group on the live-action side, having helped break story beats and worked closely with them to bring the worlds of animation and live-action film closer together. The Story Group also coordinates with publishing, video games, anything with the Star Wars name goes first through them.

That relationship has brought in characters like Darth Vader and Lando Calrissian from the original trilogy of films onto the series, along with characters from the last canon animated series (which shares a showrunner, Dave Filoni, with Rebels).

"What's lovely is, obviously, we've brought in characters from [Star Wars: The] Clone Wars in the second season, and we keep sort of bringing characters from the original movies and sort of deepening the relationships between our core characters, the Ghost crew," Kinberg told Moviefone. Ahsoka Tano, Darth Maul, and three clone troopers including Captain Rex all played pivotal roles in season two of Rebels. "So it's trying to balance the two different things, like the original cast from the first season with Clone Wars, with characters from the original movies, and maybe even feeding into future movies."

That's the first real tease that Rebels might link somehow to "future movies" that we've had from the production team. With Rebels taking place about 4 years prior to the events of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope and the upcoming film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story taking place just a short time before A New Hope, there is certainly a strong possibility of overlap between the two. While its position in the timeline doesn't offer too many direct connection possibilities to the new Saga films (Episodes 7, 8, and 9), links to Rogue One and 2018's Han Solo film would make a lot of sense.

We'll know a lot more about Star Wars Rebels season 3 after the two-episode premiere and panel at Star Wars Celebration July 15-17, 2016 in London.