Ewan McGregor Says Star Wars: Obi-Wan Filming Delayed to Next Year, Release Date Won’t Be Affected

Following reports from earlier today about that status of the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney+ series, a surprising development has popped up to say ‘Hello There’ from the man himself, Ewan McGregor. Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis at the Birds of Prey premiere, the actor revealed that production on the series is now scheduled to start in January of 2021 and the drama behind-the-scenes has been overblown.

“It just slipped to next year, that’s all,” McGregor says of the delay. “The scripts are really good. I think that so now that Episode IX came out and everyone at Lucasfilm’s got more time to look to spend on the writing, they felt like they wanted more time to write the episodes. I read about 80-90 percent of what they’ve written so far and it’s really, really good. And instead of shooting this August, they just want to start shooting in January, that’s all. It’s nothing more dramatic than that. It often happens in projects, they just wanted to push it to next year.”

The actor went on to say that the change in filming shouldn’t effect the eventual release date, which to be fair was never previously disclosed by Lucasfilm or Disney+.

“It will have the same release date, I don’t think it will affect the release date. They’re still shooting towards having the [series] released when it was going to originally release.”

When asked about reports that the series has been shortened from six to four episodes, McGregor denied them, simply saying: “I haven’t heard that.” Though there is the possibility that such a decision had not yet made it to McGregor’s ear since the news broke earlier in the day.

Despite reports that the series was on indefinite hold because of the re-writes, Deborah Chow, who previously worked on the other live-action Star Wars series for Disney+, The Mandalorian, remains attached to direct the untitled Obi-Wan series. The series is set to focus on Kenobi’s time on Tatooine after the events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith as he adopted a life of solitude, ensuring the safety of Luke Skywalker from afar ahead of the events of the original Star Wars. Previous reports indicated that the production was looking to cast a young Luke Skywalker for the series, but with the impending re-writes it remains to be seen if that will make it to the shooting drafts or not.

Originally developed as a spinoff movie like the young Han Solo prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story, Obi-Wan will instead be the third live-action Star Wars series to debut on Disney’s streaming service following the Jon Favreau-created The Mandalorian, now in production on its sophomore season, and a Rogue One prequel centered around Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor.