Ahsoka’s Surprising Season 2 Update Confirms Streaming Really Is Dead

Star Wars: Ahsoka Season 2 is in development, but don’t expect to get the same kind of experience you did with Season 1. That’s because the landscape of streaming is changing rapidly, and Ahsoka Season 2 will likely be one of the first, biggest examples of the shift into a new era. Word is already circulating that Disney and Lucasfilm are approaching this next season of Star Wars streaming content with a far more conservative outlook – i.e., the pursestrings are being tightened, fast. The budget for Ahsoka Season 2 has reportedly been greatly diminished in order to cut down on the financial risk for the studio.

Admittedly, the behind-the-scenes workings of streaming and the revenue it generates are still very vague. So it would be very hard to know what is or is not going on with the production of Ahsoka Season 2, if not for some first-hand testimony.

Claudia Black starred in Ahsoka Season 1 as Nightsister Klothow, the lead sorceress in the trio of Nightsisters witches employed by Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen). The Nightsisters were key to helping Thrawn survive being lost in a far-off galaxy on the planet Peridea. They also helped him create an army of zombie Stormtroopers and return to the main Star Wars universe as a conqueror. However, when it came time for Season 2, Black discovered that Disney and Lucasfilm weren’t inviting her back, in order to save on coin.

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“They picked up season two, picked me up with it, and then Disney, which is structuring things differently these days, could not pay me what I needed to be paid as a single mother to keep all my responsibilities going at home in Los Angeles, because they were filming in London,” Black explained to Bleeding Cool. “It was not something that they could make happen, and therefore, I had to bow out for season two.”

To be fair, Disney and Lucasfilm saving budget on Claudia Black’s role makes a certain amount of sense. Klothow is a character whose appearance requires a lot of facial makeup and head-to-toe robes as a costume; the actor underneath all of that costuming isn’t necessarily as critical. A more inexpensive character actor could easily take on the role of Klothow (like the late Ray Stevenson’s “Baylan Skoll” being recast). However, at this time, there is little to no evidence that Klothow and the Nightsisters will once again be prominently featured in Ahsoka.

Star Wars Actor Confirms Streaming Content Cutbacks At Disney

The mention of “Disney structuring things differently these days” is real tea in that statement; Claudia Black is the first actor to speak outright about the shifting production values over at Disney and Lucasfilm, as the studio (and really, the entire streaming business) has been scaled back from the deep-pocket investments during the “Streaming Wars” of the early 2020s. Star Wars has been one of the biggest cautionary tales to come out of the Streaming Wars: once upon a time, the franchise releasing a film every few years was viewed as a premium “event.” With Disney+ streaming, Star Wars oversaturated the market by pumping out so many TV shows (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, The Acolyte, Visions, Andor, Tales of the Jedi/Dark Side/Underworld), without being able to maintain the epic cinematic quality of Star Wars films.

Now it seems that the studio is going through some obligatory motions that they’re less willing to pay out for. Ahsoka Season 2 has a pivotal story to tell that will matter to the larger Star Wars story arc playing out on TV. The Mandalorian and Ahsoka creator Dave Filoni is still working on a major event film set in the New Republic Era (where most of the shows take place). Ahsoka Season 2 will feature some key players (Ezra Bridger, Thrawn, Sabine Wren) who all need to complete some additional arcs, so that the event film has a proper foundation underneath it. So it is a block of content Disney needed to invest in.

Ahsoka Season 2 is in production and will be released in 2026.