Star Wars: Dave Filoni, Peyton Reed Talk Returning to Jabba’s Palace in The Mandalorian

Full spoilers for The Mandalorian below! After the credits rolled on the season two finale of The Mandalorian, there was one surprise left for the audience. Not only did we get a chance to see Temuera Morrison’s Boba Fett one last time, but he was returning to a classic Star Wars location, none other than Jabba’s Palace. Fett enters the familiar location and finds none other than Bib Fortuna seated where the giant slug once made himself comfortable. The bounty hunter dismisses the plesantries directed at him and shoots Fortuna, now bloated like his old boss, and toss his body to the floor, and takes the thrown, setting up The Book of Boba Fett and his control of crime on Tatooine.

The super-sized episode of Disney Gallery for The Mandalorian season two showed some behind-the-scenes footage from when the series shot this sequence and included a number of interviews about how it was achieved. Like so many other scenes and moments for the series, the production originally considered recreating Jabba’s Palace digitally and projecting it onto their StageCraft Volume sets, but in the end it required that they simply build the set from scratch onto a stage.

Visual Effects Supervisor Richard Bluff said, “The challenge with Jabba’s Palace is we simpyl couldnt find a good seam from where we could go from practical to the digital walls. It had to match exactly from the blueprints of the original movie, Return of the Jedi.”

Production designer Andrew L. Jones added, “The intention is to just get that feel back that you felt when you first saw it. There’s a lot of little nooks and crannies around the back of that one, it wasn’t a shape that suited breaking down into a volume set so we built that physically and got it very accurate.”

Episode director Peyton Reed praised their ability to get the details of Jabba’s Palace just right, adding, “You go on and it’s like ‘Wow, we’re in the palace. There’s that weird mobile hanging down the stairs where Carrie Fisher hits her head when she’s the bounty hunter. Every detail is exact because everybody has a personal relationship with every frame of those movies and you walk on a set and of course that thing’s there.”

Executive producer Dave Filoni offered a final note about the care taken in recreating sets from the classic Star Wars movies, noting that the commitment to fidelity isn’t just out of respect for the audience but for those that game before them.

“When we do recreate things like Jabba’s Palace we show it the proper respect, and not just the respect for making it look like the place like when we did the Cantina, but for the people that worked on it, for the people that were a part of the legacy of Lucasfilm that are the reason we have jobs; living up to that expectation and living up to that creativity.

Boba Fett will appear in their own spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett which premieres in December of 2021. It’s unclear if Jabba’s Palace will play a big part in its plot, but based on that teased sequence it seems likely!