Andor: Why Star Wars Is Ending the Hit Show After Season 2

Once upon a time, TV Shows typically ran for as long as networks could squeeze the last drop of money out of them. Nowadays, extremely brief runs on streamers and networks are extremely common for a multitude of reasons. Shows just don’t get to five or more seasons very often anymore. Star Wars: Andor is no exception. This Star Wars TV program’s first season was an unequivocal hit by all measures. After Andor Season 2 drops in 2025, that’ll be the end for this Cassian Andor spinoff series. Andor will only last two seasons (24 episodes total), full stop.

This lines up with not just the norm for modern big-budget streaming shows, but also many of the Disney+ Star Wars programs. The Book of Boba Fett and The Acolyte only ran for a single season each, while The Mandalorian currently only has three seasons to its name. Even so, there are some very specific reasons why Andor Season 2 is the Final Season. Despite Star Wars fans loving this corner of the galaxy far, far away, it’s simply not practical to make even more seasons of this particular show.

It’s hard to remember now, but Andor was one of the very first Star Wars Disney+ shows put into development, first being revealed to the public back in November 2018. A showrunner was set for the program by the end of that year – indicating that Andor was really getting up and running. It’s easy to imagine a timeline where this show debuted as early as the first few months of 2021. Instead, COVID-19 hit and Rogue One‘s uncredited director Tony Gilroy took over the reins of Andor, delaying the production severely.

The Changing Plans For Andor’s Length

The program would not begin airing until August 2022, nearly four years after it was first announced! A few months before those debut episodes dropped, cinematographer Adriano Goldman divulged that, initially, Andor had been set to run for five seasons. At the time, Goldman speculated that ambitions were to do the show in just three seasons. The lengthy delay behind Andor’s first season and all the energy it took to get those first 12 episodes off the ground had clearly impacted long-term commitments to the show. In a later breakdown of the show’s origins, Diego Luna would reveal he too signed onto Andor under the perception that it would be a five-season show.

Gilroy would explain a month later specifically why those lengthy plans had been so drastically altered. The grand scope of Andor took so long to realize and bring to life that, while shooting the first season, Gilroy realized bringing five Andor seasons to life was going to be impossible. After all, Luna would naturally age over the years it took to make just a single season of 12 episodes. Eventually, trying to pass off Andor as a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One while starring an older Luna would be lunacy; condensing it down into two seasons was the best solution for everyone’s sanity.

[Related: Rogue One Star Still Has “Unfinished Business” With Star Wars, But Will They Return in Andor? ]

What Will Andor Season 2 Entail?

Andor’s second season will now compress all the years between Andor season one and Rogue One into 12 episodes. Gilroy even revealed while promoting Andor’s inaugural season that the program’s final scene would lead right into Cassian Andor’s first burst of screentime in Rogue One. There’s a lot of material to cover in this season, but it sounds like Gilroy, Luna, and company are all dedicated to giving Andor a grand finale.

Gilroy’s flexibility with condensing Andor will understandably frustrate some Star Wars fans who would gobble up as many Cassian Andor yarns as these writers could conjure up. Certainly if this show existed in the 1990s, Andor would just keep running and running until the ratings dropped through the basement. However, Gilroy’s comments over the last three years have made it definitively clear that Andor has a finite lifespan of two seasons. Given that the second season directly leads into Rogue One, there’s no chance for a reprieve here.

Limiting a TV program to just two seasons would’ve sounded like madness back in the day. Then again, most TV shows of past decades didn’t have budgets and grand scopes as expansive as Andor’s! At least Star Wars fans can now gird themselves for Andor: A Star Wars Story’s inevitable conclusion and pray this final season is half as good as the show’s first.

Andor is now streaming on Disney+.