'The Mandalorian' Is Small In Scope, Which Jon Favreau Compares To Original 'Star Wars'

When you think of Star Wars, you might automatically picture grand spectacle and galaxy-hopping adventure. But that isn't what you should picture when you think of the upcoming Star Wars series The Mandalorian. According to showrunner Jon Favreau, the scope of the Disney+ series is smaller; intimate, even. The best comparison, at least according to Favreau, is the very first Star Wars film, A New Hope.

Hey kids, do you like your Star Wars entertainment to be huge!? Full of massive battles made up of thousands upon thousands of clones? And star destroyers zipping about left and right, firing their big-ass blasters? Well, if so, you might want to skip The Mandalorian. During a Directors Guild of America conversation with James Cameron, Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau said he wrote the series to be more of a "low budget affair", akin to Star Wars: A New Hope:

"Since I wrote most of [The Mandalorian], I wrote it to fit within our volume, and in trying to keep the scale of it like the first Star Wars film, which was a relatively low-budget affair, even though the effects were spectacular."

I like the sound of this. The idea of a smaller, more intimate Star Wars-based show would go a long way toward making The Mandalorian stand out. Sure, Star Wars eventually became this big, massive-scale affair. But A New Hope is relatively scaled down, especially if you watch the original version, before George Lucas went back and added a bunch of stupid looking cartoon characters in every corner of the frame.

In The Mandalorian, "after the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic."

The series features Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Nick Nolte, Giancarlo Esposito, Emily Swallow, Carl Weathers, Omid Abtahi, Werner Herzog, and Taika Waititi, with episodes directed by Dave Filoni, Taika Waititi, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rick Famuyiwa, and Deborah Chow. There's no premiere date set yet, but with a big Disney+ shareholders presentation today, and the Star Wars Celebration unfolding over the weekend, we're bound to learn eve more about the series in the immediate future.