Exclusive: Lando Series Dead At Lucasfilm
The Donald Glover prequel Lando series has been canceled in development by Lucasfilm.
The eagerly anticipated Lando series has been shut down by Lucasfilm. According to our trusted and proven sources, the Star Wars prequel series, which was to star Donald Glover reprising the role of the roguish gambler, is no longer moving forward. While there are few details as to the breakdown of the Lando series, past comments by Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy hint that the Star Wars show might simply not have been a priority for Glover, whose level of critical acclaim and industry clout has been steadily rising for years.
In Star Wars Celebration 2022, Kathleen Kennedy told CinemaBlend that the Lando series was basically waiting for Donald Glover and development had come to a standstill. According to Kennedy: “You need to ask Donald. He’s the one that holds all the cards here. But there’s no movement.” She went on to further explain that Glover was a very busy man (which, true enough) and that he was also working on another series that was occupying his time. It is possible that she was referencing the now-concluded FX series Atlanta, which Donald Glover both created and starred in (and frequently wrote and directed episodes).
However, she might have also been alluding to a different show that was deprioritizing the Lando series for Donald Glover. Reportedly, the third and fourth seasons of the show had finished filming several months before Kennedy’s comment and while the future Spider-Man villain was almost certainly involved in the editing and post-production of the final season, things were largely wrapped. Instead, Kennedy might have been referencing Glover’s upcoming TV adaption of Mr. & Mrs. Smith at Amazon Studios.
The Lando series was first announced back in 2020, as part of a slate of Star Wars projects whose fates now all seem very much up in the air. While Donald Glover was committed to the show at the time, he also signed a massive overall deal with Amazon Studios in February of 2021, which reportedly involved featuring his work on the Amazon Prime Video portal (thus giving it incredible visibility). At the risk of reading between the lines, it seems like the once-and-future Community star might simply have gotten a lot more control and power at Amazon Studios than Lucasfilm, and the Lando series was the collateral damage.
The Lando series was set to be written by Justin Simien, best known for his acclaimed film Dear White People and its Netflix follow-up series of the same name. Almost nothing had been announced about the series prior to cancelation, so it is unclear whether it would have taken place before or after Donald Glover’s appearance as Lando Calrissian in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. Now, it seems we will likely never know.
The cancelation of the Lando series is somewhat unusual in that it was intended to be a limited series streaming on Disney+, where Lucasfilm has directed all of its Star Wars content since 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker. Shows like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi found enough success there to encourage the company to pretty much go all-in on shows over feature films, but it seems the Lando series will not be one of them.
