We’d barely heard anything about Rangers of the New Republic since its announcement last year at Disney’s Investor Day briefing. Its future looked even more dire in the wake of Lucasfilm parting ways with Cara Dune actress Gina Carano for a litany offensive statements on social media. Now, we know once and for all, there’ll be no ranging in the New Republic.
The final nail in the spinoff series — which would’ve revolved around Dune potentially joining the New Republic after leaving the Rebel Alliance before its dissolution into the new entity in events before we met her in The Mandalorian — comes from Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who made the comments to Empire Magazine (via IGN). In fact, Kennedy notes that Lucasfilm, in spite the series’ announcements, basically had nothing on the series, and what was there will likely be used going forward in The Mandalorian instead. “We’d never written any scripts or anything on that,” Kennedy told Empire. “Some of that will figure into future episodes, I’m sure, of the next iteration of Mandalorian.”
This is no surprise, as we’d heard already that Rangers was being put on hold as Lucasfilm shuffled plans in the wake of Carano “no longer being employed” by the studio. And as Lucasfilm has proven with Star Wars lately, it’s quite comfortable with reshuffling its plans over and over, shelving some ideas and putting some off for the future. But it still kind of sucks that we’re not going to get something that will explore this still relatively-untouched period of the new Star Wars chronology. So much of Lucasfilm’s current expansion of Star Wars has been in the shadows of the prequel and original trilogies, plugging up the gaps in and around them, or going back far before them with initiatives like The High Republic. The 30 years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens have rarely been touched thanks to the secrecy that surrounded the sequel trilogy as it rolled out, and even now with it’s conclusion there are projects few and far between set to tackle what happened in that time or what will come after The Rise of Skywalker.
Rangers of the New Republic could’ve been a chance to explore the nascent days of the Rebel Alliance in the power that it fought so hard for across the original Star Wars movies, another chance to add texture to that time period for the galaxy far, far away with no lightsabers or force powers required. Hopefully something, anything will follow in its wake — even if between Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett, as well as Mandalorian’s third season, we have plenty enough Disney+ Star Wars show as-is — to explore those ideas. And hopefully Lucasfilm does a better job of vetting who they might build such a spinoff around next time.