The Willow series is set to premiere at the end of this month, and the show’s existence owes a lot of credit to a mediocre film from a galaxy far, far, away.
Buy the Book
The Keeper’s Six
In an interview in Total Film’s December 2022 issue [via SlashFilm], Willow showrunner and co-writer, Jonathan Kasdan, shares how the series owes its existence to moments during the making of Solo: A Star Wars Story, where he was a co-producer.
“I’ll be frank—the show came together in two troubling moments [during Solo: A Star Wars Story],” he said. “We were behind schedule in the Canary Islands when I first met Warwick and told him, ‘I’m going to ask Kathy [Kennedy] to let me make a sequel to Willow. And he sort of lit up a little. And then I was like, ‘Oh s—t, and now I’ve really got to make this happen!’”
The other moment involved Ron Howard, the director of 1988’s Willow and also the director who came into Solo after Disney fired directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller from the project:
“Ron [Howard] came in to help us out [on Solo], which, as you can imagine, was another fraught moment,” Kasdan recalled. “But when I met him for the first time, I told him I was a huge Willow fan and that maybe we could make [a sequel] happen. And then when they launched Disney+, Ron was like, ‘This is how we’re going to get this going [as a series rather than a movie]. You can just air it, and you won’t have to deliver an $80 million opening weekend.'”
Howard knows how Hollywood works! Streaming series don’t have the same upfront pressure as theatrically released films, so the move likely made the powers that be more comfortable with the investment.
We’ll be able to see the Willow series when the first episode drops on Disney+ on November 30, 2022.
