With The Mandalorian and Grogu now established in cinemas around the world and edging its way towards $300m globally, we can start to look forward to the film arriving on Disney Plus later in the year, where it will sit alongside three seasons (and a third of The Book of Boba Fett) that already looked so cinematic that they themselves held up well to cinema screenings. It was that subject that Jon Favreau tackled as he looked at the visual effects and presentation of the sixth Star Wars movie in the past 11 years to hit the big screen.
“Part of what people enjoyed about The Mandalorian was that we were delivering cinema-level effects,” Favreau notes. “And when we had projections on the big screen for things like premieres or fan screenings, it would hold up quite well. We had to take that up a notch and deliver best-in-class VFX on a scale that held up to IMAX projection. That meant taking a much longer time. We would turn around a whole season of a show in less than a year. For this, we had several years. We made sure we locked into what we wanted to do early so we could build sets, create assets and engage with every generation of visual effects that Star Wars has embraced over the decades. On one hand, we have state-of-the-art CGI with beautiful particle, water and fire simulations. But also, we go all the way back to doing motion-control miniatures, building spaceships, and engaging with Phil Tippett for stop-motion sequences in the film as well.”