Ewan McGregor Says Obi-Wan Delay Won't Affect Disney Plus Premiere Date

Fans may be thirsty for the upcoming Obi-Wan Disney+ series, but their wait may have just gotten longer. According to Collider, the series has officially been put on hold and the crew has been sent home.

Ewan McGregor was set to reprise his role from theStar Warsmovie franchise in a new series, and though Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy confirmed that production was supposed to begin in 2020, it now appears that Disney+ has slammed on the brakes. Collider reports that "the crew that had assembled at Pinewood Studios in London was sent home. A time frame was not given, but the crew was told that the show would be down 'indefinitely.'"

The scripts were apparently the problem in this case, and the current plan is to rework them and gets things back on track this summer. There's no telling whether the rewrites will keep to that schedule though. Obi-Wan isn't the first Disney+ series to experience hiccups. The highly-anticipated Lizzie McGuire sequel series, which had previously gone into production, was also halted earlier this month due to creative redirection after the former showrunner exited.

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Shortly after this news made headlines, McGregor was on-hand for a Birds of Prey media event and spoke to IGN about the Obi-Wan series' delay, claiming that the production halt won't affect the series' premiere plans. "It's just slid to next year, that's all. The scripts were really good. I think now that [Star Wars] Episode IX came out and everyone at Lucasfilm's got more time to spend on the writing, they felt like they wanted more time to spend on the writing," McGregor told the site. "I've read about eighty, ninety percent of what they've written so far, and it's really, really good. Instead of shooting this August, they just want to start shooting in January, that's all. Nothing more dramatic than that. It often happens in projects, they just wanted to push it to next year. It will have the same release date, I don't think it will affect the release date. They're still shooting towards having the [show] release when it was going to be originally."

Though not much is known yet about the Obi-Wan series (not even its official name), it is supposed to be set eight years after the events of The Revenge of the Sith, aka the time period when Obi-Wan went into hiding from Darth Vader and the Empire after delivering an infant Luke Skywalker to Tatooine. There's no telling whether that will still be the case after the scripts are reworked.

TV Guide has reached out to Disney+ for comment.

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