Disney already ran Star Wars into the ground and hasn’t gotten around to rebooting Indiana Jones yet, which means it needs to go in another direction if it wants to squeeze some more sweet cash out of Lucasfilm, but since nobody remembers Strange Magic and Scott Derrickson is already making a new Labyrinth, that pretty much just leaves one obvious path: Willow, Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy classic starring Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, and Joanne Whalley.
As reported by Variety, Disney+ has officially ordered a Willow sequel series (first teased last year), with Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu handling the pilot and Jonathan Kasdan and Wendy Mericle serving as showrunners. Howard will also be returning as an executive producer, and Davis will be coming back to play Willow Ufgood once again (since you can’t have Willow without Willow). Details about the new Willow are fairly slim, though we know it takes place years after the original—to account for the fact that Davis has aged—and that Howard says it’ll be a “creative lean-forward” and not a “nostalgic throwback.” Chu, meanwhile, is apparently a huge Willow fan, saying in a statement that the movie had a “profound effect” on him as “an Asian-American kid growing up in a Chinese restaurant looking to go to Hollywood.” In fact, Chu even said on Twitter that he named his daughter Willow:
This will be the first non-Star Wars project to come out of Lucasfilm since 2015, which is when Strange Magic came out. Boy, when are we getting a years-later sequel series to that? Oh, never? Yeah, that seems about right.