Disney+'s Lando show isn't dead, by the way

We don’t normally write a Newswire post just to tell you which TV show’s aren’t dead in development—we’d be here all day, starting alphabetically from Angry Birds Mystery Island and ending up at X-Men ’97—but there’s been some confusion circulating online this weekend about Disney+ and Donald Glover’s Lando TV show, and it felt worth getting out in front of.

Basically, Dear White People creator Justin Simien gave an interview to Collider this week (timed to his upcoming docuseries Hollywood Black) in which he talked about his time working on developing the Lando show, and the “true grief” he felt after being removed from the project, which was originally announced back in 2020. In July 2023, news broke that Glover and his regular writing partner, his brother Stephen, would be serving as sole writers on the show; at the time, it wasn’t clear why Simien was departing the project, but it’s clear now from his interview—in which he notes that he only learned he was being replaced on the series when he read about it in the trades—that it wasn’t a voluntary move. So when Simien says (per Collider) that the series “just wasn’t meant to be,” and that he’s been through “a true grieving process” for it, he’s talking specifically about his version of the show.

Now, there’s a whole other conversation to be had here about Glover’s track record with collaborative projects—it’s hard not to view this all in light of what happened with his and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Mr. And Mrs. Smith show, which pretty quickly became just his Mr. And Mrs Smith show—but the upshot of it is that the actual Lando series is, by all accounts, still a go at Disney+. None of this confusion is Simien’s fault—he was talking honestly about his time on the series, didn’t throw any shit Glover’s way, and has pretty obviously moved on, given that he’s now working on a show set in the other big Star ____ universe for Paramount—but we’ve seen people passing around the idea that the Lando show itself is dead, when, by all accounts, the Glovers are still working on it, so we thought we’d try to correct the mistake.