A persistent rumor is circulating right now that it would guarantee the announcement - during the Star Wars Celebration in April by LucasFilfm - of some exclusive short films coming to Disney+ starring Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia .
The source comes from Shaun O'Rourke , a true Hollywood veteran with over twenty years of experience and prestigious collaborations with companies such as HBO, CBS, Warner Bros, Disney, Lionsgate, Blumhouse, Amazon Studios, Hulu and Netflix. It is therefore understandable that the media are evaluating his latest considerations very seriously.
If this were true, one wonders: how and with what aspect will the actors who gave life to the aforementioned characters be re-proposed? In the case of Leila, as sadly known, the actress Carrie Fischer left us a few years ago; as far as the actors Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are concerned, they would still be interpreters of a certain age, which we could hardly imagine in scenes full of action as happened in the past.
It is reasonable to suppose that a rejuvenation operation has been adopted through the most recent technologies , as already seen for example in "Rogue One: a Star Wars story" to reconstruct the features of Leila identical to how we remember them in episode IV of the first trilogy, or as always happened in the same film also with the actor Peter Cushing, brought back to life - so to speak - through computer graphics. But it is equally true that this anti-aging technology has not been able to excite fans and that for the moment it would seem to work best with only a few minutes of footage.
The most logical option at this point would be to expect new stories inspired by the youthful past of the characters. Already in 2018, in fact, the production house tried to tell the exploits of a young Han Solo with his "Solo: a Star Wars story", played by Alden Ehrenreich and, unfortunately, without collecting a worthy success. But the return of Ehrenreich in the role of Solo cannot be completely excluded, perhaps even in an operation like the one we could discover in April.
It is equally plausible that LucasFilm may have created an animated version of our heroes , as happened in the past for other series related to the saga and which, in the end, would greatly simplify the implementation plans.
But above all, if these rumors turn out to be true, one wonders how the upcoming shorts will be able to fill the unsolved gaps in the saga, left scattered between a film and a television series. What is certain is that - even in the face of public and critical successes such as "The Mandalorian" and "Andor" - the Star Wars mythology seems to be renewed more and more every day . And this unfortunately does not apply to its historical interpreters.
John Scanu
