Andor Season 2 is next on the slate of upcoming Star Wars movies and TV shows, arriving roughly two and a half years after Season 1’s critically acclaimed run. Andor was also the fourth live-action Star Wars TV show to premiere to Disney+ subscription-holders, with The Mandalorian kicking off this era back in 2019. Well, with just a couple weeks to go until Andor Season 2 premieres on the 2025 TV schedule, showrunner Tony Gilroy took some time to give The Mandalorian its flowers while discussing his own Star Wars series’ success.
While The Mandalorian and Andor are unquestionably quite different tonally, with the former appealing to the Star Wars franchise’s all-ages fanbase and the latter being geared towards older fans, Gilroy acknowledged to Empire that Andor wouldn’t exist had The Mandalorian not been so popular, saying:
The success of The Mandalorian gave us the platform to jump off. Their success is what would fuel the whole thing. I mean, no Baby Yoda, no Andor. Seriously. Don’t think that we don’t know that.
Over five years later, I can still remember social media blowing up over the reveal of the character we now know as Grogu at the end of The Mandalorian’s first episode. Baby Yoda quickly became a pop culture sensation, and not only did two more seasons of The Mandalorian follow, we also have the movie The Mandalorian & Grogu to look forward to next year. Granted, Andor was already well into development before The Mandalorian premiered, but its strong start helped with boosting the Rogue One prequel’s chances of success.
During this interview, Tony Gilroy also mentioned that a series like Andor “will never happen again,” with The Mandalorian playing a role in guaranteeing this story following Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor came to life in the way that it did. As the showrunner put it:
Not because we’re so great, but because no-one’s ever gonna start a show on this scale again, and shoot it practically, and have the resources and the protection to do something like this. … We were protected all the way down the line. Kathy [Kennedy] protected us. Lucasfilm protected us. Bob Iger protected us. The audience protected us. The Mandalorian protected us. We had all these people out there backing our play.
Andor Season 1 took place five years before the events of Rogue One, chronicling how the title protagonist went from a cynical thief and scavenger to a Rebellion recruit. Season 2 covers the remaining four years leading up to the 2016 Star Wars movie, with three episodes being released weekly. Although Tony Gilroy initially conceived the show to run five seasons, he realized in the middle of shooting Season 1 that this wouldn’t be feasible for several reasons. So the two-season run was “born out of desperation,” and if Gilroy is indeed correct, we’ll never see a show like this in a galaxy far, far away again.
Andor Season 2’s first three episodes drop Tuesday, April 22 on Disney+, and The Mandalorian & Grogu follows on May 22, 2026. The only other live-action Star Wars TV show on the horizon is Ahsoka Season 2, but we’ll let you know here on CinemaBlend if that changes.
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