If we are being totally honest, the official trailer for the upcoming Star Wars Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett looked… decent, but not spectacular. Part of that might be because the two seasons of The Mandalorian raised expectations for the amount of action and intrigue that these Star Wars shows can provide. We don’t really know what The Book of Boba Fett is going to deliver, but our hopes are for more than the dialogue snippets and minimal action that was included in the two-minute tease. However, it turns out that there was a reason for the lackluster marketing push, and as you might expect with every Star Wars project, it’s tied to the act of protecting fans from spoilers.
Sin City and Spy Kids director Robert Rodriguez is serving as a co-showrunner on The Book of Boba Fett, which is due to arrive on Disney+ on December 29. And when speaking to THR about the film’s first teasers, he explained:
We can’t use the second half of the first episode, because it gives so much away. . . . Things turn up you don’t expect, you see things we couldn’t believe we got to do. Every episode has big surprises.
So, the footage that we witnessed only comes from the very beginning of the first episode. That is encouraging, and better explains the narratively thin and relatively contained information that is presented in this early look at the full series of episodes. At the very least, the official trailer showcases Temuera Morrison in the lead role, returning to the bounty hunter realm that he occupied in the Star Wars trilogies. It pairs him with Ming-Na Wen’s Fennec Shand, and seems to pick up right after the mid-credits tease that showed the two taking over the throne of Jabba the Hutt. That’s a massive throne, physically and metaphorically.
Here’s that official trailer, to scour for any clues:
The rest of The Book of Boba Fett is being kept under wraps, but we have grown accustomed to that when Star Wars projects are on the table. We knew next to nothing about both seasons of The Mandalorian as they played out, and similar to what Robert Rodriguez has been promising, there were major surprises waiting for us in almost every episode. These included the appearances of Boba Fett, as well as the return of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson), and those characters are now continuing on in series of their own.
But there’s a larger challenge facing the Disney+ shows as they roll out. They’re tasked with scratching the Star Wars itch that fans have been suffering due to a lack of feature films. Marvel’s Disney+ shows, as a counterpart, complement the movies that are packing theaters. But the Disney+ shows have been some of the only Star Wars content arriving for a fanbase that’s probably wondering where their original content will be coming from. Several Star Wars movies have been announced over the years, then stalled out, allowing the longer-form television programs to carry that Star Wars torch.
The Book of Boba Fett begins streaming on Disney+ on December 29.
