Maul Shadow Lord

Disney

Since its release, Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord has been the most popular series on Disney Plus, and it remains the highest-scored Star Wars project ever, even if it dropped from a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score to a 98%. And yes, we’re talking higher ratings than The Empire Strikes Back, The Clone Wars and Andor here.

Before Maul: Shadow Lord even aired, it was renewed by a very confident Disney for season 2 in an era where any Disney Plus Star Wars series getting a second season is more rare than kyber crystal. Now, we have more information on when that’s coming.

While Darth Maul was played by Ray Park in The Phantom Menace, that was more about physicality than…ever talking. But Maul has been a fixture in animated projects for years before landing his own series, and his core voice actor has been Sam Witwer for years, including this show. You may also recognize him from playing Starkiller in the Force Unleashed games.

In a recent interview with The Direct, Witwer addresses the season 2 release date:

"It's the usual development cycle... I know when it's coming out, but it's not a situation where the audiences will have to wait too, too long. But I think I am forbidden from saying what I know, but we are working on it. We've been working on it for a while, and it's interesting."

The benefit of renewing Shadow Lord so early is that work could begin on the series well ahead of release, slimming down those production times. There are ten chapters in all, and Disney has been airing two per week since April 6. The show will end on May 4.

Possibly the equivalent of the “usual development cycle” would be the recent Star Wars animated series, The Bad Batch. It was 1 year and 8 months between seasons 1 and 2 of that show, then just 1 year and 1 month between seasons 2 and 3. The catch there is that it was a series with 15-16 episode seasons, 50% longer than Maul: Shadow Lord. But the catch in the reverse direction is that Maul has a more intensive animation style, one of the best the Star Wars catalog has seen, so that may take longer.

Still, I would guess that it will not be much more than a year, based on Witwer’s comments and what we know about past timelines for this sort of thing. So maybe May, June 2027 we will see Maul: Shadow Lord season 2, and I’m pretty sure all its fans cannot wait. But they don’t have to wait long.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.