The Next Star Wars Show Might Finally Reboot The Oldest Jedi

Star Wars just can’t get enough of delving into its own past. While James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi movie is still in the works, and 2024 gave us the 100-years-before Phantom Menace prequel, The Acolyte, there’s now a rumor that even older-school Jedi might show up in a new Disney+ Star Wars TV series.

According to showbiz insider Daniel Richtman, there’s a rumored Star Wars series in development that would be set in the “Old Republic” era, and possibly focused on various Jedi Knights of that era. But what would this hypothetical Knights of the Old Republic series actually be about? While several fans might bet on seeing characters from popular video games, there’s actually a much bigger chronological net to cast here. Interestingly, a Knights of the Old Republic TV series could give Lucasfilm the most freedom of any Star Wars prequel project to date.

While the phrase Knights of the Old Republic tends to make fans think of the 2003 game of the same name, the phrase itself could suggest all sorts of things. And, somewhat hilariously, one interpretation of all of this comes down to how we feel about the definition of the word “old” within Star Wars canon. Was The Acolyte an “Old Republic” show? Well, technically, anything set between 500 BBY and 100 BBY is classified as part of the “High Republic” era of the Star Wars timeline. But, colloquially, when people like Ben Kenobi and Grand Moff Tarkin talked about “the Old Republic” in A New Hope, they meant pretty much anything before Order 66.

In our world, we use phrases like “The High Republic” and “The Imperial Era” to describe epochs within Star Wars, but it’s unlikely that Star Wars people think of things that way. In fact, as Skeleton Crew has made clear with its all-important “Old Republic” credits, anything that predates the Empire is “old.”

So, what would a Knights of the Old Republic show actually be about? And when would it be set? The 2003 KOTOR game was set nearly 4,000 years before A New Hope, which is where characters like Darth Revan come from. But, before that, in the 1990s, Dark Horse Comics published a series of comics under the Tales of the Jedi banner, which were collected in 1994 as Knights of the Old Republic. These stories followed Jedi named Nomi Sunrider and Ulic Qel-Droma and were also set 4,000 years before ANH. On top of that, in 1996, Dark Horse also published additional Old Republic stories called The Golden Age of the Sith, which were set 5,000 years before the familiar events of the classic trilogy.

Retroactively, none of these stories were ever explicitly canon, especially after 1999 when The Phantom Menace changed a great deal of previously assumed Jedi and Sith lore. Even Darth Revan’s canonicity from the KOTOR video games is only partial, since aspects of those games and spinoff novels haven’t been fully incorporated into the post-2014 Lucasfilm/Disney Star Wars continuity.

While rumors of a possible KOTOR TV series (or film series) are nothing new, the idea that a new Star Wars series could end up in the distant past of the Jedi is an exciting possibility. The Acolyte gave us a taste of how the prequel-era Jedi formed some of their policies and tendencies, but a deeper dive into the past could be even riskier. Aesthetically, a KOTOR series could completely reimagine the Jedi, and present them in a way we’ve never quite seen before. The Dawn of the Jedi movie sounds interesting, but ancient Jedi in their prime, and totally isolated by thousands of years from any other major Star Wars events, could be a revelation.

As Star Wars continues to play around in very interconnected eras, complete with dot-connecting to even the most self-contained shows and movies, a show set thousands of years before everything happened could be just the shot in the arm the Force needs right now.