Skeleton Crew’s Creators Are Already Planning Its Kids’ Futures

For the first time in Star Wars’ long history, the new Skeleton Crew series stars a young group of kids as they explore the galaxy trying to find their way home. It’s clearly a deliberate choice to echo old 80s movies like The Goonies, but it does present some real world logistical problems—namely, kids grow so fast before you know it, especially when they shot something a year or more before it actually comes out.

Series creators Jon Watts and Christopher Ford touched on the aging problem in a recent Collider interview. There’s no word on if Skeleton Crew will come back for season two, but they said if it does, they know they want to do for the story and the show’s growing stars. Everything ultimately comes down to “how tall the kids are,” but they suggested their solution would be an in-universe timeskip of about three or four years. “By the time we would get production going, we know what age the kids would be,” Ford and Watts explained. “We’ll be writing towards that, and you’ll be growing up with the kids.”

Keeping kid characters current with their actors has always been an issue with TV. Even beyond Stranger Things, which the two namechecked as what they wanted to avoid, Lost famously ran into this problem with Malcolm David Kelly’s Walt: after season one, he shot up like a tree, so he was sparingly used in season two and eventually written out, minus some later appearances. Ford told Collider they’d always planned for a timeskip with Skeleton Crew since it “takes so long to get things moving.” Interestingly, he further said there are “so many repercussions” at the end of the season that it’ll do the kids (and the audience) some good to not immediately jump into the next adventure.

A nice tease for what’s to come in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, and where the show could go, if Disney lets it have a future.

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