Andor Season 2 Has A Weird Release Strategy For A Great Reason
We’re basically getting four new Star Wars movies in four weeks.
Star Wars loves to take its time with its storytelling. Pretty much everything, from the film trilogies to the book series to the comics, is organized in chapters so fans have to come back to see what happens next. When the franchise made a major shift to television with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, this was continued through multi-episode arcs, a structure common in anime but not often seen in Western television.
When Star Wars TV shifted to live-action with The Mandalorian, this structure was more or less abandoned for more traditional one-episode adventures with greater, season-long arcs. But with Andor, the Clone Wars structure returned, and Season 2 will highlight it with a release schedule unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Andor Season 2 will have a compressed release schedule compared to Season 1.
When the trailer for Season 2 was released to the public ahead of its April 22 premiere, it immediately got fans hyped up for the second and final chapter of Cassian Andor’s journey to Rogue One. However, the trailer also came with a change to the release schedule of the series. While Season 1 began with a three-episode premiere so fans could watch the first arc all at once, the rest of the episodes were released once a week for the remainder of the series. With Season 2, three episodes will premiere every week, meaning fans can watch each of the four arcs in one sitting.
This fixes a major issue with Season 1: while the storytelling was immaculate, the pacing was often strange. The arcs had excellent self-contained adventures, but there often wasn’t any rhyme or reason to when the episodes began or ended. By releasing three episodes at once, this isn’t much of an issue, because the next episode will just autoplay in a manner of seconds.
Cassian Andor’s adventures will play out as what are essentially TV movies.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t downsides. The most obvious is that the series will only be releasing episodes over four weeks instead of ten, but it also means a bigger time commitment for Star Wars fans every Tuesday night. The runtimes of three episodes of Andor usually reach feature-length, so essentially a movie’s worth of Star Wars television will be released every week.
Andor Season 2 comes ahead of a pivot back to movies, with The Mandalorian & Grogu and a Rey-focused sequel already on the roster. Perhaps this is the best way to ease that transition: creating what are, essentially, TV movies for fans to enjoy weekly.
