A hotly anticipated Star Wars project is set to drop on Disney+ in 2026, and although it’ll be able to reference several corners of the sprawling franchise, there’s one storyline in particular that fans will be desperate to see resolved. There’s no guarantee it’ll happen, but given the nature of the project in question, it’s only logical that answers will finally be provided after almost a decade of waiting. If not, then it’ll seem like Star Wars just isn’t willing to address the cliffhanger, and probably never will be.
The Star Wars timeline has become so vast in recent years that various characters and storylines cross over between the movies and TV shows at an almost frantic rate. While shows like Andor and Skeleton Crew tend to be pretty self-contained, most Star Wars projects tend to be very referential to adjacent arcs. For instance, The Clone Wars sits snugly in the gap between 2002’s Attack of the Clones and 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. Disney+ is gearing up to do something very similar with a series that’s animated in the iconic Clone Wars style. However, it’s a live-action Star Wars story that desperately needs closure.
‘Maul: Shadow Lord’ Is the Perfect Show to Address the Cliffhanger Ending in ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’
2018’s Solo came in the wake of 2017’s The Last Jedi, which caused Star Wars fans to revolt. The biggest fallout of the negative reaction to The Last Jedi was the boycott of the movie that saw Alden Ehrenreich take over the role of Han Solo from Harrison Ford. While Solo is actually pretty good, the fact that so much of the fan base refused to go and see it meant it bombed at the box office. It barely managed to make its production budget back, and that doesn’t even account for the marketing costs. This made it Star Wars‘ first and only big-screen offering to be a financial failure.
Even when it came to light that Maul had a surprise cameo at the end of Solo, that wasn’t enough to make fans flock to their nearest screenings. While the moment was clearly an attempt to set up a sequel or a spinoff, Star Wars has never attempted to add to this twist since Solo ended. In fact, The Last Jedi hurt the franchise’s reputation so much that 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker is still the most recent movie Star Wars made. The upcoming Mandalorian & Grogu will finally break this fallow period when it debuts in May 2026. Instead of focusing on theatrical releases, Disney pivoted to making Star Wars TV shows its main priority for the saga.
Maul is physically played by Ray Park in Solo, but voiced by Sam Witwer.
So, almost a decade later, Maul: Shadow Lord gives Star Wars its best shot yet at finishing the arc that Solo set in motion. While Star Wars: Rebels has shown Maul at a point in his life after Solo, the animated series doesn’t show or fully explain how he fell from leading Crimson Dawn and became a revenge-obsessed hermit. Instead, we just see him laser-focused on tracking down Obi-Wan Kenobi. In Solo, Maul is the leader of Crimson Dawn, a criminal syndicate he built himself from the ground up. So, it stands to reason that, even if not immediately, Shadow Lord‘s timeline will show this journey to the top of the underworld, and then intersect with the moment we saw Maul in Solo.
‘Shadow Lord’ Is a Much Better Way of Paying off Maul’s ‘Solo Cameo’
Even though the 2018 movie’s ending was transparently trying to force a sequel, which would presumably have brought back Maul for a more substantial live-action appearance, Solo‘s box office failure comes with a delayed silver lining. Had Maul returned in a Solo sequel, he almost definitely would have been framed as a textbook Star Wars villain. While he would have been treated as more of a proper character than he was in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, Maul has always been a more compelling figure when he’s presented as morally gray.
Following his defeat at the hands of Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan, Maul’s resurrection brought him back in The Clone Wars, where he was fleshed out as a far more emotionally complex individual than he seemed on the big screen. His arc continued into Rebels, further establishing his character as someone who flourished in animation after a brief live-action debut. There are droves of Star Wars fans who would love to see Maul return in a live-action movie, but the truth of the matter is that it’s not the medium that suits him best.
Furthermore, Shadow Lord won’t present him as the bad guy he was initially made out to be. The show will provide the writers with more freedom to give Maul stories that suit the version of the character who has taken TV screens by storm for over a decade. Granted, he’ll be getting up to some things that are way more unsavory than some other Star Wars characters, but as the protagonist, it’ll be tricky to see Maul as the “bad guy” he arguably is at heart.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
