The abundance of Star Wars content coming to Disney Plus includes an event series about Lando Calrissian with a story by Dear White People’s Justin Simien. Since the only details revealed about the series are Simien’s involvement and the title Lando, there’s a lot of room for the fan base to speculate. Namely, there’s been some debate about whether the series will star Billy Dee Williams as an older Lando or Donald Glover as the younger Lando introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
But it could feature both Williams and Glover, and use the extended runtime of a TV miniseries to cover Lando’s entire life like a novel. The older Lando could be passing on the tales of his adventures to the first generation of children growing up in a peaceful universe in a post-Episode IX framing narrative. Alternatively, the series could be framed by “The Calrissian Chronicles,” the memoirs that Lando was seen recording throughout Solo. The vanity of writing memoirs in real time added a hysterically zany angle to Lando that draws parallels with Dennis Reynolds and Kenny Powers.
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The final scene in The Rise of Skywalker seemed to set up a future storyline involving Lando and Jannah. Jannah asks Lando where he’s from, so he tells her, “The Gold system. What about you, kid?” She says, “I don’t know,” and Lando smiles and says, “Well, let’s find out.” Like every character who isn’t named Rey or Ben Solo, Jannah had seriously limited screen time in The Rise of Skywalker, so Naomi Ackie didn’t have a chance to really round out the character. An ex-Stormtrooper trying to learn about her identity in a post-Final Order world could be a fascinating and wholly original Star Wars story – and a great framing narrative for Lando to tell his life story.
Abandoning his duties on Cloud City and joining the Rebellion to eventually take down the Empire was just a small part of Lando’s life. Simien has a mostly blank canvas in telling his story. The series could even bring in a new actor to play Lando as a kid and fill in his childhood like The Mandalorian has done with Din Djarin. Lucasfilm recently confirmed that Lando is canonically pansexual, which will be an interesting characteristic to explore in a galaxy far, far away. If Lando covers the character’s entire life, it could finally bring an LGBTQ+ romance to the Star Wars universe (after Disney ignored Finn and Poe’s obvious sparks) and take a look at Lando’s greatest loves and heartbreaks.
There’s a lot of ground to cover between the original and sequel trilogies. By the end of Return of the Jedi, Lando was one of the highest-ranking officials in the Rebellion and a key hero in the Empire’s defeat. He’d forged strong friendships with Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, and just about every other major player. According to The Rise of Skywalker, in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi, Luke and Lando headed to Pasaana in search of the vaguely defined Sith dagger that somehow lines up with the wreckage of the second Death Star, and when they didn’t find it, Lando just stuck around for 30 years until Rey and co. happened to show up at a big festival and he spotted Chewie in the crowd.
Although Solo: A Star Wars Story offered a glimpse into how they met (and how the Falcon changed hands), Han and Lando have a rich history of on-and-off friendship that Lando’s solo series can explore further. The original trilogy charted their journey from frenemies to B.F.F.s, but there’s still a lot of uncharted territory in this friendship – especially since Disney dismissed the entire Expanded Universe as “legends.” Between Solo and The Empire Strikes Back, Han and Lando surely teamed up on a couple of space heists. Glover shared terrific chemistry with Alden Ehrenreich, whose spot-on portrayal of a young Han Solo was squandered by a weak script. If this series brings back Glover, it should also bring back Ehrenreich, even if it’s just a guest spot in one episode.
Throughout the final battle in Return of the Jedi, the Rebel officials leading the space fleet constantly underestimate Han, expecting his mission to disable the shield generator to fail. Time and time again, Lando sticks up for his pal, promising Admiral Ackbar and his cronies that Han won’t let them down. Han, of course, successfully shuts off the shield generator, allowing Lando to infiltrate the Death Star and blow it up. Since Han was killed so early in the sequel trilogy and Lando was introduced so late (i.e. after they killed off everyone else), Star Wars fans never got to see how Han and Lando’s rekindled friendship turned out. Lando’s event series is a perfect opportunity to dig into it.
It’s a long shot, but if Disney could get Harrison Ford to reprise his role as Han (or write a check large enough to get him to do it), it would be great to see Ford share another scene – or, ideally, a lot more scenes – with Billy Dee Williams, just like it would’ve been nice to see Ford share another scene with Mark Hamill. There are a bunch of other underdeveloped, but promising friendships that the series could flesh out: Chewie, who Lando kept company in Han’s absence; Nien Nunb, Lando’s co-pilot from the second Death Star assault; and Finn and Poe, who each developed a strong bond with Lando in The Rise of Skywalker (although John Boyega has said he won’t play Finn on Disney Plus).
Lando has a long, important history in the Star Wars saga, but there are huge gaps between his most significant moments in the established canon. He was a smuggler like Han who eventually went straight with a political office on Cloud City (but still made illicit deals with the Empire on the side), and went on to take part in the defeat of two evil empires, three decades apart. The new event series can effectively be a big, multi-part Lando Calrissian biopic – an intimate character study by way of a sprawling epic.
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