Dave Filoni has spent twenty years inside Star Wars and can stage a battle so that we always know who is above whom. He has not yet written one, for the cinema or for television, with much at stake.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing Filoni has put on a screen is a cliff. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008), Anakin, Ahsoka and Captain Rex's clones drive their six-legged walkers up a rock face on Teth while droids fire down from the top, and Filoni points the camera at the sky, so the thing to fear is the drop rather than the blaster. Jason Tucker cuts it so we never lose track of who is higher, and Dee Bradley Baker gives Rex the voice of a sergeant who has done this before. For ten minutes we sat forward. The other eighty-eight are a television pilot that got into the wrong building, and we said so.
He came from animation, directing episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) at Nickelodeon before George Lucas hired him the same year to develop The Clone Wars as a series and, first, as a feature. He went on to create Star Wars Rebels (2014) to carry those people into the next era; we have not reviewed either series, but Ahsoka Tano, the character he is most attached to, came out of this stretch and has followed him ever since. In 2019 he crossed into live action, writing and directing on Jon Favreau's The Mandalorian, and in 2023 he wrote Ahsoka on his own. He became chief creative officer of Lucasfilm in 2023 and its president in 2026.
His strength is the long game: characters who grow over many hours, and a knowledge of Lucas's galaxy so complete that people describe him as its encyclopaedia. On television that pays. The Mandalorian earned its place in an evening with brisk hunts and a sense of humour, though we found the masked lead underwritten and Filoni's own hand hard to pick out from Favreau's. In cinemas the habit shows differently. The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026), which he wrote with Favreau and Noah Kloor, is a chain of monsters met and fought, each cut to a clean finish by Rachel Goodlett Katz and Dylan Firshein and each much like the last. It is competent and it is repetitive; somewhere in its second hour we caught ourselves waiting for a recap card. That is the complaint that follows him: the projects can play like a box of toys tipped onto a carpet, every figure named, nothing risked.
The 2008 film was built to launch a series and behaved like a first episode, introducing everyone and asking nothing of them. Eighteen years later the Grogu film, made after the series, did much the same from the other end. Filoni can stage an action scene; he has yet to write, or be handed, a script that gives him one worth the staging. Now that he runs the studio, we would like to know whether he still gets to point a camera at a cliff, and whether he will let someone else decide what is waiting at the top.
Biography
Dave Filoni is an American writer, director and producer. He graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 1996 with a degree in animation and worked as a director on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender before joining Lucasfilm.
George Lucas hired him in 2005 to supervise direction on the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which he co-created, directed and wrote. Filoni later created Star Wars Rebels and served as executive producer and writer on The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka. He is writer and producer on the 2026 film The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Filoni was promoted to chief creative officer of Lucasfilm in 2023 and became president of the studio in 2026.
