Morning News · Sunday 18 October 2026
Are you a believer or a sceptic? Dave Filoni says Ahsoka’s second season is built for both. This morning’s edition also has James McAvoy’s young Picard pitch, the winners at Sitges, a Doomsday confession from Hayley Atwell and the news that Quentin Tarantino’s tenth film is written.
The News That Matters
Dave Filoni says Ahsoka fans are either Mulder or Scully
- New development: Filoni spoke about season two in Empire’s new issue, with his comments widely reported from Thursday 15 October
- Series: Star Wars: Ahsoka season two, created, written and run by Dave Filoni
- Cast: Rosario Dawson returns as Ahsoka Tano, with Lars Mikkelsen as Grand Admiral Thrawn and Rory McCann taking over as Baylan Skoll
- UK availability: On Disney+ from Wednesday 20 January 2027
Dave Filoni knows that some of Ahsoka’s new season will split the room, and he is happy about it. Talking to Empire, the Lucasfilm chief creative officer explained that he has told two stories at once. “I divided the story into two different galaxies to tell a story that was one, very classic war-centric Star Wars-feeling, and one that’s the weird stuff that we haven’t seen,” he said.
He borrowed a comparison from The X-Files to explain how he thinks viewers will react. “Some of the audience is Scully, and some of the audience is Mulder. And I love that. You have to serve both,” he said. “Some audiences can be, ‘That’s crazy, come on.’ And some are like, ‘Well… Maybe that’s true!’ Why do you so easily believe in a Force ghost? What’s the truth there? Fans will litigate that, and I think that’s the beauty of fandom.”
The weird stuff is not hard to find. Filoni has already confirmed that the gods of Mortis are part of the season, Thrawn has the Nightsisters of Dathomir on his side, and Ezra spends his time warning the New Republic that “this is not the Empire you knew. They’ve got some weird stuff going on!” Filoni compares the thorn-filled Dathomir set to Maleficent’s maze in Sleeping Beauty. Fans of the real Mulder and Scully have their own reason to smile this week, as Ryan Coogler’s X-Files reboot was ordered to series on Tuesday.
James McAvoy pitched a young Captain Picard series, and it nearly happened
- New development: McAvoy revealed the pitch on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, reported on Thursday 15 October
- The pitch: Mutiny on the Stargazer, a standalone season about Jean-Luc Picard’s first command
- Status: Not in development; McAvoy says the talks ended because of “logistical issues”
- UK availability: Star Trek: The Next Generation streams on Paramount+ in the UK; no young Picard series is planned
James McAvoy has played a young Charles Xavier to Patrick Stewart’s older one, and it turns out he wanted to do the same with Stewart’s other famous role. “Mutiny on the Stargazer, that was a whole idea that I pitched the Star Trek people as well, and we nearly did it,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “All I really want to do in my career is play young versions of Patrick.”
His idea was a single, self-contained season set on the USS Stargazer, the ship Picard commanded long before the Enterprise-D, which was first seen in the Next Generation episode “The Battle”. It would have shown “when he took over as captain of the Stargazer, and what actually happened, and the secret that he’s been holding his entire career.” Talks with the producers went on for a while before they stalled, but McAvoy has not let go: “I just love that story and go to bed thinking about it at night.” Trek’s 60th year has more for fans to enjoy, as the documentary The Sixty-Year Mission reaches UK cinemas on Wednesday.
Sitges crowns French body horror Sanguine as Laika’s Wildwood wins the audience
- New development: The 59th Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia announced its winners on Saturday 17 October
- Best Feature Film: Sanguine, the debut feature from Marion Le Corroller
- Other winners: Best Director to Joko Anwar for Ghost in the Cell; Best Actress to Jasmine Trinca for The Spiral; Best Actor to Benoît Magimel for Historias de la noche (The Birthday Party)
- Audience award: Wildwood, directed by Travis Knight
- UK availability: Wildwood is in UK cinemas from Friday 23 October (12A). Sanguine is coming to Shudder in 2027 under the title Species; UK date not yet confirmed
Sitges, the best-known fantastic film festival in Europe, has picked a winner that should make anyone who works long hours squirm. Marion Le Corroller’s Sanguine follows Margot (Mara Taquin), a young intern struggling to cope in a hospital emergency department, who starts treating patients her own age with unexplained symptoms and then finds alarming changes in her own body. Karin Viard co-stars. The film premiered at Cannes, and Shudder has since bought it, retitled Species, for release next year.
Le Corroller says she wanted to film “bodies battered by the world of work”, asking what would happen if young people had to mutate to survive the job market. Elsewhere in the awards, Drag, from Greg Yagolnitzer and Raviv Ullman, took the Special Jury Award, and Casper Kelly and Jamie King’s Buddy won Best Screenplay. The Méliès d’Or for best European fantastic film went to Gábor Holtai’s Feels Like Home.
The Sitges crowd gave its top prize to Laika’s Wildwood, whose festival debut we covered earlier this month. UK families will not have long to wait: Travis Knight’s stop-motion fantasy opens here on Friday.
Hayley Atwell says Avengers: Doomsday shot storylines that were dropped
- New development: Atwell discussed the film with The Playlist, as reported on Saturday 17 October
- Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo, with Robert Downey Jr. as Victor von Doom
- UK release: In UK cinemas from Wednesday 16 December 2026
- US release: Friday 18 December 2026
Marvel has always been secretive, but Hayley Atwell has let slip how much was tried on Avengers: Doomsday. “It’s so epic. It’s so extraordinary, the level of ambition and scope that they had for it,” she said. “We tried different things, we shot different things, there were different storylines, some picked up, some developed, some dropped away.”
Atwell, Marvel’s Peggy Carter, says the aim was always to find “the thing that makes the most sense for those characters, but also for what role they play in this part of the world.” She gave nothing away about which threads made the final cut, so the surprises are intact. With heroes from three universes heading for a collision and the battlefield already teased in the latest poster, it is no shock that some ideas ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Quentin Tarantino has written his tenth film, but he is not making it yet
- New development: Tarantino spoke on The Graham Norton Show, broadcast on BBC One on Friday 16 October
- Next project: The Popinjay Cavalier, a swashbuckling comedy play starring Sacha Baron Cohen, at London’s Phoenix Theatre
- Play dates: Previews from late February 2027, opening in March and running until Sunday 13 June 2027
- UK availability: The interview is on BBC iPlayer. The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Tarantino and directed by David Fincher, is on Netflix from Wednesday 23 December
Quentin Tarantino has always said he will stop after ten films, and the last one is now on paper. “I’ve written a script that I really like, but I want to do the play and see who I am,” he told Graham Norton, on his first visit to the sofa in more than a decade. After that, he plans to “go back and spend time with my family and live a little and then see what I want to do.”
The play comes first. The Popinjay Cavalier began life as a screenplay before Tarantino realised “it really worked as a play”, and he promised that “it will be thrilling.” So the director of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, still his most recent film, will be in the West End next spring. His words reach the screen sooner than that, though: Brad Pitt is back as Cliff Booth in Fincher’s Netflix film just before Christmas.
Movieversalfilm Takeaway
This morning is about what we see and what we do not. Filoni wants Ahsoka to make believers and sceptics argue, Marvel has kept whole storylines from Doomsday off screen, and James McAvoy’s Stargazer series and Tarantino’s tenth film exist only on paper for now. The nearest treat for UK viewers is Wildwood, fresh from its Sitges audience award and in cinemas from Friday.
Which are you when Star Wars gets weird: Mulder or Scully?