Ever since Disney purchased Lucasfilm, all of the Star Wars movies have been filmed at Pinewood Studios in London. But it looks like the next batch of films set in a galaxy far, far away may have found a new home.
Reports of a newly-registered production company (which could potentially hint at a new Star Wars project’s working title) have been linked to Lucasfilm and suggest that Star Wars may be packing up from Pinewood and moving across town to East London, to the new East Brook Studios which is slated to be open by the end of this year.
According to Fantha Tracks and Bespin Bulletin (via JediNews), Lucasfilm are shareholders in a new company that was registered in the UK on July 23, 2019 called Barking Lion Productions (UK) Limited. That name is probably a nod to the London district of Barking & Dagenham, the future home of East Brook Studios. When the new London production facility is finally completed, it will rest under a sign that reads “Made in Dagenham” – possibly a shout-out to the 2010 movie of the same name about women fighting for equal pay in the workplace.
This will be a 200,000 square feet facility with twelve sound stages for filming, and the DailyMail reported that longtime James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, the British Film Institute, and London Film School were all involved in setting up a “centre of excellence” there with training facilities on site as well.
The current speculation is that Barking Lion Productions could be a code name for either Lucasfilm’s upcoming Cassian Andor prequel series on Disney+, or potentially even the first film in Rian Johnson’s new Star Wars film trilogy, which is expected to finally expand what we know of the Star Wars universe in a major way by featuring characters and locations that have not been in any of the existing movies.
Of course, there’s also the chance it’s for something else entirely, like Indiana Jones 5 or the recently-rumored Children of Blood and Bone. But MakingStarWars, who generally has reliable intel on things like this, actually reported all the way back in April that both the Cassian Andor series and David Benioff and D.B. Weiss‘s first Star Wars film (which will come out before Johnson kicks off his new trilogy) will be shooting at this new location, making it the first Disney-era Star Wars movie to shoot outside of Pinewood. But Pinewood shouldn’t feel too left out: several Marvel movies have filmed there with even more on the way, including Black Widow and The Eternals.
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