In a recent interview with CNet promoting the premiere of The Bad Batch, supervising director Brad Rau confirmed that the first season will run for 16 episodes!
“We have 16 episodes in season 1,” he said, before touching on a potential second season. “We can’t confirm any more than that, but we have high hopes. We love these characters. We’d love to keep telling the stories.”
While no second season has yet been announced, it’s very likely that the show will get another one. Cinelinx’s Jordan Maison is hinting at that too, and it would be totally shocking if it did not receive another season. Every Star Wars animated show to date has received multiple seasons, and I’m sure this one will be no different.
The Bad Batch will be the fourth full-length Star Wars animated series produced by Dave Filoni’s team, and the prior three ran for 22 episodes (The Clone Wars), 15 episodes (Rebels), and 21 episodes (Resistance) in their first seasons, so it seemed likely that The Bad Batch would run for a similar length of time. However, the more recent shows from Lucasfilm have had shorter seasons, with both seasons of the live-action The Mandalorian featuring eight episodes, and the seventh season of The Clone Wars featuring twelve. So there was some question about how long it would be, which is why it’s good to get confirmation here.
Furthermore, this also means that The Bad Batch will still be running when Loki releases on Disney+ on June 11. Again, this seemed obvious, but it’s a significant step: all previous Star Wars and Marvel shows released to the platform have been spaced out and have not overlapped. Given the stunning amount of content from those two properties that will be hitting the streaming service in the coming years we obviously knew that wouldn’t always continue, but it’s nice to hear confirmation that The Bad Batch won’t be short-changed because of it.
After the May 4th premiere, The Bad Batch will drop episodes weekly on Fridays, just like with every other Disney+ series that has been released. And looking at the calendar, it seems like a 16-episode season will run until mid-August. So that’s probably the time frame for The Bad Batch, and probably shortly after that we’ll get the premiere of Visions. The series will include ten anime anthology stories to the galaxy, and all we know is that it’s releasing this year. But there is a tie-in novel, Ronin, that will go along with Visions and will release on October 6, so I’d imagine the series will premiere sometime before that.
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