The director of Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi says the series is not finished. Shunsuke Tada told Anime News Network that the story audiences watched this year is “only Episode IV of our saga”, and pointed at the original trilogy to explain what that means.
A trilogy framing is the cheapest way to promise more, and it costs nothing until someone orders it. He is borrowing Lucas’s own numbering to say something about scale. A story that starts at four claims three more parts before it. Whether Lucasfilm agrees is a different question, and nothing has been announced.
What the director actually said
In an ANN interview published on 16 October 2026, as CBR reported, Shunsuke Tada framed the limited series as one chapter, not a conclusion. He compared it to Luke Skywalker’s arc across three films and said there are more stories to tell. Supervising director Kenji Kamiya added that he would keep working in the Star Wars universe if the opportunity came.
The Lah Kara story so far
Lah Kara is the one character who has moved through three separate releases, which is unusual for an anthology built on one-off shorts. Her story is now longer than most Star Wars side characters get in live action.
| Release | Title | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Star Wars: Visions, season one | The Ninth Jedi | Introduced Lah Kara as a Force-sensitive girl who survives a massacre |
| Star Wars: Visions, season three | The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope | Continued her training and led into the series |
| 5 August 2026 | Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi | First entry under the Visions Presents banner, the limited series itself |
| Not announced | Episodes V and VI, in Tada’s framing | Nothing confirmed by Lucasfilm |
The numbers make the case for him
The limited series holds a 92% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes across 24 verified reviews, and a 76% audience score across more than 50 ratings. That gap of sixteen points is normal for franchise animation: critics reward craft, and audiences score against what they hoped a Star Wars story would be.
A 92% is still the strongest argument a director can make to a studio. It says the format worked, the audience showed up, and the next decision is commercial rather than creative.
Why “Episode IV” is a production claim
Visions was sold as an anthology of unconnected shorts. That framing gave the creatives freedom, because nothing had to fit canon. James Waugh, the executive producer, said in 2025 that Visions does not try to be part of the ongoing canonical narrative. He left room for stories that happen to fit.
What Tada is describing is what happens when one of those shorts quietly turns into a serial. The anthology stays an anthology, and one branch inside it grows a trilogy structure of its own. Lucasfilm gets franchise-scale storytelling from a Japanese studio without touching the timeline that the films depend on.
That is a useful piece of machinery for a company that has to keep feeding a streaming service. It is also the arrangement that Marvel and DC keep failing to find, where every story has to count toward one shared ledger.
How to watch the three parts in order
Start with the season one short, “The Ninth Jedi”, which stands alone and needs no preparation. Then watch “The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope” in season three, which assumes you remember the first. The limited series last, because it is the only one of the three that expects the other two.
Watching in release order also shows how the animation changed. The 2021 short was a proof of concept with a single fight at its centre. The series has room for quieter scenes, and the quieter scenes are where the character work sits.
The risk in saying it out loud
Announcing a trilogy before the second part exists creates an expectation the production cannot control. If Lucasfilm orders nothing, fans spend a year reading interviews about episodes that never come. If it orders everything, the shorts have to start carrying the weight of a saga, and the freedom that made The Ninth Jedi good is the first thing to go.
The safer reading is that Tada is describing intent, not a slate. He was asked whether he would keep going and he said yes, with a comparison that flatters the work. Directors do that.
What to watch for next
An order is the only thing that counts. A second Visions Presents title under a different character would suggest the banner is the product, and Lah Kara is one entry in it. A direct continuation would confirm the trilogy talk, and it would be the first time an anime short from this anthology became a franchise of its own.
Either way, the interview is the most concrete thing said about the future of Visions since the banner launched. It just happens to be a director talking, not a studio.
