The Book of Boba Fett: release date and everything we know

Bounty hunters? As it turns out, we do need their scum. Ever since Greedo and Han Solo began the famous 'who shot first' debate in 1977, these morally flexible individuals have been integral to the Star Wars universe. 

Now, the latest Star Wars series to hit Disney Plus, The Book of Boba Fett, puts the most famous bounty hunter of them all front and center.

While Fett only appeared in a few scenes of the original Star Wars trilogy, his iconic, gadget-packed armor and appetite for disintegrations made him an instant fan-favorite. And since The Mandalorian’s second season confirmed that the character wasn't eaten by the Sarlacc, after all, he's once again free to hunt more bounties in The Book of Boba Fett.

After a year-long wait, the show is now streaming, and below you'll find all the key details worth knowing if you're thinking about jumping headfirst into Boba's bounty-hunting world. We've also included a list of episode recaps above, too. 

Release date: The Book of Boba Fett began airing on December 29, 2021.

Cast: Temuera Morrison reprises his role as Boba Fett, alongside Ming-Na Wen as fellow bounty hunter Fennec Shand.

Story: Plot specifics were a bigger mystery than the inside of a Mandalorian's helmet, but The Book of Boba Fett picks up after the conclusion of The Mandalorian season 2, and includes flashbacks to Fett's earlier bounty hunting exploits.

• When is The Mandalorian set in the Star Wars timeline?
• The Mandalorian season 3: what we know
• How to watch the Star Wars movies in order

The Book of Boba Fett release date

The Book of Boba Fett release date

The Book of Boba Fett began streaming on Disney Plus December 29, 2021. The first two episodes were made available then, followed by five more (it's a seven-episode season) on a weekly basis.

Check out the first poster for the show below.

The Book of Boba Fett: when was it announced?

Warning: spoilers follow for The Mandalorian season 2.

The return of Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian was a huge deal, but The Mandalorian season 2 finale saved its biggest surprise for a post-credits scene. As the twin suns of Tatooine shone over Jabba the Hutt’s iconic palace, we watched as legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett and his new bounty hunting associate, Fennec Shand, executed Jabba’s former Twi’lek maître d’ Bib Fortuna – and took control of what was once Jabba's criminal empire.

Then came the title cards: “THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT: Coming December 2021”. Has there ever been a cooler way to confirm the existence of a new TV show? Maybe, but not in recent times – and certainly not in such a headline-grabbing way.

The Book of Boba Fett was one of a number of new Star Wars TV shows and movies – including fellow The Mandalorian spin-offs Ahsoka and Rangers of the New Republic – announced for Disney Plus around the same time. 

But while Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy revealed those shows in the more traditional surroundings of a stage at Disney's Investor Day, she saved The Book of Boba Fett for later – at the request of The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau. 

“We wanted to hold this back [from Investor Day] because we didn’t want to spoil the surprise during the big Disney announcement,” Favreau told Good Morning America. “They let me keep this one a secret.”

We're certainly glad Disney agreed to Favreau's request – although we were left with a major question in the wake of its announcement...

Is The Book of Boba Fett actually the third season of The Mandalorian?

Thankfully, no, it isn't. Although sections of Star Wars fandom speculated that The Book of Boba Fett might be a completely retooled third season of the parent show, shifting the focus from Din Djarin and Baby Yoda to Boba Fett, it’s now been confirmed that the two series are distinct entities.

“[The Book of Boba Fett] is actually separate from The Mandalorian season 3,” Favreau said in his afortmentioned GMA interview. 

StarWars.com added a little more detail following Favreau's admission: “Boba Fett is back. And his story is just beginning. As teased in a surprise end-credit sequence following the season finale of The Mandalorian, the legendary bounty hunter’s journey will continue in The Book of Boba Fett.”

The Book of Boba Fett trailers

There have now been several trailers for The Book of Boba Fett. The first, as mentioned, appeared as a post-credits teaser during the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian, which smartly sets up the world Boba Fett and Fennec Shand will be operating in.

You can check it out below. 

The second (and first main) trailer arrived in November 2021 – almost a year after The Mandalorian season 2 ended – and gives a much more detailed look at what to expect from the show. 

In the footage, Fett and Shand have ambitions to rework the hierarchy of Tattooine's seedy underbelly. We hear them claim they'll rule through respect rather than fear, though it looks like all-out war is the more likely consequence of the power vacuum left in the wake of Bib Fortuna's death.

Take a look at the official trailer yourself, below.

Subsequent teasers have since been released by Disney, though they're mostly soundbites from certain sections of the main trailer (titled 'Message', 'Reign' and so on).

The Book of Boba Fett story

The Book of Boba Fett story

When it comes to The Book of Boba Fett, plot specifics were, for a long time, thin on the ground.

“I can't say anything about that, sworn to silence,” executive producer (and director of The Mandalorian season 2 episode 'The Tragedy') Robert Rodriguez told the Nerdy Basement (via Comicbook.com) in September 2021. “I can say it's gonna blow your mind. You saw [Boba Fett] arrive in my episode [of The Mandalorian], that was nothing. I can talk it up all I want because I know it's gonna deliver, I know it's gonna over-deliver.”

Some speculated that Jon Favreau’s December 2020 comments to GMA – confirming that The Mandalorian spin-offs will be set “right after” Return of the Jedi – meant The Book of Boba Fett would kick off in the immediate aftermath of the second Death Star’s destruction. However, it’s more likely that “right after” was just a figure of speech, and Favreau was loosely referring to the time period where The Mandalorian already operates – some five years after the events of Return of the Jedi.

We know, for example, that the famous Jabba’s Palace coda must have taken place after the events of The Mandalorian season 2, because Boba Fett is wearing the iconic armor Mando recovered from Cobb Vanth in Mos Pelgo in The Marshal. Presumably, Fett and Fennec Shand jetted off to Tatooine after Din Djarin handed Grogu over to Luke Skywalker, which ties in nicely with Favreau's comments.

Given that the show focuses on Boba Fett’s efforts to take control of the crime empire Jabba the Hutt left behind, its setting opens up all sorts of possibilities for Fett to interact with characters old and new, good and bad. 

Since we now know who many of those characters are (given that the show has aired), we've refrained from divulging them below in an effort to avoid spoilers. So, what follows is a roundup of our predictions for what narrative ground The Book of Boba Fett would cover prior to its release.

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It’ll be interesting to see how many of Fett’s former associates are still in his orbit. While his former mentor Aurra Sing is apparently dead – Tobias Beckett said in Solo: A Star Wars Story that he’d killed her – Cad Bane, another former bounty hunter from The Clone Wars era who's also turned up in The Bad Batch, may still be business. And then there’s 4-LOM, Zuckuss, Bossk, IG-88 and Dengar, the bounty hunters Darth Vader hired to track down the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back.  

As a long-standing associate of Fett’s, Dengar is of particular interest. Not only was he voiced by Simon Pegg in The Clone Wars – Pegg told Collider that he’s open to returning to the role in live-action – it’s believed that he’s still alive three decades later in The Rise of Skywalker era. That said (according to SlashFilm), he’s radically different by then, a bizarre, grotesque cyborg who goes by the name of Rothgar Deng – Dengar’s journey to his new form could be a major part of the story.

Fett could easily pay a visit to Mos Pelgo marshal Cobb Vanth to compare notes on that famous armor, seeing as they’re both based on Tatooine. And the show could also explore the various crime syndicates operating in that galaxy far, far away, like some interstellar Godfather saga. Indeed, the story of Crimson Dawn (the crime syndicate we learned was headed up by Darth Maul in Solo) was left unresolved – so maybe The Book of Boba Fett will pick up those dangling threads. And any trip off Tatooine will give us an excuse to see Fett's similarly iconic ship, Slave I – which may now be called Firespray – in action.

Fett would be an ideal guide through these shady worlds, seeing as his The Mandalorian arc saw him evolve from villain to antihero. Remember, Fett was renowned as the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, so the fact he helps Mando to rescue Grogu reveals a code of honor we never knew existed. We bet he's still partial to the occasional disintegration, though... 

In fact, we're not expecting Boba Fett to spend all his time taking it easy on a throne in Jabba's Palace. Although the bounty hunter never really got his hands dirty in the original trilogy, we finally got to see him in combat in The Mandalorian – and we're betting he'll be continuing the action vibe in The Book of Boba Fett.

“I think the [hand-to-hand combat in The Mandalorian] was a blessing for me in a way, in terms of Boba Fett's history,” Morrison told Rotten Tomatoes. “No one's actually seen him do anything besides stand there. And of course, his claim to fame was catching the man, I guess. But other than that, he was a pretty elusive bloke.”

It looks like flashbacks will also be a major element of The Book of Boba Fett. Morrison teased as much in his Rotten Tomatoes interview, where he revealed that, “We can't say too much, but we're going to see his past and where he's been since The Empire Strikes Back. Somebody pointed out that he's been kind of stuck in this one place, and now's the time to actually go back in time and check out his journey and find out more about him.”

We wouldn't be surprised if the show explores Fett's previous relationship with Fennec Shand – after all, Shand features heavily in The Bad Batch (set a couple of decades before The Book of Boba Fett), where she's already had dealings with Boba Fett's clone 'sister' Omega.

But possibly the biggest question on Star Wars fans’ lips is the issue of how Fett escaped 1,000 years of pain and suffering in the belly of the Sarlacc. While at least one version of the story was told in the old ‘Legends’ version of the Expanded Universe, it’ll be cruel if the details of Fett’s survival aren’t enshrined in canon. It would also leave five years of Fett’s life unaccounted for.

The Book of Boba Fett could go even further back in time to explore Fett’s origins. Although The Clone Wars revealed his tentative first steps in the world of bounty hunting after his father, Jango Fett, died, we don’t really know how he became such a big player in Jabba the Hutt’s crime empire. And while Marvel comics have revealed that Fett helped Darth Vader look for Luke Skywalker after A New Hope – and that he and Skywalker duelled – there are still plenty of gaps in his timeline to fill.

Disney era Star Wars has also borrowed plenty of ideas from those aforementioned Legends stories, so don’t be surprised if we see Boba Fett acting as best man at Dengar’s wedding. Yes, that really did happen in one Expanded Universe story.

Crossovers with The Mandalorian

Will The Book of Boba Fett cross over with The Mandalorian?

It’s not been officially confirmed, but we wouldn’t bet against it. For starters, Boba Fett, Fennec Shand and the Mandalorian himself, Din Djarin, have worked together before and operate in similarly morally ambiguous regions of the Star Wars galaxy, so it’d would be no stretch for them to cross paths again.

Also, at the Disney Investor Day, Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy confirmed that The Mandalorian, and spin-offs Ahsoka (and the now-seemingly abandoned Rangers of the New Republic) are “interconnected” and “will culminate in a climactic story event”. While The Book of Boba Fett wasn’t included in that announcement, it’s likely its absence was down to the fact the show hadn’t been announced at that point. 

It would be weird if Boba Fett and Fennec Shand weren’t involved in such a major crossover, seeing as they’re going about their business in the same part of the Star Wars timeline. We imagine that they'll go off on their own adventure for a while, but that they'll reunite with Din Djarin, Bo-Katan Kryze and other sympathetic characters somewhere down the line. Perhaps they'll be helping Bo-Katan restore her home planet of Mandalore after the Great Purge wiped out most of her people? Or simply trying to stop an Imperial remnant from increasing its influence across the galaxy. 

With all of these shows set in the decades between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, we also know that the First Order is secretly on the rise somewhere in the Unknown Regions – presumably they won't take too kindly to a bunch of bounty hunters sniffing around their business.

Whichever direction the show takes, though, there are plenty of stories to tell – so many, in fact, that The Book of Boba Fett season 2 could be a possibility. While That Hashtag Show may be jumping the gun (or should that be blaster?) when it suggests that unofficial crew graphics referring to "season 1” may imply there'll be more, it certainly wouldn't be a surprise if the bounty hunter's adventures continue beyond the show's first run.

The Book of Boba Fett cast

The Book of Boba Fett cast

Unsurprisingly, as mentioned, Temuera Morrison (who'll also appear in Aquaman 2) is back as Boba Fett.

Morrison’s first Star Wars appearance came in Attack of the Clones, where he played Boba Fett’s bounty hunter ‘father’, Jango Fett. Jango was the template for the Clone Troopers who fought for the Old Republic in the Clone Wars. As payment for his genetic material, Jango asked the cloners on Kamino to create Boba, an unmodified version of himself, so he had a son to call his own.

And since the 2004 DVD release of the original trilogy, Morrison also voices Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars creator George Lucas decided to replace lines originally recorded by Jason Wingreen, so there's some continuity there, too.

Morrison’s co-star in The Book of Boba Fett will be Agents of SHIELD/Mulan star Ming-Na Wen, who reprises her role as bounty hunter Fennec Shand. She's also playing the character in animated Clone Wars spin-off The Bad Batch, set over two decades earlier. 

Behind the camera, The Mandalorian's brain trust of Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni will executive produce, along with Robert Rodriguez. The Sin City/Alita: Battle Angel director has been brought into the Star Wars fold after helming Fett’s big comeback in The Mandalorian season 2 episode The Tragedy. Morrison confirmed in his Rotten Tomatoes interview that, "they brought Robert [Rodriguez] back to direct a few more. There's some wonderful directors involved.” The identity of said “wonderful directors” is, however, unknown at present.

Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy will executive produce. 

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