With Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord set to premiere this year, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Maul is a character the franchise has no intention of ever killing off.
The new series, set after The Clone Wars, places Maul back at the center of the galaxy’s criminal underworld as he plots to rebuild his syndicate and search for a new apprentice.
An official trailer recently dropped, positioning the show as one of Lucasfilm Animation’s darkest projects yet. But beyond tone and setting, Shadow Lord reinforces something Star Wars has quietly embraced for years: death is rarely permanent.
The franchise has a long history of reversing finality. The Mandalorian revealed that Boba Fett survived the Sarlacc pit, undoing one of the original trilogy’s most famous offscreen deaths. The Rise of Skywalker resurrected Emperor Palpatine outright, summed up by the line “Somehow Palpatine returned.” And Luke Skywalker even acknowledges this storytelling philosophy directly in The Last Jedi, telling Leia, “No one’s ever really gone.”
Maul fits neatly into that pattern. First introduced in The Phantom Menace, he was cut in half and discarded down a reactor shaft — a death that seemed definitive for nearly a decade. The Clone Wars overturned that assumption, revealing that Maul survived, rebuilt himself, and re-emerged as a major power broker. Rebels later gave him a more intimate end, but Shadow Lord takes place before the events of that animated series.
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Lucasfilm Animation Vice President Athena Portillo addressed this directly last year when speaking to IGN, comparing Maul to horror icons who refuse to stay down. “My joke for the Lucasfilm Animation team is it’s kind of like Michael Myers or like Jason Voorhees. Like you keep killing them, but they keep coming back,” she said.
She added, “Darth Maul has passed away so many times, but he does keep coming back.”
Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord premieres April 6, 2026, on Disney+, with two episodes released weekly through May 4.
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