Disney “Working” On Adding Violence Advisory To ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Series Due To Similarities To Texas School Shooting; ‘Star Wars’ Show Currently Has “Upsetting” Warning On Streamer Landing Page – Update

Patrick Hipes and Dominic Patten
·3 min read
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UPDATED with Disney statement: Similarities between a horrible mass shooting at a Texas elementary school this week and a Jedi school massacre in Disney+’s new Obi-Wan Kenobi series has seen a succession of warnings added to the Ewan McGregor-led show.

“There are certain scenes in this fictional series that some viewers may find upsetting,” it says right now in the details section of the Obi-Wan landing page on a number of accounts on the Mouse House streamer.

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That’s a bleaching and editing of sorts of the statement released earlier today.

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“Although this fictional series is a continuation of the story from Star Wars movies filmed many years ago, some scenes may be upsetting to viewers in light of the recent tragic events,” it said before. “Warning: Contains violence involving children.”

Oddly enough, the warning actually has to be sought out on the Obi-Wan page and is not to be found as a slate at the beginning of the opening episode. The inclusion of the warning comes one day after rolling out Obi-Wan at the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim.

“In light of recent tragic events, we recognize there are certain scenes in this fictional series that some viewers may find upsetting and a content warning has been added to the show page,” a Disney spokesperson told Deadline today. “We are also working to add an advisory in front of the series as quickly as possible.”

The company added the first version of the current content warning early Friday, just hours after Obi-Wan Kenobi debuted. The much-anticipated series dropped its first two episodes late Thursday, almost three days after 19 children and two teachers were killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

The scene in question is actually the first one in Obi-Wan Kenobi, which comes after a lengthy recap of the events leading up to the time frame of the series that takes place a decade after the events depicted in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

The scene shows the cavernous Jedi temple under attack from Imperial Inquisitor and Stormtroopers. With chaos and death all around, a female Jedi dodges blasters and red lightsabers to get some young boys and girls to safety. The teacher is cut down and the cluster of less than half a dozen students makes a decision to “run” in the hopes of escaping a similar fate.

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The jarring scene ends with the children bolting over an overhead pathway as Jedi are massacred by Imperial forces.

Netflix did something similar this week for its Season 4 premiere of Stranger Things, adding a warning card about a scene of violence involving children. The card appears before the Season 3 recap that auto-plays at the beginning of Season 4, Episode 1 for viewers in the U.S. only.

McGregor is the the title character in Obi-Wan Kenobi, which takes place between during the time between the Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope movies. The six-episode series follows Obi-Wan’s life in exile on Tatooine. Star Wars prequel vet Hayden Christensen also is back as Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader.

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