Light & Magic season 2 will continue the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) story, when it returns to Disney+ in April 2025. More here.
Appreciating there’s a fair amount of frustration about streaming services around at the moment, there are still some real highlights. For film nerds, I can’t think of too many better shows than Light & Magic, the 2022 documentary series which charted not just the rise of visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), but in tandem the Star Wars saga, George Lucas, Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg and more besides.
The series ended in 1993 as Jurassic Park came in, and digital effects began to take over from miniatures and motion control. Now, it’s been revealed that a second season of Light & Magic is arriving next month, which will continue the story through the rest of the 1990s and 2000s.
Like the first season, it’ll be a Disney+ production, and will once again access to the kind of people it needs to tell its stories – master animator Phil Tippett was a particularly memorable voice from that earlier series. (Though as we wrote at the time, there were one or two notable omissions.)
The second season will be three episodes, and Joe Johnston is stepping in to direct (Lawrence Kasdan steered the first). Films that are going to be covered in the new series are the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Pirates Of The Caribbean, War Of The Worlds and Twister.
Read more: Light & Magic, and the love of cars that led to Star Wars
Collider has picked up the news that the new run of the show will debut on 18th April. It feels like a tough challenge to bring this to life: some of the most striking visuals from the first season including flying model space ships in a car park, what looking like basically a dorm room of groundbreaking effects brains, and problem solving away from a computer. But still: there are stories to be told, and Joe Johnston is a fine storyteller.
If you’ve not had the pleasure, then do seek out the first season of the show. Particularly the early episodes are modern cinema history unfolding before our eyes, with enough time passing for those involved to be open about their stories. Season two has shot straight to the top of my want-to-watch list.
More as we hear it…
