After playing Cara Dune for two seasons on the Disney+ subscription-exclusive The Mandalorian, Gina Carano was fired from the Star Wars TV show in 2021 over her controversial social media posts. This led to the actress filing a lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm in February 2024, and today, that lawsuit has come to an end. Upon looking through the details of the settlement, however, there’s an intriguing detail that caught my eye and may pertain to the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away.
While Disney and Carano were set to go to trial over this matter in September, the Mouse House and the actress have reached a settlement in her favor. No specific details about the settlement were revealed, but according to a source who spoke with Deadline, Carano is “happy with how things were dealt with.” You read the full statements from both sides in the outlet’s writeup, with Carano’s including her expressing gratitude to Elon Musk for funding her lawsuit. But in the Disney statement about having “reached an agreement” with Carano, this sentence caught my eye:
With this lawsuit concluded, we look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.
This conclusion comes after Gina Carano scored a victory with her lawsuit when a judge required Disney to hand over key documents for the case. She was ousted from The Mandalorian mere months after Season 2 premiered following backlash over comments she made about COVID-19 protocols, making claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and sharing a post that seemingly compared being a conservative in the United States to being present in the Holocaust. Several months after Carano filed the lawsuit, Disney responded by saying it “had a constitutional right to dissociate its own artistic message from Carano's outspoken 'political beliefs.’”
But now this legal drama is over, and the fact that Disney is entertaining the possibility of working with Gina Carano again is curious. What does the company mean by “identifying opportunities” with her in the near future? Is this an indication that Carano could return as Cara Dune in the Star Wars universe? Is there even a way she could be squeezed into the upcoming Star Wars movie The Mandalorian & Grogu?
Or do Disney and Lucasfilm still have no plans to bring Gina Carano back into the Star Wars franchise, and the former is merely suggesting that she could be considered for other Disney projects? Maybe I’m thinking too much about this, and ultimately Disney and Carano don’t collaborate again. Still, it feels like the door for a Cara Dune return is at least open now rather than being completely closed like it had been these last several years.
Needless to say we’ll let you know if it’s announced that Gina Carano will reprise Cara Dune. For now, be on the lookout for The Mandalorian & Grogu arriving May 26 on the 2026 movies calendar, as well as Ahoska Season 2’s premiere on Disney+ sometime that same year.
