Star Wars Forces of Destiny is a canon animated micro-series that takes place around all eras of the Star Wars universe. Consisting of sixteen episodes, it began airing online on the Disney YouTube channel on July 3, 2017, and aired on television on July 9, 2017, after the release of the first eight episodes. It is accompanied by its own toy line and a series of tie-in books. A 5-issue weekly comic book miniseries was released in January, 2018 by IDW Publishing.
In September 2016, Disney Television president Ben Sherwood revealed that he had been working with Lucasfilm on a new animated series. With the debut of the third season of Star Wars Rebels, it was announced that Dave Filoni had stepped down as Supervising Director, in favor of working on "future animation development." Around this time, Jennifer Muro announced on her Twitter page that she was writing for a new Lucasfilm project.
The project was first announced in an Entertainment Weekly article on April 13, 2017. It revealed the name of the series, the cast and crew, and that the first eight episodes would be released on Disney's YouTube channel and another eight episodes would air on Disney Channel during the fall. The next day at Celebration Orlando (during the "Heroines of Star Wars" panel) the episode "BB-8 Bandits," which ended up being the second episode released online, was premiered.
As announced on June 27, 2017, the first eight shorts were released on YouTube one a day from July 3 to July 9, when they were released on Disney Channel. In October, eight more episodes were released. The release of the show was accompanied by a series of young reader books and comics, as well as a line of Hasbro toys.
On September 9 during the Forces of Destiny panel on HasCon it was announced that more shorts were planned to be released during 2018. On March 16, 2018 eight more episodes were announced to debut on March 19 on Disney's YouTube channel, and seven more episodes were released on May 4.
As of November 12, 2019, the series is available on the Disney+ streaming service.
The episodes compiled into Volume 1 were first released on home video as part of a DVD. The disc was packaged with other Star Wars releases exclusively at the retailer Walmart at Christmas 2017. "Ewok Escape" was included among the "sneak peeks" on the Coco Blu ray.