For years, Embo remained the missing piece of the live-action puzzle, the answer to a question Clone Wars fans have asked since he first slid across the snows of Orto Plutonia: When would this cult-favorite bounty hunter finally step out of the animation cell? Lucasfilm finally answered, confirming that Embo will serve as one of the main villains in The Mandalorian & Grogu, the 2026 theatrical film that marks Star Wars' first return to theaters in seven years.
The film, hitting cinemas on May 22, stars Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin alongside Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt, and Steve Blum. Embo himself is voiced by Dave Filoni, who reprises the role he originated in animation and who recently became Lucasfilm's president.
Embo's debut makes one wonder whether we're getting more such crossovers in live-action. The Clone Wars produced some of the richest characters in Star Wars history, and many of them have never made the leap to live-action. With Embo finally here, there are at least eight Clone Wars characters that need to crossover to live-action, too.
Clone Wars Favorites That Should Make the Jump To Live Action
Asajj Ventress
Born on Dathomir into the Nightsisters, Asajj Ventress is among the most layered characters Star Wars has ever produced. Taken from her clan as an infant, she spent her formative years on Rattatak under the training of the stranded Jedi Ky Narec, until his death sent her spiraling into darkness. Count Dooku found her consumed by vengeance and took her as his assassin. For much of The Clone Wars, Ventress served as Dooku's ruthless enforcer: dual red lightsabers, a biting wit, and an uncanny ability to push Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker to their limits.
But her story takes a turn most villains never earn. Darth Sidious, sensing that the bond between Dooku and Ventress threatened his control, ordered her elimination. Dooku obeyed, leaving her for dead. This sent her back to Dathomir to her Nightsister kin and eventually to a life as a bounty hunter entirely on her own terms. Her final chapter in the animated canon involves falling in love, saving a Jedi, and giving her life so that someone else could return to the light.
She later appeared in The Bad Batch, restored to life through Nightsister magicks, and then resurfaced in Tales of the Underworld on Disney+ in 2025. Voiced throughout her animated run by Nika Futterman, Ventress has been in the conversation for a live-action adaptation for years. With her arc touching Obi-Wan, Maul, Ahsoka, and the Nightsisters in equal measure, she is essentially a one-woman connective thread across the prequel and early Imperial era. Any story set in that window holds a natural place for her.
Hondo Ohnaka
Hondo Ohnaka is another character who should be close to a live-action debut, given how interconnected his story is with many live-action characters. The Weequay pirate captain, voiced throughout his animated run by legendary voice actor Jim Cummings, made his debut in the Season 1 Clone Wars episode "Dooku Captured," immediately distinguishing himself as someone who could kidnap Count Dooku and make you root for him in the process.
Originally designed to appear in just a two- or three-episode arc, Hondo proved so popular that he became one of the most recurring side characters across both The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. His Ohnaka Gang operated out of Florrum. He held Jedi prisoner, then fought beside them. He robbed the Rebellion, then helped liberate a planet. His true loyalty was always to profit, making every interaction with him genuinely unpredictable.
In 2025, Cummings teased his Star Wars return in an interview with The Direct, stating, "Hondo is not done yet." With the deep connection Hondo and Ezra Bridger have, his best shot at a live-action debut is in Ahsoka Season 2, where Ezra is making his return.
Satine Kryze
Satine Kryze is the argument that The Clone Wars could do political drama as well as it did action. As the Duchess of Mandalore and leader of the Council of Neutral Systems, a coalition of 1,500 planets that refused to take sides in the Clone Wars, she governed with the conviction that peace was her people's only viable future.
Her history with Obi-Wan Kenobi is one of the most devastating threads in all of Star Wars. He guarded her during a Mandalorian civil war before the events of The Phantom Menace, and the two fell in love, a fact Kenobi acknowledged with the admission that he would have left the Jedi Order had she asked. By the time fans meet her in Season 2's "The Mandalore Plot," that love exists only as a carefully maintained distance between two people who chose duty over each other.
Death Watch, led by her political nemesis, Governor Pre Vizsla, waged a shadow war against her government throughout her time on screen. She survived assassination attempts, Senate maneuvering, and internal corruption. Darth Maul ultimately killed her in front of Obi-Wan. Satine Kryze is long dead, but death never stopped a Disney-owned character from returning. Lucasfilm can definitely find a way to reintroduce her. Bo-Katan actress Katee Sackhoff's keenness on Satine's live-action debut makes it all the more realistic.
Mother Talzin
Mother Talzin is the most frightening character The Clone Wars produced. The leader of the Nightsisters of Dathomir, she wielded a dark magick that operated entirely outside the Jedi and Sith binary, drawing from a wellspring so potent that Darth Sidious himself once sought to understand and control it.
Her character design was directly inspired by Iain McCaig's original concept art for the villain in The Phantom Menace, a figure who eventually became Darth Maul. That lineage is not coincidental: Talzin is Maul's biological mother. Darth Sidious took the child from her when he sensed Maul's Force potential, setting in motion a decades-long vendetta that fueled much of her scheming throughout the war.
She transformed Savage Opress into a weapon, then used Maul himself to strike at Dooku and Sidious. She could possess others, project herself across great distances, and restore a shattered mind.
When Sidious finally faced her in the Son of Dathomir comic series, drawn from unproduced Clone Wars scripts, she held her own until Dooku's Force lightning turned the odds against her. She chose to save Maul rather than herself, and General Grievous's blades ended her physical form. The Nightsisters' expanding presence in live-action through Ahsoka creates a direct on-ramp for her arrival.
99
99, a clone of Jango Fett, like every other soldier in the Grand Army of the Republic, was rendered physically defective in the cloning process: aging faster than his peers, unable to fight, and assigned to maintenance duties in Tipoca City's Military Complex on Kamino for his entire life. Voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, he appears in just two Clone Wars episodes, "Clone Cadets" and "ARC Troopers," both from Season 3.
In that short span, he earns more genuine investment than most characters do across entire seasons. He spots Hevy preparing to go AWOL from Domino Squad and talks him back with a quiet, unassuming speech about brotherhood. Hevy later gives 99 his graduation medal as a gesture of gratitude, a gift 99 treasures as the closest thing to a soldier's distinction he will ever receive.
When the Separatists attack Kamino, 99 refuses to sit it out. He resupplies his brothers, leads lost cadets to safety through encyclopedic knowledge of the facility, and dies after being shot by a battle droid in the hangar area while trying to reach the armory. He tells the clones around him with total conviction that he is a soldier, just like them. The Bad Batch is named "Clone Force 99" in his honor. A 99 appearance in any live-action Clone Wars era story would mean a great deal. He can be introduced simply through flashbacks.
Savage Opress
Savage Opress is the tragic figure at the center of The Clone Wars' most operatic storyline. Originally a tribal leader among the Nightbrothers of Dathomir, known to his brothers for his protectiveness, especially toward his younger brother Feral, Asajj Ventress selected him as the instrument of her revenge against Count Dooku. Mother Talzin's rituals reshaped him: larger, stronger, his body and mind transformed into a weapon, his identity subordinated to someone else's ambitions from the moment his power began.
Voiced by Clancy Brown, Savage is a Dathomirian Zabrak, the same species as Darth Maul, and eventually revealed to be Maul's biological brother. The two spent the latter arc of The Clone Wars building the Shadow Collective, a criminal empire designed to rival the Sith Order itself. Savage killed a Jedi Council member, lost his arm to Obi-Wan Kenobi on Florrum, and stood beside Maul at Mandalore when Darth Sidious arrived personally to neutralize the threat.
Sidious killed him there, impaling him with both blades, the Nightsister magic draining from his body until the hulking warrior faded back into the gentle Nightbrother he once was. His ties to Maul, the Shadow Collective, the Nightsisters, and the Death Watch arc make him a natural fit for any live-action story set during or just after the Clone Wars.
Omega
Omega is technically from Star Wars: The Bad Batch, which functions as a direct sequel series to The Clone Wars. Given that lineage and the degree to which her story is inseparable from the clone trooper world that The Clone Wars built, she belongs on this list.
Voiced by Michelle Ang, Omega is an unmodified clone created from Jango Fett's genetic template, making her, in biological terms, Boba Fett's sister. Unlike the accelerated-aging troopers who make up the Republic's army, she ages normally. She spent her early life as a medical assistant to Kaminoan scientist Nala Se, hidden from the broader clone population, until the end of the Clone Wars brought Clone Force 99 back to Kamino and changed everything.
Her three-season arc across The Bad Batch traces her transformation from a sheltered child who had never seen dirt into a self-possessed survivor who understands the galaxy's cruelty and refuses to be defined by it. The Empire hunted her for her pure Fett DNA, which the Kaminoans needed to continue their cloning operations.
She escaped imprisonment at Mount Tantiss and emerged on the other side of the Imperial era with a life finally her own. The Bad Batch concluded in 2024. Omega's story is technically complete, but a character this carefully developed, set in an era that live-action Star Wars is only beginning to explore, is exactly the kind of thread Lucasfilm tends to return to.
Pre Vizsla
Pre Vizsla is the originating conflict of everything Mandalorian storytelling did in live-action, and he's yet to appear there himself. As the governor of Concordia, Mandalore's moon, he publicly served Duchess Satine Kryze's government while secretly leading Death Watch: a terrorist organization committed to restoring Mandalore's warrior heritage by force. He is a descendant of Tarre Vizsla, the ancient Mandalorian Jedi who forged the Darksaber, a weapon Pre wielded with skill and total conviction.
He was voiced in animation by Jon Favreau, who later created The Mandalorian, a series built almost entirely on the Mandalorian mythology that Pre Vizsla helped establish. Favreau acknowledged the connection directly: the Darksaber became central to his show because George Lucas rewrote a Clone Wars script specifically for Pre's debut, replacing a vibroblade with something far more significant.
In the show, Pre allied with Count Dooku and later Darth Maul, always in service of one goal: removing Satine and returning Mandalore to its warrior past. He achieved it briefly before Maul challenged him to a duel and decapitated him with his own Darksaber.
Pre accepted the outcome with the same conviction that defined every other choice he made: only the strongest should rule. His ideology, his weapon, and his bloodline are already woven into live-action Star Wars. Pre Vizsla remains the obvious next step.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
