Weird. We keep being told that Disney Star Wars is a huge success. When even the mainstream media are admitting the truth...
"There’s an exchange in Star Wars: The Force Awakens when Rey and Finn are fleeing from stormtroopers and searching for a way to escape. Rey spots the legendary Millennium Falcon, declares it looks like “garbage,” and then quickly reconsiders: “The garbage will do!”
Increasingly, that’s the attitude some fans have about Disney’s Star Wars programming: “Look, we all know this isn’t fantastic anymore, but Star Wars is still Star Wars, and, therefore, it will do.”...
Let’s run through Disney’s Star Wars legacy to date, from The Force Awakens to The Acolyte, and see what conclusions might be drawn. Because several aspects of the company’s track record admittedly look shaky: A five-movie franchise that was halted after its box office returns trended the wrong direction. Six live-action TV shows, just one of which has been a multi-season hit. A startling number of projects put into development and then abandoned like starships on Bracca. And one wildly ambitious role-play hotel that closed after little more than a year...
After buying Lucasfilm from George Lucas in 2012, Disney relaunched Star Wars as a franchise trilogy in 2015 with director J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens. The film was an absolute blockbuster. Yet surprisingly — and, as it turned out, problematically — the studio did not have a firm creative plan for the next two films (at least, not one that was followed).
Rian Johnson’s 2017 sequel The Last Jedi took the story in a different direction that many loved and many didn’t. Then Abrams returned with 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker and tried to push the narrative closer to his original intentions. Comedians learn in improv class to always say, “Yes, and …” to any idea introduced during a show, no matter how challenging. The studio and Abrams’ reaction to The Last Jedi was more like, “No, actually …” (Rey is a nobody. No, she’s a Palpatine!) The result was a trilogy that’s a mishmash of dueling creative visions. (Lucas took a similar I’m-making-this-up-as-I-go approach to his original trilogy, but it’s far easier to maintain a saga’s cohesion when all the films are led by the same person.)
The films’ box office also told a story. At a time when Disney’s Marvel movies kept breaking new ticket sales records, Force made an extraordinary $2 billion worldwide, Jedi dropped sharply to a still-huge $1.3 billion, and then Skywalker made $1 billion which is, you know, still $1 billion. These are incredible numbers for any film, but they were going the wrong way — when the third entry in your trilogy launching a new franchise sells half as many tickets as the first, you probably made a wrong turn somewhere.
Around the same time, the studio experimented with two stand-alone titles. There was 2016’s gorgeous-looking and compelling, if wildly uneven, Rogue One, earning $1 billion (a film whose reputation has improved since it was released). And 2018’s widely panned Solo, which made a disastrous-for-the-franchise $393 million (a film whose reputation has not improved since it was released). Both had behind-the-scenes drama and reshoots that saw their original directors being replaced during filming.
After Rise of Skywalker, Disney paused making big-screen Star Wars movies altogether but continued to announce new films in development from top creatives. The list of well-known writers and directors who have come and gone is comically long: Rian Johnson (originally enlisted to make a new trilogy), David Benioff and Dan Weiss (also enlisted for a trilogy), Patty Jenkins, Colin Trevorrow, Damon Lindelof, David S. Goyer, Josh Trank, Guillermo del Toro, Taika Waititi and Marvel chief Kevin Feige. Some of their projects were confidentially announced as movies that were definitely happening until they weren’t. And there are others that were never revealed publicly.
If all this seems rather chaotic for a studio that’s famously meticulous, well, yes, it does. The charitable read is that Star Wars movies should be very special and the studio is determined to get them right. A batch of projects are still the works: James Mangold is developing a Dawn of the Jedi feature, Shawn Levy is working on an untitled film, Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron was resurrected this year, and Lindelof’s feature starring Daisy Ridley’s Rey has shifted to director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. It’s uncertain which of these, if any, will be made...
The 2019 debut season of Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian nearly single-handedly made Disney+ an out-of-the box success, charmed critics and audiences, and was even nominated for an Emmy for best drama. Moreover, The Mandalorian proved live-action Star Wars on TV was possible — it’s easy to forget this show was considered a big gamble at the time (given Favreau also launched the MCU with 2008’s Iron Man, he deserves to be honored at one of those medal ceremonies on Yavin). In season three, The Mandalorian creatively stumbled a bit, ratings slipped (a little) and the show received backlash for the first time.
Instead of a fourth season, Disney decided to pivot The Mandalorian to launch its first Star Wars feature film since The Rise of Skywalker. Coming in 2026, The Mandalorian & Grogu will probably perform well. Yet it also looks like Disney spent many years and untold capital struggling develop a new Star Wars movie and its best idea was an extra-long episode of a TV show.
From The Mandalorian came 2021’s spinoff The Book of Boba Fett, which is where some problems with the franchise’s TV efforts first emerged. So much about this brief effort was weirdly clunky. Two Mandalorian episodes were inexplicably sandwiched into the show’s seven, and they felt like a Band-Aid effort to repair a struggling show. The Book of Boba Fett was originally a series, not a miniseries, but it was quickly considered concluded...
The Acolyte’s premiere ratings were the lowest to date for a live-action Star Wars series launch (488 million minutes, according to Nielsen’s U.S. streaming figures). Then the show’s ratings sunk further, with The Acolyte dropping out of Nielsen’s Top 10 entirely for several weeks (not typical for a Star Wars show). It was impossible for Disney to spin this one as a concluded story — the season ended on a cliffhanger — but The Acolyte is not getting a season two. The cancellation has been portrayed by some defenders as baffling, even conspiratorial, but the show’s ratings, trend and reception point to a pragmatic decision on the studio’s part...
So that’s six live-action shows in five years. Just one — The Mandalorian — has been an outright hit with critics and fans and has delivered a multi-season run, which is the traditional model for TV success.
This doesn’t mean a single season of TV cannot be a win; limited series are considered hits all the time. But there’s a reason popular close-ended limited series like the debut seasons of HBO’s The White Lotus and FX’s Shogun were given second season orders and became ongoing series. Making a show that can run for multiple seasons is the typical goal, even for streamers, because it encourages subscribers to stick around. There are also considerable startup costs to making something new, particularly in the fantasy space — enormous amounts of production, costume and prop design, and all-around world building. The Acolyte season one took four years to make, but a second season would have likely only taken half that time. With an ongoing series, a company doesn’t have to work so hard and spend so much to keep re-earning its audience. One would think Disney would have wanted more juice from some of these squeezes.
Because what is left for Disney+ after Skeleton Crew? The final season of Andor and a second season of Ahsoka? In 2020, Disney bullishly announced 10 new Star Wars shows at an investor event, heralding a glorious new era of Star Wars TV. Those entries included Lando (now being re-developed by star Donald Glover and his brother Stephen into a film) and Rangers of the New Republic (scrapped for reasons). The prospect of being left with a single ongoing live-action Star Wars show after Andor concludes surely wasn’t the company’s hope coming out of that announcement...
The company’s live-action movies and TV efforts, on average, could and should be better. In 2018, Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted the company made “a mistake” with Star Wars, making movies “a little too much, too fast.” After Iger temporarily left the company in 2020, Disney/Lucasfilm arguably made the same error again on the TV side. Lucas famously instructed his actors to be “faster and more intense,” but that doesn’t typically work as a franchise strategy (as Marvel has discovered, as well). It’s unclear if Star Wars requires more order or less — more Empire-like corporate oversight or more Rebellion-like creative chaos. But it’s long seemed like there’s somehow too much of both, which has resulted in a master plan that’s constantly being rewritten, and content that sometimes feels undercooked and clunky. It’s not the fault of fans that they increasingly have “a bad feeling about this.”"
