Disney’s decade-long destruction of Star Wars is nearly complete
"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars was the hottest property in Hollywood. Actually, it wasn’t that long ago – a mere 10 years ago to the day on Wednesday, Disney released its first new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens...
Ten years on, it is fair to say that the franchise and its fans are in a different place. As only a cash-obsessed mega-corporation can, Disney has burnt through 50 years of goodwill and turned Star Wars into a zombie franchise. On and on it staggers, moaning and gibbering, but with nothing new to say for itself. The glory days of 2015 and The Force Awakens’s $2bn box office feel like a mirage – as distant as the Old Republic must have felt to Obi-Wan Kenobi as he hid out in his man-cave at the start of George Lucas’s original Star Wars.
Having whooshed towards the heavens with The Force Awakens, Star Wars has gone on to endure a decade of hell. One increasingly dire film and TV series has followed another – the atrocious The Last Jedi, the incoherent Rise of Skywalker, the cheap and shoddy Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Each has hit with a thud – another insult to fans old and young.
Disney – which, lest we forget, once threatened to release a Star Wars film every year until the end of time – has tackled the franchise with a unique mix of avarice and chaos. We expect our big Hollywood studios to be obsessed with the bottom line. But who would have believed Disney to be chaotic to the point where its lack of vision costs tens of millions as former fans desert the franchise?
The situation as 2026 dawns is grim. Disney’s much-touted attempts to turn Star Wars into a force in streaming are dead – 2024’s awful The Acolyte was cancelled within weeks, and the second series of Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka is generating negative levels of hype ahead of its release at some point in 2026.
A collective yawn has already attended the one shining star in the franchise, Tony Gilroy’s Andor, which came to an inglorious end in April. Its second and final season was well regarded but failed to strike a chord with viewers who, in an increasingly dystopian world, had no interest in Gilroy’s doomy account of how the Old Republic descended into fascist tyranny. In dark times, audiences wanted some light relief. Though it created a degree of commotion – and won several Emmys in primarily technical categories – ultimately nobody much cared either way. With each episode costing more than $25m, it’s hard to see how Disney could justify the investment.
With small-screen Star Wars on life support, Disney and Lucasfilm, the in-house studio that oversees all things Jedi-related, have turned once more to cinema. But despite Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy’s hopes for a movie comeback, audiences are lukewarm. Trailers for Jon Favreau’s 2026 big-screen continuation of The Mandalorian – the imaginatively titled The Mandalorian and Grogu – have been greeted with an intergalactic shrug. Much of the conversation has been around the hideous poster art – and the “please take some time off” ubiquity of Mando actor Pedro Pascal.
Nor is anyone counting down to Ryan Gosling’s debut in the Star Wars universe in the generic-sounding Starfighter, to be directed by Shawn Levy, who oversaw the pleasantly forgettable Night at the Museum movies and is the guy you call when you don’t want to take any risks. Fans aren’t excited, and neither is Hollywood – including Mikey Madison, who flat-out turned down the offer to play a villain in Starfighter after bagging the Academy Award for Anora. Star Wars, it seems, is not the best career option for a newly minted Oscar winner.
As to what comes after that… well, nobody knows. Among the ranks of the clueless is Kennedy, who has green-lit countless Star Wars projects, only for them to then vanish into the mists of development purgatory. Names associated with new Star Wars films at one point or another in the past decade include Jurassic World’s Colin Trevorrow, indie director Josh Trank (cancelled after his controversial Fantastic Four flopped), Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, Thor director Taika Waititi, Force Awakens actress Daisy Ridley, Wonder Woman’s Patty Jenkins, Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, and X-Men director Simon Kinberg.
The majority of those films have since been binned, while Disney boss Bob Iger gave a straight no to a Ben Solo movie pitched by actor Adam Driver and arthouse director Steven Soderbergh. Iger did so on the not-unreasonable basis that Solo had definitely and definitively died in Abrams’s terrible Rise of Skywalker – a disaster that Abrams was parachuted into after Johnson’s sneery Last Jedi went out of its way to poke fun at Star Wars fans (by, among other things, turning Luke Skywalker into a crotchety hobo).
There is also ongoing speculation about Kennedy’s future at Lucasfilm...
The ultimate problem – as it often is with Hollywood – is executive meddling. Disney paid $4bn for Star Wars, but rather than taking a long-term view and recouping that investment over decades, it was desperate for a fast buck. This led it to rushing its initial trilogy of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker – meaning Last Jedi’s Johnson took over from Rise of Skywalker director Abrams with nobody involved having the foggiest how the story should end (in truth, they had barely worked out the beginning or middle).
Johnson’s 2017 film, pitched as a subversive take on Star Wars, made $1.33bn at the worldwide box office but annoyed the public so much that they stayed away in droves from the subsequent Han Solo prequel. The timing was disastrous, as Solo had already been through a rocky period after comedy duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired for trying to make Star Wars funny. This seems ironic, as post-The Last Jedi, we could all have done with a laugh.
Then came the underbaked Rise of Skywalker, where a flailing Abrams tried to correct everything that Johnson had got wrong. True, Star Wars on Disney+ was off to a happier start in 2020 when The Mandalorian brought some of that old Lucas pizzazz. Sadly, it lost the plot in its third season – having already drawn criticism over the firing of star Gina Carano for expressing conservative views on social media (she subsequently won a lawsuit against Disney). And then it was straight off a cliff with Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, The Acolyte and Jude Law’s Skeleton Crew – a show which I watched all the way through but of which I cannot recall a single detail.
The expulsion of Carano came as Disney was accused by some of imposing “wokeness” on Lucas’s hippy-dippy, “feel the Force, Luke” universe. Much of the criticism was directed at The Last Jedi. True, the movie had a multiracial cast and went out of its way to have female characters lecture Oscar Isaac’s fighter pilot Poe Dameron about toxic masculinity. But in other ways it was deeply retrograde – for instance it relegated John Boyega’s Finn from main character to comedy sidekick (a decision later criticised by Boyega). Social media was just as agog about The Acolyte, which had a female showrunner and a storyline featuring queer female users of the Force who were more powerful than the Jedi. Again, however, the real problem was clunky execution and a deathly-dull script.
What does the future hold? From his new perch as the creator of the lucrative Knives Out whodunnits, Johnson’s advice is for Disney to think outside the box. “The worst sin is to be afraid of doing anything that shakes it up,” he said recently. You can understand his logic. But the worry for Stars Wars fans is that if you shake something too hard it might break – and Disney has shown it does not have what it takes to put Star Wars back together again"
