Another week, another Star Wars “announcement” that leads to languished sighs all over the internet. Despite Daisy Ridley saying only a few weeks ago that the Rey-focused Star Wars movie was “evolving” and we’d get an update soon, the news came soon after that the next untitled Star Wars film has been yanked from its December 18, 2026, release date and ignominiously replaced with Ice Age 6. Whether or not you’re excited for a new Ice Age film (John Leguizamo renaissance incoming?), it’s certainly not a great sign that what was supposed to be the crown jewel franchise in Disney’s lineup when they purchased the property back in 2012 is now being shoved aside for yet another talking animal movie in 2024.
And yet, it’s not at all surprising. Regardless of anyone’s thoughts on the quality of individual projects, the Disney Star Wars era has been rife with corporate mismanagement, constant second-guessing, and an inability to envision a future for the property beyond pilfering from its past. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s also what Lucasfilm has been doing for far too long, to the point that it’s time we stop giving the company any credence unless they go through a serious realignment. Let’s take a look at why we all need to stop paying attention to Star Wars.
The Phantom Movies
The Rey movie, currently set to be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, may not have been the movie that just lost its release date, but it most likely was. Even though the film recently lost Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight as its writer, reports have indicated that Rey is important to multiple in-development projects, so her movie (supposedly set after The Rise of Skywalker as she establishes a new Jedi Order) was the most probable candidate to launch the next wave of Star Wars films. Knight departing the project would also be an understandable reason why the film had to be pushed back, as Lucasfilm scrambles to find someone new to pen the script. But that situation is standard operating procedure for the studio, not an aberration.
Far more Star Wars projects have been announced and failed to materialize than have actually been produced during the Disney era. Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss cratered the last season of their most famous project because they were hired to develop a Star Wars trilogy, only to be let go. Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, has also had a trilogy announced that hasn’t come together; the official story is that this is because of his commitments to the Knives Out sequels over at Netflix, which, sure. Josh Trank and James Mangold were both at various points attached to a Boba Fett spin-off film that was later reworked into a streaming series. Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron, Taika Waititi’s untitled film, Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi film, a Lando spin-off starring Donald Glover, Shawn Levy’s untitled film, and a New Republic era movie from Dave Filoni have all been announced or reported on by the Hollywood trades but are currently MIA.
To say it’s unlikely that most of these films will come to fruition is an extreme understatement. Lucasfilm has repeatedly announced projects that have no real groundswell behind them, seemingly hoping that we all have the memories of goldfish and won’t recall how many times they’ve pulled the rug out from under us. Does anyone seriously believe that the latest report of X-Men producer Simon Kinberg’s upcoming trilogy will pan out differently? Has Lucasfilm really banked their future on the Dark Phoenix guy? Or will we just bide our time until we get more “news” that Kinberg has departed the project six to 12 months from now? Given the company’s history, the latter is far more likely than it should be.
The Episode IX Problem
The biggest reason why we’re in this state is that The Rise of Skywalker detonated the franchise theatrically. Yes, the last entry in the Skywalker Saga managed to barely crawl over the billion dollar mark (a huge downturn from The Force Awakens, mind you), but the film was a creative disaster, spending so much of its time trying to walk back the previous film that it rendered the entire sequel trilogy an exercise in futility. Whatever J.J. Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan and everyone else at Lucasfilm imagined the new trilogy to be when they started work on The Force Awakens, it likely wasn’t a limp sprint to a boss fight with a bizarrely resurrected Palpatine completely bereft of stakes or gravitas. The trilogy had some interesting new characters and The Last Jedi tried to add thematic depth to the proceedings, but The Rise of Skywalker threw all of that out for a tired retread that reeks of desperation.
Yes, Solo: A Star Wars Story was an actual bomb the previous year, but that was a much lower stakes affair in terms of its effect on the franchise, being a spin-off about a single character. If the movie hadn’t essentially been shot twice, ballooning its budget out of control, it could have been a respectable hit for Lucasfilm’s catalog. But the finale of the Skywalker Saga should have been the biggest movie of the year by default, yet not only did Episode IX not measure up to the previous entries at the box office, it suffered some of the roughest reviews and the worst CinemaScore of any film in the series. Within only four years, audiences went from incredibly excited to tremendously weary of Star Wars, and Lucasfilm hasn’t been able to get a new film off the ground in the time since, instead retreating to the middling comforts of Disney+ shows.
Not that the pivot to TV has been a total wash (Andor is excellent and Visions at least tried to do something different), but it simply doesn’t feel like the right call for Star Wars. Disney+ series can fill in gaps in the release schedule, sure, but the original Star Wars was one of the movies that literally invented the modern blockbuster template, so to see the franchise in such a sorry state theatrically is disheartening. And no, putting the fourth season of The Mandalorian on hold and releasing what will likely amount to a TV special for Mando and Grogu in theaters doesn’t help matters. If anything, it reinforces that the value of the Star Wars brand has plummeted to a point that it might not be able to recover from.
That’s Not How The Force Works
What makes this even more depressing to think about is that all of Lucasfilm’s walking back and second-guessing of their creative decisions is clearly being done out of fear of their own audience. Now to be fair, Rogue One underwent significant reshoots before the tide turned against the franchise, but that movie came out the other side as a strong entry and also introduced Tony Gilroy to the series, so we’ll give it a pass. But ever since the, let’s say mixed online reception to The Last Jedi, Lucasfilm has been in a full-blown panic. The Rise of Skywalker feels like a plea for fans to not make any more angry YouTube videos about The Last Jedi, and the tripling down on nostalgia out of fear of anything that could be perceived as different or subversive has turned many subsequent projects into a diet version of something you used to like years ago.
From deepfake Luke Skywalker strolling onto the screen in the second season finale of The Mandalorian (despite the stand-in they used looking like a young Mark Hamill who stepped out of a time warp), to forcing Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead into ridiculous-looking cosplay makeup so they can play characters who really should have stayed in animation, to borderline breaking Original Trilogy canon with Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan and Hayden Christensen’s Darth Vader having another duel set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Lucasfilm’s strategy has been to strangle Star Wars to death by refusing to ever let it move forward. That would be bad enough on its own, but the company’s capitulation to the worst parts of its fandom gets even more egregious when you remember they’ve largely refused to stand behind actors of color who receive the most toxic response to their projects, like John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, and Amandla Stenberg.
Quite frankly, enough is enough. Star Wars is a mess, and it will stay that way so long as the current leadership and corporate attitude remains in place. Constantly hiring, firing and recycling creatives on their projects just for none of them to get made is no way to run a movie studio. The cultural rot at the heart of this enterprise is too deep-rooted to be removed by anything less than a complete overhaul, but whether that’s even possible at this stage is anyone’s guess. What’s not is that the franchise has been lost for a long time, and it likely won’t find its way out of the woods anytime soon. But until then, we would all be better off if we stopped giving Lucasfilm any benefit of the doubt. Because the last few years of Star Wars? I’m afraid to say… that’s not how the Force works.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Bluesky.
