Star Wars is more fun when no new movies are coming out

It’s one of the biggest ironies in entertainment: Disney, the home of Marvel, Pixar, and a football team’s worth of all-star Princesses, cannot seem to get a Star Wars movie off the ground right now. It has been that way since. Skywalkers are on the Rise Ended the sequel trilogy in 2019, but the studio has not been willing to produce a new movie. They stated in February 2020 that Star Wars movies were in hiatus and that TV is where the future of Star Wars was.

It seems that the pivot is complete. In November, Disney removed previously announced items Rogue Squadron film from the company’s release schedule due to scheduling conflicts from director Patty Jenkins, who has two unrelated films set to begin production soon. Other film projects that are theoretically still on the table seem to have evaporated: a movie from Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige, a trilogy from The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson, as well as a film from Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi. These are busy filmmakers, just like Jenkins. They have many other confirmed projects. Without any evidence that these projects are actually progressing, it’s hard to believe any of them will actually land on release schedules any time soon. That’s what I think. Star Wars is at its best when the franchise isn’t producing new movies.

The Star Wars movies are the holy texts when it comes to Star Wars. Even though Star Wars sprawls into every medium, there’s a level of scriptural reverence for the film trilogies that extends to how they’re marketed. A Star Wars “Episode” isn’t just a movie, it’s an VeranstaltungIn a way that virtually no other genre is nowadays, it’s incredibly popular. Being a Star Wars fan is far and away the most mainstream kind of genre fan you can be, and the movies — at least, the movies as they exist now — are meant to cater to each and every one of those fans.

That’s an absurd expectation, but such is the current state of Star Wars, and Lucasfilm and Disney mostly pull off the illusion of selling a dream to every type of filmgoer. Star Wars is a tremendously valuable arm for an extraordinarily profitable company, and any movie in the series that does less than monster returns can be considered a failure, both by Disney’s standards, and given Star Wars’ historical track record of producing box-office and cultural smashes, no matter how critics or loud fans respond to a given film. It’s not insignificant that 2018’s Solo was the first Star Wars film to flop, and that it quickly marked the end of the “Star Wars Story” anthology film project that began with 2016’s Rogue One. There were plans for more, but the feeling that these two films tarnished Star Wars’ record of worldwide hits was enough to make Disney reverse course on its ambitious scheme to launch “a new Star Wars movie every year.”

Walt Disney Studios Photo

From a certain point of view, it’s obvious that Star Wars is better in its vast and expansive spinoff canon than in the movies. The movies are great for introducing people to the universe, while stories that expand on specific worlds or ideas can help them stay there. You could be a fan. The Force Awakens plenty, but it’s also possible that the adventures of the queer rogue archaeologist star of the Dr. Aphra Comics may speak more to the same person. The power of specificity can be very powerful. There’s also the math of it all: A Star Wars book people don’t like will not feel like a failure just because it didn’t earn literally a billion dollars.

But when it comes to that expanded universe, Star Wars films aren’t just beholden to expectation, they’re also small singularities, taking up all the oxygen in the constellation of Star Wars releases, and making sure a vast majority of the multimedia entries primarily exist to support the latest blockbuster. Comics that are like Kylo Ren: The RiseCharles Soule and Will Sliney create the spin-out of Skywalker’s RiseYou might also like: PhasmaDelilah S. Dawson led into The Last Jedi, Rogue One got a tie-in novel called Catalyst James Luceno. The need to only produce tie-in projects can obscure creators’ work, and warp their goals — when every book is promoting a movie, it’s hard not to see them as promotional material first, and individual stories second.

These books are loved by many, so tie-ins for such a large multimedia asset are common. The pattern predates Disney’s Star Wars stewardship — George Lucas’ media empire often took the same approach. Not even during movie-release years. AllIt is tied in. There’s Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn revival, Alexander Freed’s Alphabet Squadron series, and the prequel-era novel Master Apprentice Claudia Gray. Published in the midst of all the excitement surrounding the Star Wars trilogy’s final three-part finale.

Yet consider what’s happening now. Lucasfilm Books launched The High Republic, a line of comics and books for Jedi fans. These stories aim to go beyond Sith villains and introduce a new threat: the Nihil, a pirate-cult. Comics have been influenced by the success of MandalorianPlease see: War of the Bounty HuntersMiniseries and crossover have begun, leaning in the dark side of scum & villainy that have been integral parts of Star Wars since Mos Eisley. Star Wars has regained its sense of direction, with the help of Jedi: Fallen Order.

Lucasfilm

That’s just a small smattering of what’s going on now. What’s important isn’t that there’s so Much more Star Wars material at the moment, it’s the variety of the new additions to the franchise. Even though Star Wars’ entire history is governed by corporate committees, material other than movie tie-ins feel loose, fun, and less like the brand exercise that Star Wars fans must sift through for quality stories.

There is no film to refer to so something like this animated short film anthology Star Wars: Visions can steal the show and light up fans’ imaginations. VisionsThe spiral can continue onwards into books like Star Wars Visions: RoninEmma Mieko Candon expands upon the Visions short “The Duel” — a mostly monochrome homage to samurai cinema — into a Star Wars novel quite unlike any we’ve gotten before. Hopefully, the same can be true of the many Star Wars television series in development — all of which can be avenues for viewers to find a version of Star Wars that surprises them, and takes them somewhere they didn’t expect to go.

This has been done before, as with most other things. Following the 1983 publication of Return of the Jedi, Star Wars slowly drifted into dormancy until the 1991 publication of Timothy Zahn’s The Empire’s HeirIt is here that Star Wars Expanded Universe was born. Since 2008, the EU has effectively been in place. WasStar Wars is a diverse, entertaining, and frustrating collection of stories. It explores every character and imagines a bizarre future for a faraway galaxy.

Circumstances are different now — franchises are too valued, and Star Wars is too profitable to go away like it did in the ’80s. Failure can lead to innovation on any scale. It won’t last forever, but right now, Star Wars is in a rare space, one that could vanish at any moment, where no one seems to know where it’s going, and no one in charge who might know cares to say. The creators of Star Wars are playing with new ideas in spaces that are designed to allow experimentation. New characters appear all the time at a dizzying speed. Star Wars’ universe is open, as there are many works that can be found in both the canon and unpublished. Star Wars will soon take off for war and romance and crime and knavery as well as deep mysteries of its origins. When no one really knows where Star Wars is going next, that just means you’re free to wander without supervision, just another scruffy little nerfherder out of many, sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.

Star Wars: The Rising Storm

Price at publishing time.

As the Jedi struggle to curb the carnage of the rampaging Nihil, they come face-to-face with the true fear their enemy plans to unleash across the galaxy—the kind of fear from which even the Force cannot shield them.