The entire Star Wars sequel trilogy was released in the span of four years—a period from 2015 to 2019 that also encompassed the premieres of Rogue One and Solo. More time than that has elapsed since the sequels concluded: On Friday, the final installment in the sequel trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, will officially turn five. Yet that five-year-old film is still the most recent Star Wars movie, and it will be for a while. Somehow, Star Wars moviemaking hasn’t returned.
How did Disney go from releasing five Star Wars movies in four years to zero Star Wars movies in, at minimum, the next six and a half? Or, if we exclude The Mandalorian & Grogu, which will transplant the Mandalorian franchise from TV to theaters in 2026, at least the next eight? More than one factor has contributed to the franchise’s protracted absence from its native habitat, the multiplex, but we can pin part of the blame on the sequel series itself.
Even before The Rise of Skywalker debuted and disappointed—posting the worst CinemaScore and lowest Rotten Tomatoes rating of any live-action Star Wars movie, and the weakest box-office figure of any of the sequels—Disney CEO Bob Iger had signaled that Lucasfilm wouldn’t maintain its frenetic film-production pace. “You can expect some slowdown,” he said in September 2018, “but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to make films.” Anticipating the conclusion of the sequel trilogy, which was then more than a year away, he added, “We are just at the point where we’re going to start making decisions about what comes next.” In April 2019, Iger reiterated, “We will take a pause, some time, and reset, because the Skywalker saga comes to an end with this ninth movie. There will be other Star Wars movies, but there will be a bit of a hiatus.”
Pulling back a bit made some sense, considering the risk of Star Wars oversaturation. But the big-screen hiatus probably wasn’t supposed to last this long, and the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes aren’t the only culprits.
Partly, the hiatus has lingered because so much Star Wars storytelling shifted to TV. The first live-action Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, launched alongside Disney+ a little more than a month before The Rise of Skywalker reached theaters, and its instant, Baby Yoda–driven success opened up a new frontier for the franchise. In the subsequent explosion of Star Wars streaming series, the content-creation cycle repeated itself: Disney made too much, the quality fell, fan fatigue started to set in, and Iger announced another cutback. Now the future of small-screen Star Wars is itself somewhat nebulous. The only confirmed TV project coming after next year’s second and final season of Andor and third season of Visions is the second season of Ahsoka, which Dave Filoni is still writing solo and finding to be “a challenge.” (Dave, consider hiring a writers room—that’s a good trick.)
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So it’s not as if TV has entirely boxed out the big screen. No, the biggest obstacle to getting a movie made seems to be an inability to decide what it should be about. And that dilemma stems in part from the failures of the sequel trilogy—particularly the fumbled handoffs from The Force Awakens (directed by J.J. Abrams) to The Last Jedi (directed by Rian Johnson), and then back to Abrams. Abrams more or less remade Episode IV in The Force Awakens, after which Johnson tried to tear the trilogy away from retracing the original’s steps. Then Abrams turned the trajectory back toward repeating the past that Johnson had tried to let die.
All in all, the sequels failed to establish a distinct new Star Wars sandbox in which further fresh stories could be set; the central conflict was still essentially Rebels (“Resistance”) vs. Empire (“First Order”) and Jedi vs. Sith, which was pretty played out. Nor did the trilogy do a great job of developing all of its core characters into a Han-Luke-Leia-level lineup for a new generation; Abrams and Johnson had different visions for the likes of Rey, Finn, and Rose, which led to wild swings in screen time, backstories, and traits. In addition, the conflicting backlashes to The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker carved a schism in the fan base that left Lucasfilm unsure of which desires to serve and, perhaps, more prone to doubling down on nostalgia. The conversation surrounding the sequel films grew so toxic and tiresome that the franchise has largely stayed away from that entire in-universe time period for the past five years, to say nothing of trying to push past it. Instead, the main Star Wars storytellers on the TV side have devoted much of their energy to retroactively tightening the sloppy plotting of the sequels.
Waffling over which direction to take the franchise probably hasn’t helped ameliorate Lucasfilm’s long-standing tendency toward creative turmoil under Disney. “Always in motion is the future” doesn’t quite capture the in-flux nature of the projected release slate—and the talent tapped to produce it. Remember David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s Star Wars movies? Kevin Feige’s Star Wars film? The one from writer Matt Owens and director J.D. Dillard? All of those projects have gone up in smoke, like the Jedi library on Ahch-To. Johnson’s trilogy, announced more than seven years ago, hasn’t been publicly canceled, but we haven’t heard an update in years. (Johnson seems a tad busy, but Broom Boy’s hero’s journey awaits.) Add all of that upheaval among the departed or demoted directors of the pre–Rise of Skywalker era—Josh Trank, Colin Trevorrow, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Gareth Edwards—and creative differences and changes of plans start to seem more like the norm than the exception.
So who’s supposedly still toiling away on what could become a Star Wars movie? We have Taika Waititi, whose rumored feature film was confirmed on Star Wars Day in 2020 (no story details have been divulged, it doesn’t seem to be a top priority for either Waititi or Disney, and rumors that it’s been shelved persist); James Mangold, whose Dawn of the Jedi origin story was announced more than a year and a half ago (he’s still writing a first draft); Patty Jenkins, whose Rogue Squadron was revealed in December 2020 but was subsequently placed on hold (it may be back on now); Donald Glover, who’s working on a Lando Calrissian movie (which was announced in 2020 as a Disney+ series that Justin Simien was originally writing); Shawn Levy, whose talks with Lucasfilm were first reported in 2022 and who’s working with writer Jonathan Tropper on some sort of script; Simon Kinberg, who cocreated Rebels, consulted on The Force Awakens, and is now conceiving a post–Rise of Skywalker story for a trilogy announced in November; and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who was chosen to direct a Rey movie.
We’re closing in on two years since Daisy Ridley’s return to the franchise was announced, with much fanfare, at Star Wars Celebration in early April 2023. Disney recruited Ridley to star in a story about Rey rebuilding the Jedi Order that would be set 15 years after The Rise of Skywalker. This past October, Ridley offered a very vague comment on the project’s progress: “Things are evolving. I continue to be very excited. There will be an update soon.” One update came almost immediately after that: Screenwriter Steven Knight, who had replaced original screenwriters Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson, was himself departing the project.
A few weeks later, Disney removed an unspecified Star Wars theatrical release (which was widely believed to be the Rey film) from its planned December 2026 premiere date. That left The Mandalorian & Grogu—a substitute for The Mandalorian Season 4—as the only Star Wars movie due to arrive before a December 17, 2027, slot. At this point, it’s probably best to treat any non-Mando movie as vaporware until we see some concrete evidence of its existence. When Luke Skywalker said, “No one’s ever really gone,” he wasn’t referring to dismissed directors who were once attached to now-defunct films.
The most dismaying recent piece of Star Wars reporting appeared in The Hollywood Reporter last month. In 2019 and 2020, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy made the rounds to suggest that Star Wars was ready to turn a new narrative page instead of continuing to cling to the Skywalker saga even after its “final word.” Now, that sounds a lot less certain, what with the franchise’s reliance on Rey—a Skywalker by name and legacy, albeit not by birth. One “source close to the franchise” told THR, “She is the most valuable cinematic asset, in some ways maybe the only one, Star Wars has right now.” Another source echoed, “The closet is a little bare.” Suddenly, the studio is staring at Rey like the elder who greets her on Tatooine and laments, “There’s been no one for so long.”
Other anonymous insiders doubled down on the theme of division and a dearth of inspiration. If the original trilogy is the Old Testament of Star Wars, said one source who “worked on previous movies,” then the current crop of cinematic trailblazers is “being asked to create the new New Testament. And no one can agree on anything and there’s a lot of second-guessing about meanings.” (It would have been good if the sequel trilogy could have qualified as a testament in its own right.) Another source added, “Star Wars is a nostalgia-based enterprise, and they are running out of ways to create nostalgia.” Still another remarked, “To make standalone movies or [continue] the Skywalker Saga in any form is a fundamental question the company faces as it tries to move forward.” Which was fine five or six years ago, when Iger and Kennedy started contemplating that question, but discouraging if the answer still eludes them.
According to THR, Rey may be central to any on-screen efforts to extend the Star Wars timeline, which means she could be ticketed to appear in multiple movies and “potentially puts Kinberg’s trilogy story development, as early in its conceptual stages as it may be, on a collision course with the Rey standalone movie.” (Which puts me in mind of a Palpatine line: “Long have I waited, and now, your coming together is your undoing.”) Even if there is no conflict between those particular projects, as some insiders cited in the story suggest, it sounds like a lot is still up in the air.
There are numerous Star Wars movies being developed that overlap characters or timelines. They are not related but whatever one were to come out first, could, in a domino effect, impact the ones after it. … Some Lucasfilm directors are aware of what others are working on, while others are not. … “It’s a different way of development,” says another insider familiar with the company’s way of working. “There’s so much parallel work going on.”
I have a bad feeling about this. If there’s one overarching lesson Lucasfilm should’ve learned from the sequel debacle, it’s the importance of planning and ensuring that creators coordinate their efforts. Per that report, though, the theatrical pipeline appears to be no less chaotic than it was a decade ago. It’s nice that Disney’s not rushing its next non-Mandalorian movie—just the opposite, it seems—but it doesn’t bode well that no one seems to know which movie that might be.
Almost three years ago, I made the case that Star Wars still needs movies, which I still stand by. I just thought that by now, the next film might be close to fruition. Instead, Star Wars moviemaking is mired in a non-Mandoverse malaise, and the next leap forward feels far, far away. Even if Disney knows what it has to do, I don’t know whether it has the strength do it. But before five more years go by, the stewards of Star Wars must bring balance to the saga’s cinematic output and find the sweet spot between too many movies and none at all.
