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WWhen Disney bought Lucasfilm for around $4bn in 2012, it must have felt like an obvious business venture: who wouldn’t throw a lot of money at an event boasting an entire galaxy in a box? For a while, it seemed too good not to happen. The Force Awakens made more than $2bn worldwide. Rogue One made over $1bn. The Last Jedi made more than $1.3bn, despite starting a traditional war so that radios could power the Death Star. Most of the fandom hates Rise of Skywalker, but the blockbuster movie still earned Disney more than $1bn.
Then came Disney+, a great way to deliver. No more waiting years between movies: just watch for a few months and something will appear on the conveyor belt. Andor, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, The Mandalorian. Holes were filled, side characters got their magnum opus, and we all learned more about the central management of galactic fascism than we thought. So why are we, nearly 14 years after Star Wars’ biggest power change, reading so many claims that the saga is over? The Mandalorian and Grogu, at the time of writing, has a 61% on Rotten Tomatoespush it into the “new” category. Its advantages, to say the least, are that it is cute, fast, polished and has Baby Yoda, a character designed to be fun. On the negative side, critics have complained that the film looks too thin, cheesy and cheesy for television, detracting from Star Wars’ biggest return to the bigger picture than Disney+’s three episodes.
Is Star Wars now a viable franchise, especially on the big screen? Because really, Jon Favreau’s movie is really good. Without giving too much away, there are callbacks to bad guys from good TV shows, Mando runs hurricane gear in a junkyard with clean equipment better than ever, and Grogu takes down new cute rabbit holes. So what is the problem? It can’t just be that Disney didn’t try. If anything, the company has tried almost everything. It gently rebooted the original trilogy with The Force Awakens, giving fans a classic look in a new guise. It worked for business, but it also set a trap. Fans asked for the old magic, and Disney gave it to them, literally. Then came Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which did what people like to say they want franchise films to do: subvert the mythology, subvert the heroes – burn down the museum. It also revealed the true dangers of today’s blockbuster movies in the age of social media: audiences all want the exact opposite, and they’re quick to announce this while accusing everyone else of killing their childhood. The Rise of Skywalker then tried to solve this problem by turning the previous film into a hole. The results did not please anyone.
And back to Mando: characters Star Wars fans really love; There are no major revelations about the Force, or the critical line-up of our main players. Mando is not genetically related to Boba Fett, and Grogu is not the son of Yoda and Yaddle. A fun, classic matinee adventure set between the fall of the Galactic Empire and the rise of the evil First Order. For fans of the TV show, this would be great. But if it’s not what people expect from Star Wars on the big screen, this begs the question: did Lucas know what he was doing when he took the money and walked away? After all, Star Wars has always been difficult to fix. The basics were very divisive. The Ewoks were not everyone’s cup of tea. Let’s not even talk about 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.
Perhaps we all missed one very important fact about the original trilogy: it had a chance to end. Lucas fictional triptych told a simple story, a fable. Farm boy finds destiny. The princess leads the rebellion. Scoundrel finds reason. Father has been redeemed. The kingdom is falling. It worked because it felt like it was over, yet every attempt to continue since then has reopened the wound. The empire did not really fall. The Jedi never really returned. Luke did not revise the plan. Palpatine wasn’t dead yet. The victory at Endor was not the end of the tyranny, but a temporary change of administration. Once you accept all of that, the whole thing folds. If every happy ending has to be changed in order for something else to appear, the tale begins to diminish at every turn. Star Wars it starts to feel like a galaxy where no one is allowed to rest, heal, learn or complete a mental arc.
Although The Mandalorianwhat starts out pretty well as a western-leaning tale of a bounty hunter and his little frog-stealing ward, ends up dragging in a tractor-trailer pile of helmets, bloody helmets, clones, councils, dark weapons and legacy cameos. It begins to resemble the inevitable end of Disney marketing: a galaxy in a box, a legend on a conveyor belt, trying to resell us what we bought last time – in a slightly brighter packaging.
