There’s another trilogy of Star Wars films coming, and let’s be honest: they are doomed.
There’s been a wild will-they-won’t-they game going over whether Disney would plough ahead with plans for a post-The Rise Of Skywalker series of Star Wars films after the… shall we say “muted” response to Solo: A Star Wars Story and the comparative disappointment of The Last Jedi.
But after many rumours of cancellations, TLJ’s director Rian Johnson has confirmed that yes, a new trilogy is happening and yes, he’ll be directing at least the first one – although the whole “happening in 2022” thing seems to have been gently put aside.
“We’re doing something that steps beyond the legacy characters. What does that look like? To me, the blue sky element of it is what was most striking about it,” he told Observer. “It really makes you think and figure out what the essence of Star Wars is for me and what that will look like moving forward.”
Here’s the thing: we know what Star Wars is looking like. And that is “tired”.
And as we’ve seen with the sequels the franchise is trapped between being over reverent about the past (like The Force Awaken‘s beat-for-beat copy of A New Hope) and the fact that the more they get away from their previous formulas, the more people complain (see: the ridiculous monster chasing Han and Chewie in The Force Awakens, all the internet response to The Last Jedi).
Also, as befits a pioneering genre-defining film like the first Star Wars film, the competition didn’t exist. Science fiction movies were either silly or over-serious, not playful and mythic.
Since then there are some massive franchises which have taken their cues from Star Wars and created their own engaging myths – most notably the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Harry Potter.
Furthermore, today’s audiences have so very much to inspire their fantasies, while people enamoured of the way George Lucas built entire fictional universes have Game of Thrones, or the Lord Of The Rings, or… well, again, Marvel.
Star Wars has nostalgia and… um, that’s kind of it.
And pure nostalgia isn’t doing the job. The Star Wars Galaxies Edge section of Disney’s parks hasn’t proved to be the hit the company had assumed, (at least, not as yet) proving that making a Star Wars thing isn’t a guaranteed home run.
And while kids in the 70s and 80s desperately wanted to be Luke and Leia and Han, are there currently new generations of kids aching to be Rey, or Poe Dameron, or Finn? More specifically, do they want that more than they want to be Hermoine or Black Panther or Jon Snow?
It’s not a problem exclusive to Star Wars either. Alien was similarly groundbreaking for science fiction upon its release, but there’s not a person on the planet that would look at any of the sequels, prequels or spinoffs since 1986 and and go “yeah, this is definitely better than the first two films.”
And yes, maybe Johnson will find a way to stay true to the legacy while exciting and inspiring a new generation, in a way that neither the prequel nor sequel films quite managed to do.
Or maybe Star Wars is doomed to inhabit the same franchise graveyard that contains such failed reboots as the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, Knight Rider and Men In Black. Some stories just aren’t as timeless as you’d assume.