The first three episodes of Andor debuted today on Disney+. Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka series is coming out, along with season 3 of The Mandalorian and another series called Skeleton Crew with Jude Law. Meanwhile not a single movie has gone into production. Why has Disney been able to churn out hours and hours of TV Star Wars, but hasn’t made a single movie since RoS? It’s not as if the tv shows are low-budget. Marvel clearly isn’t having the same problem.
All of the films revolve around characters and events from Episode 4. What’s left? An Artoo and Threepio film?
I think in a way the movies are played out. Generally, we look for blockbuster movies to involve the biggest trials, and they’ve taken 9 movies to show the rise and fall of the empire, the Skywalkers, the Sith and the Jedi. What could they possibly show next that will be interesting?
The TV series naturally focus on much smaller problems, much more personal journeys, which don’t necessarily depend on galaxy spanning intrigue and don’t rely on nostalgia of the original trilogy.
I’d say they need to develop a base of new content that can be leveraged for a big movie.
Imo, marvel has the opposite problem as star wars: still putting out decent movies, but subpar tv shows (and too many of them) (wandavision and loki notwithstanding). Star wars has no new movies, and the last two in their saga series were subpar. But their tv shows are outstanding (boba fett notwithstanding).
I’d like to see star wars jump into a different era, either into the deep past for some new jedi and sith stories or into the future for something altogether new, possibly without any jedi or sith at all, a new order of force users.
If the Force is the glue holding the whole franchise together, I’m surprised it has lasted this long. IMO, the Force has always been the weakest and least interesting thing about Star Wars.
A galaxy where many people have magical powers? That’s what makes it space fantasy, and yeah, that’s what i love about it. I don’t care if they’re called jedi or sith, but watching people use those powers for good and evil is fun.
I suspect that part of it is also that Solo: A Star Wars Story was not nearly as successful as they had hoped it would be, and that put the brakes on additional development of non-Skywalker Saga films. As a result, several of the projects which had been planned as stand-alone Star Wars films, prior to Solo’s release, such as the Boba Fett film, and the Obi-Wan Kenobi film, instead wound up being Disney+ series.
That said, there is a new Star Wars film, directed by Taika Waititi, which is currently slated for release in late 2023 (though little more is known about it).
Also, Patty Jenkins is working on a film around Rogue Squadron, though that looks to be even further down the road than Waititi’s film.
There are several other SW film projects in development (including a trilogy by Rian Johnson) though none of those seem to be anywhere close to production.
This, I agree with. I would love to see a movie with the old Jedi Order, against a fully-formed Sith Empire – the sort of setting that’s been featured in video games, like the Knights of the Old Republic games, and the Star Wars: the Old Republic MMORPG, rather than seeing Lucasfilm, again and again, dip into the same 50-year span of galactic history.
I’d suggest a reboot of the Odd Couple. Keep it set in New York, but with C3PO as Felix and R2D2 as Oscar.
#ifeelold
And a couple electric kettles as the Pigeon Sisters.
I agree with Kenobi (It does seem like he would be an expert on this)
I think part of what we’re seeing is that nowadays, the distinction between “movie” and “TV show” is blurring.
I do not think there will be many movies made. If they can achieve their goals without a cinematic release, why go there at all*? This really ought to apply globally, but Disney is a visible example as both Marvel and Star Wars thrive on TV.
*As time goes on, I see less and less justification for the absurd expense of a 2hr movie over a 10hr TV series
About a week ago, Disney removed Rogue Squadron from its calendar. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Disney still has two untitled Star Wars films on its calendar: Dec. 19, 2025, and Dec. 17, 2027. It also has a number of Star Wars films in development, including one directed by Taika Waititi.”
Ahh, I missed that. Thank you for the update. (A shame, as I had hopes for that film.)
Exactly. There’s plenty of talk about new movies, but that’s it. They can’t seem to commit to actually begin filming.
They milked that cow till it was bone dry, killing the cow in the process.
To quote James Stephanie Sterling;
There definitely seems to be a lot of “Sure, this is a solid pitch from a director with a proven record and our audience wants to see it, but what if it DOESN’T make a billion dollars on opening weekend and smash all existing box office records and sweep every category at the Oscars?” level of FUD happening on the production side of things.
I think Disney’s gone in the right direction. The movies tend to trip over their own feet with visual effects/big budget scenes, and don’t spend enough time on being good movies in their own right. I would bet you could have distilled “Rise of Skywalker” down into a good solid hour TV episode, if they’d cut the extraneous garbage and seriously curtailed the huge visual effect scenes. And that’s 90% of the problem with the movies- they’re bloated and centered on bamboozling the audience with crazy effects and sound, and not so much with good storytelling.
The shows can’t do that- they have to have decent enough stories to engage for 10 or so half-hour stories that are mostly, but not entirely stand-alone. So they get more screen time, but they’re more constrained as well. Everything has to have more of a narrative purpose, because they have little time to throw away.
And to go with that, I think that @Chronos is right, albeit maybe not the way they’re thinking. I don’t think the distinction is blurring, so much as shifting. Look at the big fictional stories of the past decade or so- have any of them been movies? If so, it’s very few. Instead, they’re short-run cable TV shows- Game of Thrones, Westworld, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, etc…
Used to be that the big “stories” were movie ones, and you watched TV essentially to kill time. Most shows were relentlessly episodic- they started and ended at the same place, reset for the next week, with sitcoms adhering even more doggedly to that format.
But now, the popular storytelling is going on in cable/streaming television. That’s where the really interesting stuff is being shown now. I’m not sure why movies have lost that storytelling primacy, but it is definitely the case.
So I’d count it as a very good thing that Disney’s not making more movies, and is making TV instead.
I like the idea of the Force as a powerful spiritual device that’s bigger than the individual or technology. It gets less interesting when you get a platoon of Jedi superheroes running around, jumping and flipping and swinging lightsabers. For all of the missteps that Rian Johnson took with The Last Jedi, I really liked the thought that the Force is not just for Sith and Jedi, it’s for the little kid in the stable too.
Star Wars has been a very resilient franchise, I think. Lucas struck gold with his Flash Gordon-Hero’s Journey-Hidden Fortress-WWII dogfighting space pulp fantasy movie and was able to build from there and make one and a half more very good movies. The prequels, as had been discussed thoroughly, had some neat moments but weren’t really that great altogether. The latest trilogy was a disjointed mess but Star Wars will continue.
Another trilogy would be neat and I would like for them to get beyond the Skywalkers and the Palpatines. Stories about the Old Republic would be interesting and I imagine they’re being discussed. They really need to put a Kevin Feige in charge of the whole trilogy though to keep it all consistent and coherent. John Favereau and Dave Filoni have shown themselves capable with their efforts in the past and I think they’re the kind of guys who could put the “magic” back into a Star Wars trilogy.
Sort of the same thing is going on at Paramount with the Star Trek franchise, with multiple shows on Paramount+ but only vague promises of future films.