Cognition Dissemination: May the 4th Be with a Bold Star Wars Future
This May the 4th occasion is offering the newest reminder that Star Wars remains a big franchise in terms of popularity, sometimes against Disney’s better judgment. Their initial plan to release one film a year was a misguided one when they first embarked on this quest through the series’ galaxy after acquiring Lucasfilm and Star Wars itself from George Lucas in 2013. Their first efforts seemed fine enough with the The Force Awakens despite it being rudimentary, but hit an inevitable wall with The Rise of Skywalker a mere four years afterward.
To say the franchise merely hit a wall with TROS is putting it lightly. The movie’s story decisions were so pitiful that they brought down several previous installments in the franchise. It’s a good thing The Mandalorian was airing around the same time, or we may not have been celebrating today’s occasion at the same volume. For as much as that show and The Bad Batch are trying to come up with ways to explain the worst aspects of TROS’ story, they’re unlikely to wash away the entire stench.
Treading familiar ground continues to work well enough for the Star Wars franchise among the wider (read: not too online) audience, but that will only last for so long. It is my hope — my plea — that the franchise will get bold again. It should.
It would be lovely if most new Star Wars works were set in, well, a galaxy far, far away, in terms of its time. These would ideally be set thousands of years before and after the current and well-trodden Skywalker Saga timeline. This is what Disney should have done the moment they obtained the franchise, at least in retrospect, unless they planned on going through with Lucas’ original ideas for a new set of movies. It’s easy for me to say this now, after the movies released and with Disney’s desire to distance themselves from them after TROS (for a time, anyway), but the Sequel Trilogy was always doomed to be compared to the quality and especially the powerful nostalgia associated with the older movies. Lucasfilm and Disney could have crafted their own universe within a universe immediately, but it was far too easy to cash in on the fanbase’s fond memories.
Not to say that it isn’t possible to craft good stories that take place within familiar ground. Andor was a sterling example of exemplary storytelling, with its emphasis on the political thriller and space fascism aspects during one of the darkest times for the galaxy making for one of the best sci-fi works in recent memory. I won’t lie when I say that I enjoyed stuff like the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, and Ahsoka to a lesser extent. But all these works are making what’s supposed to be a large galaxy feel small, and it will only feel more enclosed in terms of its potential by continuing to retread familiarity.
Disney and Lucasfilm are, to be fair, making steps towards crafting newer segments of the franchise’s universe to explore. The High Republic era, which takes place between 50 to 150 years before The Phantom Menace, started being explored a couple of years ago, with several novels, comics, and a Disney Junior animated series releasing since. It will finally make its way into the live-action sphere through The Acolyte, which begins next month and received a new trailer today, and into games with Star Wars Eclipse from Quantic Dream… whenever. The novels and comics have been well received, so there should be plenty of new tales to tell from the era over the next several years.
It’s a shame that’s largely as far as Disney is willing to go. Part of the reason why Star Wars and several other franchises are in their current messes is thanks to companies not wanting to venture too far away from established ground. Travelling to an era several centuries or even millennia from current works would require a writing team hunching together to come up with the worldbuilding that would occur over time. That would take a while, too long for the content-driven streaming world.
This is also the reason why the “Blood Moon” Game of Thrones spinoff that was set to take place 5,000 years before the main Game of Thrones series was cancelled — alongside the pilot not being that well received after the original show’s divisive ending. It was replaced with House of the Dragon, which takes place not even 200 years before the original series.
There’s potential for Star Wars to explore unfamiliar ground, however. One of the upcoming movies that hopefully won’t join the legion of cancelled projects is Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi. The story is set to tackle the origins of the Force millennia before any prior Star Wars work, even before The Old Republic content, from director James Mangold. There’s a question of whether this era really needs exploration at all, yes, but hey, it’s something new. Let’s leave it at that for now.
All the current stuff is nice, but a lot of it exists for the sake of having more content to continue bolstering streaming services, Disney Plus in this current case. Recent news has given me a new hope that the Forth Force will be with the franchise and its creative team despite being attached to a company resistant towards taking risks, one gearing up to tighten the knots for their bags of money further after last year’s string of theatrical box office failures and streaming being a money loser for every big company outside Netflix. In the meantime, I guess we should hope the newest stuff they have cooking turns out well. It’s a shame the Fandom Menace will always be with us too, though.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
