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Star Wars films used to feel like the biggest event in the world. People waited years for new movies. Fans camped outside theaters. Every release felt massive, important, and unforgettable. But in today's content landscape, it seems Star Wars has morphed into just that....content. What once felt like ground breaking cinematic storytelling, has now become a passive TV event that nobody is watching.
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We've decoded the intel from the First Order spy
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And it confirms the worst. Somehow Palpatine returned. Star Wars has a problem, but it wasn't always this way
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Star Wars used to be one of the most beloved franchises on the Earth
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Today, Lucasfilm has turned one of the most powerful brands in entertainment into something audiences are starting to ignore
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And it might be too late to fix. Why do we all care about Star Wars the way we used to
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Is it just the amount of mediocre content being produced? Or is it the people at the top not setting a clear direction for the franchise
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Well, it's a complex and varied issue, but the motivation behind so many of these problems comes back to one simple reason
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Lucasfilm is no longer in the movie business. They're in the money business
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Chewing. We're home. Star Wars is in a weird place right now
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There are multiple movies and shows in development or being announced, but none of them feel like events anymore
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There's no anticipation or excitement. Even after Maul Shadow Lord comes out to rave reviews, it's just another blip on the Disney Plus radar
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Star Wars Starfighter? The Mando and Grogu movie? Everything Lucasfilm seems to be doing as a corporate entity just feels like they're borderline pleading with fans to care
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But how exactly did they screw up all the positive goodwill and brand loyalty that they built up
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Well, to really understand how we got here, we have to go back to the moment everything changed
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Begun. The Clone War has. After making the prequel trilogy, getting remarried, and then threatening to make a sequel trilogy
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George Lucas decided to pack it in. He sold Lucasfilm and all the properties housed within it to the Walt Disney Corporation in 2012
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for just over $4 billion. Yes, billion, with a B. Up until this point, the flow of mainline Star Wars content came directly from Lucas
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with a few key exceptions. Sure, you had the expanded universe, which encompassed comics, games, toys, and novels
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Then you had the animated projects, which Lucas himself was directly involved in shepherding
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Of the six existing movies, he directed four of them. He was seen as the overarching godfather of this franchise
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So what would selling Lucasfilm mean for Star Wars moving forward? Would Lucas stick around
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No, but how would they chart a course without him? Well, by October of 2012, Kathleen Kennedy, longtime Lucas and Spielberg producer
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was named as the new president of Lucasfilm. And Bob Iger, then CEO of Disney, gave her specific marching orders
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Make more Star Wars. The original plan for the sequel trilogy, if it had been made by George himself, would have followed Skywalker descendants as they dealt with a resurrected Darth Maul, who would have been a galactic crime lord
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However, there were behind-the-scenes disagreements, and Lucas ended up parting ways completely with his former company
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Well they are you know I loved them I created them I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and It hard to remember now but at this point the major opinion of the fandom was prequel trilogy bad original trilogy good So Disney
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was extremely gun shy to make anything that wasn't stylistically and tonally honorific to the
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original three films. And here's where we get to the first truly cataclysmic fumble of the Star
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Wars IP. They jettisoned the EU, they decided not to fully map out the sequel trilogy, and they
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immediately greenlit origin stories and spinoff films. First, the expanded universe. All of the
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games, books, and comics that at one point in time were heavily marketed as canon to the universe
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were all decanonized and rebranded as Star Wars Legends. But this would only be the first giant
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mistake that would send Lucasfilm into a tailspin. When it was first announced, the sequel trilogy was
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one of the most anticipated film events of the century. People have been waiting since the return
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of the Jedi to see more of Luke, Han, and Leia as they heroically attempt to stand up to the
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Empire. The only problem is, kind of seems like no one involved in these films got the memo
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They chose to have it be an intergenerational story, but opted to not have a concrete plan
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at the start for how the entire new trilogy would pan out. J.J. Abrams, the go-to director for
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relaunching a dormant franchise, was selected to head this new endeavor. Like a lot of you
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I've been a Star Wars fan since I was a kid, so it's truly a surreal thing to be working on this
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movie. I just, I can't believe it. Being a massive fan of the original trilogy, he wanted to return
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things to a narrative baseline. No green screens, no weird childhood versions of
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characters you loved, and no debates about trade sanctions in galactic parliaments
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He wanted mythic fairy tale style storytelling about good and evil, which on paper
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sounds great. The only problem is that the choices they made weren't that
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different from both Star Wars A New Hope and the future from the comics and novels that
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Lucasfilm had just decanonized. This left a weird stop start effect with the fans. Some people were upset that
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it was too close to the original film, and some people were confused as to why
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they weren't adapting the storylines from the novels. Despite Abrams and Empire Strikes Back screenwriter Lawrence Kastin writing a rough outline for
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the whole trilogy, these ideas weren't used when the handoff to Rian Johnson happened
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He wanted to try and take a huge creative swing. Was this a mistake? That depends on your perspective
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The last Jedi left some fans shocked by Luke Skywalker's story. Looking back, would you change anything in your script or do you stand by all your choices
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Nope, stand by every choice. However, the real screw-up was not seeing this creative vision through
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Fan reactions to The Last Jedi were mixed, to say the least. So when it came time to roll into the proposed third film
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they decided to completely course-correct. The original director, Colin Trevorrow, was let go
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and Abrams was brought back in to make a film that essentially amounts to Reddit, the motion picture
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Every creative choice was walked back. Character arcs were not paid off. The universe building the second installment had attempted was completely undone and they even somehow got Harrison Ford to return for five minutes for pathetic attempts at crowd The movie is as craven as it is cynical and as creatively bankrupt as it is poorly planned
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And then comes the spinoff films. Kennedy, Lucasfilm, and Disney should have pumped the brakes in order to retool what they were looking
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for going forward. There was too much money at stake. They had to keep going
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Rogue One, a direct prequel to the original Star Wars film, was released in 2016
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and despite a rocky production, made a good amount of money, and most fans loved it
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Then, Solo, a Star Wars story, hit theaters and completely belly flopped
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Audiences didn't like a new actor playing Han Solo. And frankly, the whole affair, also written by Lawrence Kasdan with his son Jonathan
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felt like a paint-by-numbers attempt at telling Han Solo's origin story. Who are your people
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I don't have people. I'm alone. Solo. Of course, none of this was helped by the fact that the original directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller
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were also fired halfway through filming, and Ron Howard was brought in to finish the film in the blandest way possible
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So what would Kennedy and Disney choose to do next? Well, they'd use Star Wars as the anchor point to launch Disney+
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The first attempt at luring longtime fans to the new platform was The Mandalorian
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The criminally simple high concept was just, we're making a Boba Fett Western procedural show, only without Boba Fett
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But thanks to the popularity of the new Baby Yoda character, who would later be named Grogu, Star Wars was back
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Well, only on the small screen. Now, with a false sense of confidence
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a raft of new Star Wars projects would be rushed into production throughout the pandemic years
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including a spinoff of Mando titled The Book of Boba Fett, which repositioned everyone's favorite evil bounty hunter as a good-hearted sheriff
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A live-action Ahsoka show that was basically Rebels Season 5, a couple more seasons of Mando with declining quality
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Obi-Wan, The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew, and two seasons of a prestige follow-up of Rogue One titled Andor
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Is that the best you got? With the exception of Andor and the first season of Mando
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everything felt like a complete cash grab and nostalgia play. But here's where things get even more complicated
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On January 15th, 2026, it was announced that Kathleen Kennedy was stepping down as the head of Lucasfilm
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Did Kennedy seem like the best fit for the job? No, not really. Did she always make the right calls
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Also, no, not really. But she was an industry veteran that produced some of the biggest films in history
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and she navigated the shifting priorities of the Disney landscape pretty well
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One of the main critiques levied against her is that she seemingly wasn't a fan of Star Wars
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which is true. Would things have gone differently if she was a hardcore fan? Now that's up for debate
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What would this new age of Lucasfilm look like after Kathy left? Dave Filoni and Lin-Win Brennan were named as co-heads of Lucasfilm moving forward
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which is set up to mimic the current DC film situation Filoni is the James Gunn handling the creative and Brennan is the Peter Safran handling the business and logistics side of things Some longtime fans firmly believe that
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Filoni is a great choice. He is a mega fan, after all. His experience on both sides of the live
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action and animation divide, his studying directly with George Lucas, immediately separate him from
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Kennedy's career pedigree. He's had some pretty major successes with the first few seasons of
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Mandalorian and some of the animated shows he's helped create. His creative impulses seem to lean
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more towards weaving connective tissue out of what's come before, less than bold new initiatives
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The best part about how the MCU is set up and how Lucasfilm used to be set up is that there was a
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bit of separation of church and state. Both Kevin Feige and Kathleen Kennedy were non-writing
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producers, and the DCEU and now this new version of Lucasfilm have adopted for creatives to be in
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charge of the direction of the universe. Strategically, setting up your studio like this
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is just really risky. This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them. Robert Evans didn't
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direct The Godfather. He had a ton of other movies to worry about. His entire career didn't sink or
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swim on one picture. If Gunn's Superman had failed, would he still be the head honcho? That's anyone's
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guess. So if Mando and Grogu underperforms at the box office, what does that mean for the future of
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Lucasfilm? Basically, every version of Lucasfilm has had its issues. First, it was Lucas not wanting
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to make sequels after the conclusion of Return of the Jedi. Then it was him surrounding himself with Yes Men
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which enabled the prequels to be what they are. Then it was Kathleen Kennedy being picked
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and her fumbling the ball at some key junctures, most specifically not having a real plan
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for the sequel trilogy. And now we're living through the knock-on effects of the death rattle of the streaming bubble
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Disney pivoted hard into streaming. It worked for a hot second, and then they realized there isn't infinite scalability
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in subscriber numbers, so they are going back to what sort of worked before theatrical distribution
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The question is, is it too late? And now the real good guys are coming
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The good guys. No one's coming to save you, boy. Star Wars used to be something you camped out
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in front of a movie theater for two weeks to go and see. And now it seems like something that visually
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looks like a made-for-TV movie that your dad is going to watch on a Sunday afternoon
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We're not going to stop getting Star Wars anytime soon, and Dave Filoni is not leaving Lucasfilm
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in a timely manner either, even though he probably should. At this point, it's really not a problem with Lucasfilm as a company
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It's a problem with all of us that we keep going to the same source of these stories
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and expecting something different when that's just fundamentally not going to happen
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Andor was a fantastic representation of what Star Wars could be, but it's the outlier
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The rest of Star Wars lacks the maturity, depth, and joy to appeal to either young or adult viewers
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The problem with Lucasfilm isn't that there is a problem with Lucasfilm
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it's that there's nothing left but the corporate empire stripped for parts