It was the announcement we had all been waiting for at Friday’s Star Wars Celebration – news of the future of the gilded space saga on the big screen. Because it is all very well experiencing every fabulous new episode of The Mandalorian that debuts on Disney+ from the comfort of our own homes; it is wonderful to see Luke Skywalker restored to his lightsaber-wielding prime by the power of motion capture in The Book of Boba Fett; and it is fascinating to witness how complex, cosmic political machinations on Coruscant insidiously feed into the bloody-knuckled everyday lives of galactic hoi polloi in Andor … but this is Star Wars we are talking about.
When Yoda reveals under X-wing landing lights that another Jedi hope is still out there; when Darth Vader tells a disbelieving Luke that his parentage isn’t quite as simple as he might have been led to believe; when the Death Star gets blown to smithereens in 1977’s series opener – all these moments draw much of their splendour from the shared experience that comes with seeing a movie at the cinema, rapt in the darkness among hundreds of fellow souls. In many ways, for multiple generations, Star Wars is the movies. So it has been a strange experience watching the saga morph slowly into a small-screen affair after the abject failure of 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, even if shows such as The Mandalorian, Andor and the forthcoming Ahsoka (all of which provided genuinely thrilling updates at Celebration) have done much to keep fans happy in the meantime.
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy revealed at London’s ExCel that the Disney-owned studio now envisages Star Wars as a saga that takes place across vast stretches of time, from the very early days of the Jedi, to a future beyond Rise of Skywalker. We’ve already seen with the stupendous Mandalorian and the mercurial The Book of Boba Fett that there’s plenty of fertile ground in the period just after the original trilogy took place, as the last vestiges of the fallen Empire battle the forces of the New Republic. And Celebration confirmed that Star Wars stalwart Dave Filoni will oversee a new movie that is expected to act as a climactic cinematic event for shows such as The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Baby Yoda and Mando on the big screen? It had to happen, and now it will.
The second new film, it was revealed, will see James Mangold overseeing a tale set in the earliest days of the Force. Its central protagonist will be a Jedi who learns to use their powers to battle oppression in an era of chaos. Will we finally get to learn more about George Lucas’s legendary Whills, the early Force wielders rumoured to hold the secret to becoming a Force Ghost? Or will Disney take Star Wars mythos in a completely new direction now that Lucas is no longer in charge?
Either way, this feels like a brave decision by Lucasfilm, largely because such an early period in Star Wars “history” remains mostly unwritten. So far the post-Lucas era has been characterised by incisive, glorious work carried out whenever new creators have had very little to go on (The Mandalorian), and at the other end of the spectrum, clumsy cannibalisation of past glories (The Rise of Skywalker and the worst bits of The Force Awakens and The Book of Boba Fett). So it bodes well that Mangold will be working in a period set well before the rise of the Galactic Empire, during an era that remains shrouded in mystery.
The final new movie, which will be overseen by Ms Marvel’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, might just end up being the most divisive. Centred on the building of a new Jedi Order and the powers that rise up to tear it down, a decade after the events of Rise of Skywalker, it will see the return of Daisy Ridley’s Rey from the sequel trilogy. While it’s unlikely that anyone could mess up Star Wars quite so appallingly as JJ Abrams did with that execrable movie, this feels a bit like Lucasfilm’s decision to bring back the prequels’ much-maligned Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in the middling recent Obi-Wan Kenobi show.
Rise of Skywalker was such an ill-conceived and creatively pathetic entry that many Star Wars fans have done our best to wipe it from the memory banks. While Ridley herself did nothing wrong in any of her three films, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, it doesn’t exactly feel as if she deserves Star Wars legend status either.
It will certainly be intriguing to see if Rey has learned anything from the events of the past as she forges the Jedi order anew – might these new lightsaber-wielding heroes be freed from the rigid priestly duties that ultimately caused Anakin to turn to the dark side? Is it wise to teach your young padawan that controlling the minds of weaker creatures is the quickest and easiest way to get out of any difficult situation?
But it’s even more vital that Obaid-Chinoy avoids the sequel trilogy’s unwieldy cribbing from the past, and finds new stories to inspire a fresh generation of fans. It’s hard to see how the newly announced Star Wars film can do that with Rey’s presence reminding us at every moment that they really did try to bring back the Emperor as a sort of Sith zombie.
Perhaps she will spend most of the movie being moaned at by the force ghosts of Luke, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Kylo Ren, all of whom are angrily decrying the wasted potential of the greatest space opera of all time reduced to a mess of bad planning and warring directors. It’s slightly worrying that the Mando dream team of Favreau and Filoni don’t seem to be heavily involved in this one at all.
And yet everything is going so swimmingly for Star Wars that it’s impossible not to be optimistic. It feels as if we are in a place as fans that’s a million parsecs away from Rise of Skywalker: this is an era in which Lucasfilm’s modus operandi seems to be to find great creatives who genuinely love Star Wars and let them loose in the galactic sandpit. If that approach continues as the saga returns to the big screen – and if Obaid-Chinoy’s film can find a way to look forward rather than back – then there might just be hope yet.
