It’s worth noting before we start that Disney has already started to turn a profit on the Star Wars franchise despite spending over $4 Billion on acquiring Lucasfilm in 2012. Yet, it would also be fair to say that it’s not all been rainbows and profit for the House of Mouse when it comes to Star Wars.

Solo was a tremendous flop at the box office, it was just a film that you got the feeling no fans actually wanted to see. Although reactions are always varied, I do get the feeling that not a lot of Star Wars fans liked the movie anyway, though it is always subjective. Then we also have the reshoots and director changes to factor in, and what we end up with is an expensive and unprofitable movie that no one really wanted anyway. We also have Rogue One which although it didn’t cots as much overall, it still had a lot of production issues and wasn’t loved by many critics, despite being slightly more accepted by Star Wars fans in general.

I cannot ignore either the divisive reception to Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which is still being debated endlessly by fans of the franchise two years later. The sequel trilogy will end this December with The Rise of Skywalker, but Disney has already stopped greenlighting any filler movies. The idea was to space out the new trilogy with anthology movies in between. However, Solo put an end to that for now, it didn’t kill the ideas for those stories completely though. Bob Iger the CEO of Disney had previously hinted that perhaps Disney had tried to do too much with Star Wars and it could be time to just pull back a little. In a recent interview with The NY Times Iger once again states that perhaps they did try to move too fast with this franchise, but he still feels like the talent is there to make great stories moving forward.

“I just think that we might’ve put a little bit too much in the marketplace too fast.” But, he adds, “I think the storytelling capabilities of the company are endless because of the talent we have at the company, and the talent we have at the company is better than it’s ever been, in part because of the influx of people from Fox.”

Perhaps the magic ingredient that wasn’t there previously is Disney+? The new streaming platform feels like the best home for these smaller scale stories and allows a focus on story and character that movies just cannot come close to. The Mandalorian has Star Wars fans salivating and yet it’s probably the remnants of a planned Boba Fett movie that again, fans didn’t appear to want to see. However, change it to a new character, make it six hours and focus on the storytelling more than the spectacle, maybe even tonally darken it a little, and it seems like a winner. Then we have the planned Obi-Wan movie with Ewan McGregor that has now turned into an Obi-Wan Disney+ show and again, it has fans more excited as a result. Now there are also rumors that Solo could be spun off into it’s own Disney+ series focussing on the criminal underworld, and again, it has fans more excited than a movie explaining every aspect of Han Solo’s mythology did.

When it comes to the movies, the next step is something pretty mysterious and in the hands of former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. We know it’s a trilogy, and honestly that’s about it. We also have another planned trilogy from controversial Rian Johnson to come eventually, and again, we have no idea where that could go as yet, in fact I;m not sure he fully knows the answer to that yet himself.

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Is the answer for Disney simply to stick to big trilogies for the movies and adapt their other ideas into long form streaming shows? So far it appears to be working, but only time will tell, and we still have to see how audiences react to The Rise of Skywalker. Personally, I feel like the decision to make an Episode 7-9 was very risky, simply because of how Episode 6 ended the story being told in the other five Episodes to that point. However, I guess we will find out pretty soon won’t we?

What do you think of Disney’s approach to Star Wars so far and do you agree with Iger’s comments? Leave your thoughts in the usual place below if you have any.

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