Is Star Wars Okay?
The all-encompassing space fantasy series is in something of a tailspin (and it's not Kathleen Kennedy's fault)
The Acolyte, the latest Disney+ Star Wars series, was cancelled earlier this week, the first of its kind to ever receive an official axing. Though its ratings and reviews were lackluster, the series was planned for multiple seasons. Its cancellation comes at a weird point in what should otherwise be Disney’s crown jewel. Since purchasing Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney’s shepherding of the colossal space fantasy franchise has been riddled with confounding and chaotic decision-making. The Acolyte’s cancellation begs the question: Is Star Wars okay?
While it may seem impossible, there was a time before Star Wars. The effect of the original 1977 film, written and directed by George Lucas, is impossible to overstate. Undeniably kept alive by an elaborate network of television shows, books, comics, games, and toys, Star Wars was always, first and foremost, a film franchise, with the various multimedia endeavors either supporting or expanding the stories before, during, and after the films, all telling a singular narrative overseen by Lucasfilm trusts that largely just did stuff to see what stuck. For 35 years of its life, Star Wars was a choose your own adventure; sure, everyone watched the movies, but engaging with the rest was purely individual discretion.
Yet all that changed with Disney, which more minutely managed its latest IP to ensure total brand commitment. Under Lucasfilm chair Kathleen Kennedy, characters and storylines became increasingly interconnected and self-referential, turning Star Wars into a narcissistic, alienating endeavor incapable of escaping its own shadow. Continually reflexive and rarely innovative, Disney has reduced Star Wars to an oversaturated, unceasing series of shows to keep subscribers on their steaming service. Where Star Wars used to be movies released every few years with decades between trilogies, Disney’s tenure started with yearly films and became regular television stories. The luster is gone and its specialness dwindled, in part due to these projects’ mixed degrees of quality.
Some were fundamentally misguided: The Book of Boba Fett seemed apathetic at best toward its title character, shifting focus partway through its single season to celebrate main characters from its parent series, The Mandalorian; that series, while welcoming and refreshing at first, became all about masked, stoic warriors rambling about some lost creed or whatever while continually featuring the live-action debut of myriad cartoon characters or set up other stories. At times, modern Star Wars feels less like art or entertainment and more like dramatically staged Wikipedia articles.
Conversely, The Last Jedi, the middle part of the 2010s sequel trilogy, is both deeply personal and heartfelt while stunningly ambitious, creating a colorful world powered by the individual’s resistance to tyranny all while directly confronting the franchise’s relationship with its past; similarly, 2022’s first season of Andor proved a profoundly compelling, thrilling, and inspirational tome on all sides of fascism. Occasionally Disney even empowered creatives to center new, diverse perspectives on Star Wars, which previously was a little myopic in its representation. Ideally, Star Wars was becoming anything to anyone in the new era.
In short, it was the best of Star Wars, it was the worst of Star Wars. Usually telling tales of magic space cops and dark wizards, bounty hunters, politicians and rogues, the power of human struggle, and the like, recent years of Star Wars suggest its truest enemy might be something more insidious: the fanbase.
Reaction to the sequel films, particularly The Last Jedi, was famously cruel and bitter, ostensibly breaking a cacophonous dam of grousing and pent-up aggression. (Not to mention those bothered by stories centering women, people of color, non-heteronormativity, etc.) Anyone browsing a Star Wars subreddit or X Twitter thread would realize no one hates Star Wars like Star Wars fans. Unfortunately, that bell can never be unrung in the minds of Lucasfilm’s and Disney’s corporate overlords such as Kennedy, as they live in constant fear of backlash. Too afraid to make it anything other those good feelings fans had as kids, Star Wars is stuck in this arrested, unprogressive state, moving not forward but further and further inward.
The issue is that this chase is unending and, ultimately, unfulfilling. All fans of anything, especially a media empire as vast as Star Wars’s, cannot be appeased by all things, particularly when they feel themselves constantly being catered to and humored. Repeated nostalgia hits only numb the initial high, causing increasingly higher dosing to decreasing effect. Star Wars will rarely, if ever, be as good as that first time, nor should it try to be. It won’t mean what it did when you were seven because nothing means what it did when you were seven, not to mention that you aren’t seven, you’re 38.
Only in liberating itself from these fears can Star Wars innovate and reclaim itself. (Also, make a damn movie, ideally starring new characters that people can understand without having seen tens of hours of television.) Sure, it’s best for kids – something we all need reminding of – but Star Wars can still be anything to anyone, however it will eventually stop being something if it keeps caring what anonymous trolls think of it. Solely by executives and fans letting go and allowing Star Wars to evolve can it ever be its best self. Kennedy is clearly capable of overseeing great work; a quick glance of her filmography reveals she almost exclusively produces bangers unconcerned with dorks on YouTube.
By a similar token, George Lucas clearly gave no shits when writing Jar Jar Binks. Now Jar Jar probably isn’t the height of artistry, but you know what else was created without concern for a fanbase’s reaction? A certain 1977 film called Star Wars. So, 47 years later and a decade into new leadership, is Star Wars okay? No, not at all. It could be okay, though, if it returned to its original mindset and got out of its own damn way.