Here's How We Can Fix Star Wars

Star Wars, to me, is like that out-of-control family member you desperately wish could get their life together. I want to connect with you again. I want to believe again, but you just keep fucking things up for yourself. I’m not going to come on here and write about everything that’s wrong with the Star Wars universe because it would be disingenuous in many ways. I won’t claim I’ve seen everything Disney has put out since they took over the franchise. My biggest issue is that there’s been way too much over-saturation. Star Wars doesn’t feel important anymore because Star Wars doesn’t want to be important anymore. You can turn on your laptop at any time of the day and watch Star Wars happen. The older I get, the more I realize that every franchise eventually becomes another corporate product. I cannot change that, but it was recently announced that Star Wars will be moving ahead with episodes 10, 11, and 12. I’ll believe it when I see it. The number of Star Wars projects that have been greenlit and then canceled over the last decade is unbelievable. It’s quite frankly embarrassing. But this might be the time in which it sticks. We seem about due for another saga, and while Star Wars won’t ask for my input, I figure I’d come on here and give it anyway.

The arc that Star Wars is going through now reminds me a lot of where the Batman franchise was in the late 90s/early 2000s. I know that Star Wars is a much more expensive universe, but the world of Batman had a lot of ups and downs in the first decade of its cinematic life. You had the Tim Burton films, which were beautiful to look at but received mixed reception. The first Joel Schumacher movie was incredibly successful but led to one of the all-time Hollywood bombs in Batman and Robin. You occasionally get great TV shows like Batman, The Animated Series, and Batman Beyond, but it never felt like there was anything cohesive that existed on the big screen. They tried for years to make sequels or reinvent the lore, and it ultimately took Christopher Nolan coming in with a five-minute pitch to Warner Brothers to realize that they finally had the formula down. It was time for a full reboot—no need to connect to anything else. Tell a contained story with new characters.

The universe has gotten too funky with trying to connect everything back to the Skywalkers. The timeline is starting to get convoluted. The first two seasons of The Mandalorian work as well as they do is that they are so self-contained. I know they brought in Boba Fett and even Luke Skywalker toward the end of the second season, but The Mandalorian was easily accessible for people who weren’t even huge Star Wars fans. There needs to be a full-on reset. It would be terrible to remake the original series or even remake the prequel trilogy. The best course of action is to either go years and years in the past or years and years in the future and tell a brand new story. Because the world of Star Wars is very cool, but the characters involved in those worlds are often pretty underwhelming or underdeveloped.

Even though we look at it with disdain now, the idea of what the sequel trilogy was going for was actually very cool. Hand things over to a new generation while also honoring the previous generation. The difference is that, in this particular instance, there’s no previous generation to honor. People don’t have the attachment to the sequel trilogy they did to the original films. It’s one of those instances where it’s best to just let the past be. One of the many reasons why the original trilogy works as well as it does is that you can show it to somebody who does not know Star Wars, and they can fall in love with the world in the characters. You can’t do that with the prequel trilogy, and you sure as hell can’t do that with the sequel trilogy. I think it’s contributed to the divisive nature of those films. I’m not saying to make a Star Wars trilogy for people who don’t like Star Wars, but I also think that there are certain principles that every Star Wars film feels like it needs to abide by. In reality, what fans are looking for is just a quality product. The Empire Strikes Back is rightfully considered the best Star Wars movie; in many ways, it goes against the classic tropes that we have become accustomed to seeing in those films.

One of the biggest problems that the last Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, ran into was spending so much time trying to win back the fans that they lost with The Last Jedi. I worry that they’re going to do that with the next saga. It seems as though Daisy Ridley is attached to come back as Rey, and while there’s nothing hateable about the character of Rey, she was the protagonist for a series that went off the rails after a successful first chapter. We learned with stuff like The Mandalorian and Andor that Star Wars doesn’t have to be tethered to what came before. Get an actual Director with a real vision to tell their story. And for the love of God, plan this shit out in advance this time.