It’s no secret that the dismal box office return of Solo: A Star Wars Story prompted a great deal of soul-searching over at Lucasfilm Towers.
Despite charting the galactic origins of Han Solo, arguably the greatest smuggler of them all, Ron Howard’s standalone adventure struggled to leave much of a dent on the box office charts, and fell far short of its fellow Star Wars anthology, Rogue One, when the final numbers were counted.
And so, Disney immediately pumped the brakes on its Star Wars spinoff movies to instead focus on the mainline franchise, beginning with The Rise of Skywalker. Other stories will be spun out onto television in the vein of The Mandalorian, but whereas Marvel Studios is able to craft entire trilogies around its characters, Lucasfilm is quite limited by the existing Star Wars lore.
But don’t just take our word for it; here’s Kathleen Kennedy, explaining to Vanity Fair why Star Wars will never follow the same blueprint as the MCU.
I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has. On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning, we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.
That question will take on a whole new meaning once The Rise of Skywalker has come and gone. We already know that Lucasfilm has appointed David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for one Star Wars movie series, while The Last Jedi‘s Rian Johnson has been handed the keys to another.
From what we understand, each trilogy will be totally unique and exist independently from the core Skywalker Saga. Which is just as well, given it’s all set to conclude this Christmas with the aptly titled Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
