The overwhelming majority of big budget blockbusters are designed with the intention of launching a trilogy, but the Star Wars Skywalker Saga played it differently by announcing a trio of trilogies right out of the gate.
While you can’t deny the box office success of Episodes I through IX, several of them wound up splitting opinion among both critics and audiences, particularly The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. There’s no reason why Disney and Lucasfilm can’t tell standalone stories, either, and Rogue One is widely regarded as the best of the recent movies by far even though we all knew exactly how it was going to end, meaning there was no chance of a sequel.
Still, Rian Johnson was announced to be returning to a galaxy far, far away with a brand new trilogy, while Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ brief flirtation with the franchise also saw them down to create and develop three films. However, we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Ahsoka Tano would appear in The Mandalorian‘s second season long before Rosario Dawson’s casting was announced – that the focus is now shifting to delivering movies one at a time and producing more standalone efforts.
In all honesty, that’s the wisest approach to the future of Star Wars, especially when such wildly different filmmakers as Patty Jenkins, Taika Waititi and Kevin Feige are attached to the next three outings. By all means, turn them into a multi-film series if the first installment is an unqualified success, but announcing trilogies from the off is something that should be left in the past, and if we’ve learned anything during the Disney era, it’s that Star Wars needs to stop looking in the rearview mirror for inspiration.
