Ask any number of Star Wars fans to name the best movie of the Disney era, and there’s a very high probability that Rogue One is going to come out on top. It leaned less on nostalgia than The Force Awakens, justified its existence in a way that Solo didn’t, and never came close to splitting opinion like The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker.
It’s been a long time since the feature-length side of a galaxy far, far away has unified the fanbase to the same degree as Gareth Edwards’ blockbuster, which used a single line of text from the opening crawl of A New Hope as the jumping-off point for an action-packed war epic that introduced a raft of instant fan favorites.
Today marks exactly five years to the day since Rogue One exploded into theaters, ultimately going to to earn over a billion dollars at the box office, and supporters of the film clearly haven’t forgotten.
After The Force Awakens and Rogue One landed back-to-back ten-figure hauls to combine for over $3 billion in theatrical takings, it looked as though Disney and Lucasfilm’s ambitious plan to release a new Star Wars movie every year had been justified right out of the gate. Of course, it hasn’t quite panned out like that, and based on the Rogue Squadron situation, we could be waiting a while for the next one.
