Any studio would kill for even a fraction of the success enjoyed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Kevin Feige’s brainchild spawning 23 consecutive critical and commercial smash hits, running away with the title of most successful franchise in the history of cinema with over $22.5 billion in box office receipts, a figure that will continue to rise dramatically whenever the feature film side of Phase Four eventually gets started.
The shared superhero mythology is now expanding onto television as well with ten Disney Plus shows, two animated spinoffs and a holiday special. And based on the first two episodes of WandaVision, the creative shackles have been well and truly taken off.
We’ve seen countless rivals try and replicate the MCU’s formula over the last few years, of course, the overwhelming majority of which have failed spectacularly, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones that said we’d be seeing a Young Luke Skywalker long before he showed up in The Mandalorian‘s season 2 finale – that Disney and Lucasfilm are hoping that some of the Marvel magic will work on the rapidly expanding sci-fi saga.
At the moment, Star Wars has three movies and ten TV shows in the works, which is hardly taking it easy, but the plan is reportedly for the “Mando universe” to keep on getting bigger and bigger until it rivals the MCU in terms of scope and scale.
That’s certainly a brave strategy given the number of similar ventures that have crashed and burned trying to do the exact same thing, but with an almost infinite back catalogue to mine for inspiration and a massive built-in fanbase that spans generations, who’s to say in a dozen years from now we won’t be looking back at how The Mandalorian served as the launchpad for Star Wars to reach new heights?
