The last Star Wars movie to play in theaters was The Rise of Skywalker, six years ago. That may not seem like a long time in the long arc of the series—well over a decade passed between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, after all—but ever since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, they’ve wanted to flood the zone. We got five Star Wars movies between 2015 and 2019, plus a lot of TV shows after that. So, the absence of another proper Star Wars movie has been notable.
Now finally, Disney is readying a couple of new movies set in the galaxy far, far away: The Mandalorian & Grogu is due out next year, and Ryan Gosling is filming Star Wars: Starfighter as we speak. Disney wants you back in the theater. They want you to get excited about Star Wars again. But is it too late?
Disney has been at a loss for what to do with Star Wars movies for years
Many fans have lost confidence
One of the reasons it’s hard to get psyched about a new Star Wars movie these days is that Disney has very publicly fumbled the brand for years. There was a long stretch where Disney announced multiple new projects, only to pull the plug on all of them.
At one point, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss were going to make a new Star Wars trilogy. That got dropped. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson was going to make an entirely different trilogy; also dropped. Taika Waititi was going to direct a movie. Didn’t happen. In the most public embarrassment, Disney had Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins put on a flight suit and walk towards a giant X-wing parked on a tarmac, promotion for a Rogue Squadron movie she was going to direct … but never did. Watch that confusion above.
These wounds on the brand are self-inflicted, because Disney didn’t need to be this up front with fans; they could have just developed and dumped these projects behind the scenes, but instead they were out here cutting teasers for movies that never happened. It gave the impression that they didn’t know what they were doing, and it’s hard for me to shake that feeling today. Sure, they’ve chosen a couple of projects to actually move forward with, but are those projects actually worth making, or did the executives just get frustrated with the long wait, close those eyes, and throw some darts at the wall? That seed of doubt took root in me a while ago, and I don’t know how to dig it out.
The new Star Wars movies are in an uncertain spot
They lack one interesting thing in common
Let’s talk about those new projects. First up is The Mandalorian & Grogu, a movie continuation of The Mandalorian TV series. There was a time, back when The Mandalorian was new and everyone was fawning over Baby Yoda, when a movie like this would have set the fandom on fire. But subsequent seasons of the show, especially the third, underwhelmed. The Mandalorian has lost a lot of heat. That doesn’t mean The Mandalorian & Grogu can’t be a good movie, but it has terrible timing.
We know almost nothing about Star Wars: Starfighter except that it’s set five years after the end of The Rise of Skywalker and stars Ryan Gosling as … someone, probably a pilot. Director Shawn Levy told Collider that “it is an all-new, non-sequel, non-prequel adventure. It’s new characters; it’s a new timeline. It inherits legacy themes, but it’s really trying to give Star Wars [fans] — and just movie audiences — something fresh, something new.”
That doesn’t sound like a bad direction to take; the Star Wars movies have sometimes felt weighed down by the need to service the “Skywalker saga,” the ongoing story that stretches all the way from wee little Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy to Rey “Skywalker” at the end of the sequel trilogy. The Mandalorian & Grogu has a couple of connections to the Skywalker saga, but the two title characters are more or less unencumbered. Both of these new films are trying to separate themselves from the mainline movies, which I’m all for. Fresh blood is good, right?
Well, maybe. I like that Disney is trying to strike out in a new direction, but what if it needs the pull of the Skywalker saga to woo back the masses? I think there’s an alternate reality where Disney could have slapped the name “Star Wars” on just about anything and counted on tons of people showing up, but at this point the brand has been watered down to the point where it might just wash out.
Star Wars doesn’t feel as special as it used to
And Disney has no one but itself to blame
We haven’t had a Star Wars movie in years, but we’ve had plenty of Star Wars. In the years since The Rise of Skywalker, no less than seven live-action Star Wars series have streamed on Disney+. Some of them were great—Andor has set a standard against which other sci-fi shows can be held—but there were also total airballs like The Acolyte and The Book of Boba Fett. A show like Obi-Wan Kenobi may be fun to watch in the moment, but there’s an airy emptiness to it that feels dissatisfying. I left asking myself, “Did that really need to happen?”
This is how franchises lose their potency. It happened earlier this year to the Alien franchise, courtesy of the middling show Alien: Earth. You can see it happening right now with the new HBO show IT: Welcome to Derry, a prequel to the IT movies. Welcome to Derry isn’t awful, but it’s not good enough to overcome the sense that it exists mostly to draw in people who might recognize the name, not because the producers were truly passionate about making it. Watching Welcome to Derry, I find myself losing my enthusiasm for that world. And that’s kind of what happened to my enthusiasm for Star Wars as I watched show after serviceable show.
The long road back
And that’s the conundrum that Disney faces with this pair of new Star Wars movies. They need to have enough in common with the old films that they feel of a piece, but feel new enough to create new fans, not just bring back old ones. Making one big blowout event movie might get people excited, but that’s in conflict with Disney’s business model, which depends on maintaining never-ending franchises that keep fans coming back again and again.
I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to thread this needle, but as a Star Wars fan from way back when, I’ll hope for the best. The Mandalorian & Grogu is due out on May 22, 2026, while Star Wars: Starfighter is coming on May 28, 2027.
Release Date
May 22, 2026
Director
Jon Favreau
Writers
Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni
Sequel(s)
Dave Filoni’s Untitled Mandalorian Movie
Franchise(s)
Star Wars
Pedro Pascal
Din Djarin / The Mandalorian
Jeremy Allen White
Rotta the Hutt
