Star Wars: A Brief Postmortem
I am not the biggest Star Wars fan in the world. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the worlds, the characters, or the lore. But I do have a love for the franchise. So much so that when The Force Awakens premiered, some friends and I went to see it at two in the morning, because it was the only showtime not sold out, and we didn’t want to wait. And even though I came down with a nasty bout of food poisoning mere hours before the movie was to start, I refused to be anywhere else except my assigned IMAX seat.
Fast forward to now. The Mandalorian and Grogu comes out May 22, only a few days from now. I will not be going to the theater to see it, nor am I sure if I’ll even check it out once it hits streaming. And I know I’m not the only one. As the first Star Wars film to hit the big screen in almost seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu is projected to take in $80 million for its opening weekend, against a production budget of over $166 million, without factoring in marketing costs. This is the lowest projected opening of any Disney-era Star Wars film. Even Solo: A Star Wars Story, widely considered a flop, opened to over $100 million.
A quick look online shows that there is little to no hype for this movie. Much of the discussion revolves around lackluster marketing, and how many fans feel as if Star Wars isn’t for them anymore. So what happened? How did a franchise with such cultural resonance get to this state?
I think it comes down to two compounding failures: Disney/Lucasfilm made a series of poor creative decisions that alienated their core audience, and then mismanaged their attempt to build a new one. Each mistake made the other worse.
The Creative Failure
“Star Wars is a film for 12-year-olds.”
A direct quote from George Lucas himself. While he made his share of mistakes with the franchise, at least he seemed to have more of a grasp on who his audience was than modern Disney/Lucasfilm.
When they took over, Disney talked a big game about honoring the OG trilogy, returning more to that aesthetic, rather than the more divisive prequels. There was a lot of hope as Disney built up towards the release of The Force Awakens.
What followed over the years, though, was a creative disaster. It quickly became clear that Disney/Lucasfilm had not planned out the sequel trilogy. Over three films, plot points were introduced and abandoned, legacy characters were killed off before any meaningful reunion, and story decisions made in one movie were flatly contradicted in the next. The relationship between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker in particular suggests two filmmakers actively working against each other, with the audience caught in the middle.
Fans don’t just want to see familiar faces; they want those stories to mean something. When a franchise signals that it has no plan, audiences stop trusting it.
The Audience Failure
The second failure compounded the first. In trying to expand Star Wars’ audience, especially to women, Disney ended up not satisfying old fans nor the new ones they were trying to reach.
To be clear: Star Wars was never a boys-only club. Many women have long cited Princess Leia as a role model, and female-led Star Wars stories have proven they can succeed. Wanting to broaden the franchise’s appeal is not necessarily a bad thing, in of itself . But they weren’t doing a good job with their attempts. They also mishandled the backlash when it arrived.
When criticism of the sequel trilogy emerged — much of it legitimate, focused on plotting and structure — some creators and commentators seemed to insinuate dissatisfaction as evidence of racism and misogyny, despite the wild success of the first few Disney-era Star Wars movies, which starred women and minority actors. While a small, vocal group of people did harass actors and direct blind hatred at new characters, applying that label broadly to general criticism had consequences. It made it harder to have honest conversations about what wasn’t working, and it left many fans feeling that their concerns were being dismissed, while being lumped in with toxic fans. Resentment grew.
This is where the two failures locked together. Fans who were already frustrated by incoherent storytelling felt increasingly unwelcome. And Disney, having defined the conflict as a culture war rather than a craft failure, had little framework for actually fixing what was broken.
The Mandalorian Exception
What makes the current moment particularly strange is that Disney already showed they knew how to do this right. The Mandalorian understood Star Wars in a way the sequel trilogy largely didn’t. It was small-scale, mythic, character-driven, and emotionally coherent. It proved that the audience wasn’t resistant to new ideas — they were resistant to bad ones.
Yet even The Mandalorian eventually lost its footing. By season three, the show that had captivated audiences by keeping things simple began to feel unfocused, pulling attention away from what had made it work. The lesson didn’t fully stick.
Where That Leaves Us
Much more could be said — I’ve barely touched on the other Disney films, canceled projects, or the broader streaming shows. But the through line is consistent: a franchise that keeps losing sight of what made it matter in the first place.
George Lucas said he wanted to make a children’s film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality. That shouldn’t be complicated. But it requires creative discipline, long-term planning, and the humility to listen when something isn’t working.
Star Wars can still be that. Whether Disney/Lucasfilm can get back there is another question.