Yesterday at Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm hyped a third season of The Mandalorian, teased the debut of Ahsoka, announced a new show called Skeleton Crew from director Jon Watts, and premiered the trailer for Andor, a prequel to the events of Rogue One (which was itself a prequel to the events of Star Wars). It was a lot of stuff … and it was all a bunch of TV shows for Disney+. The future of Star Wars movies was left almost completely undiscussed.
That’s a stunning turn of events from only a few years ago, when the ongoing Star Wars film franchise seemed like one of the most valuable properties Disney owned. Since The Rise of Skywalker in late 2019, Lucasfilm has pivoted almost completely to streaming television, with The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and now the new Obi-Wan Kenobi all debuting on Disney+. They’ve announced movie projects — like Rian Johnson’s trilogy of films or Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron — but most of them have already been pushed back, if not fallen by the wayside completely.
The ambiguous future of Star Wars movies was given a little more clarity by producer Kathleen Kennedy in an interview with Empire. While she didn’t give any concrete details about what movie we might see next — or who it would be by. she did explain that whatever comes next will be set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker in the Star Wars galaxy.
She added:
We’re moving further beyond the existing sequels as we look to our movie space … The sequel era] is what we talk a lot about in terms of where we’re going with our movies, and just how far out from that we’ll go. That’s very much the space we’re concentrating on.
That’s interesting because almost all of the Star Wars TV shows are set either between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens or between the prequels and the sequels. The Mandalorian is a few years after Jedi and The Book of Boba Fett is contemporaneous with it, while Obi-Wan Kenobi’s premiere episode makes it clear it’s been 10 years since the events of Revenge of the Sith. That post-sequel era is a fairly blank canvas that could go in a lot of different ways.