Episode IX is the lame duck in Disney's Star Wars saga (Forbes)

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I’m guessing J.J. Abrams and friends noticed the success of Marvel baiting the Internet with an unrevealed Avengers  4 title for over four years. The project was announced in October of 2014 with the first teaser debuting in early December of 2018. Thus, I’d expect Episode IX to get a title right along with its first teaser during this year’s Star Wars Celebration in mid-April. We didn’t get a title for Star Wars 9 because we didn’t need one, because Disney can get the same free publicity from speculative posts. Moreover, Disney’s big Christmas release is both incredibly important and utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.


That’s because no matter how it performs in December, Walt Disney will face the same challenge: How do they make general audiences care about Star Wars movies that aren’t explicitly connected to those first three Star Wars movies (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi?) and explicitly tied into the saga of the Skywalker family? Rogue One and the George Lucas prequels were, well, prequels to the first three Star Wars movies and the last three Disney episodes were 30-years-later sequels to Return of the Jedi complete with the return of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

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After this, presuming Disney really does give Rian Johnson his own disconnected trilogy and let the Game of Thrones guys make their own Star Wars movies, to say nothing of Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian episodic series on Disney+, Star Wars will face a unique challenge. What will general moviegoers think about Star Wars movies that are mostly disconnected from the world, story, and characters of George Lucas’ original trilogy? To what extent did folks flock to The Force Awakens specifically because it promised the return of Hamill, Ford, and Fisher?

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Since Episode IX will apparently close the book on the Skywalker/Solo story that began in 1977, Disney must go back to the proverbial drawing board no matter how well this ninth Star Wars episode performs. We know that right now, in 2019 (and beyond), merely offering a relatively high-quality mega-budget sci-fi fantasy actioner isn’t enough to get people into the theater. So, without the explicit ties to the Darth Vader saga, without explicit ties to the defining original trilogy characters, will folks still consider Star Wars movies to be worth trekking out to a theater to see? We don’t know.

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Maybe it will eventually become a Pixar or MCU-like brand, where the Lucasfilm franchise is big and trusted enough where people are excited just because it’s a Star Wars movie. Or maybe, after the balance is returned to the Force, audiences will look at a new Star Wars movie as little different from the next Alita: Battle Angel or Jupiter Ascending. We don’t know what the next Star Wars movies will be after Episode IX, either because Lucasfilm is being as tip-lipped as Marvel is about their respective post-Endgame plans or because they are taking time to figure out what the next phase of Star Wars should look like.

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But for now, all eyes are on Star Wars Episode IX, where J.J. Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy, and friends will attempt to tie up the Rey/Kylo saga in a way that theoretically pleases the nostalgic fans and the “deconstruction > nostalgia” folks. I imagine whatever they do is going to upset or displease 50% of the fans anyway, so I hope they just do whatever they want. It is also the equivalent of a lame deck entry in the franchise. Whether Episode IX sinks or soars, Star Wars will face the same fundamental challenge of thriving outside of its core narrative and sans its marquee characters.

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