'Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker'
I remember the midnight screening for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where a friend (seeing it in Ohio three hours ahead of me) stated that there were people in line who had never seen a Star Wars movie before. Considering how much more Avengers: Endgame made ($858 million domestic and $2.796 billion worldwide) than Avengers: Infinity War ($679 million/$2.048 billion), there must have been people who saw Endgame in theaters who had either never seen a prior MCU movie in theaters. Or, like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II in 2011, the series finale brought out nearly every audience member who had seen at least one movie in that franchise in theaters.
Selling The Rise of Skywalker as the end of Star Wars is the hook now that Star Wars is just another mega-bucks fantasy franchise. Expect a deluge of “the sage of a generation comes to an end" messaging (hearkening back to the “Every generation has a legend, every saga has a beginning” messaging of the first Phantom Menace teaser) between now and December 20. Cue the flood of nostalgia for the franchise; lots of “Hey, here’s what’s actually good about the prequels” media and blog posts; rankings of everyone’s favorite and least favorite Star Wars movies; and a critical re-litigation of the “Age of Republic” prequels, the first two “Age of Resistance” sequels and maybe even the occasionally underappreciated “Age of Rebellion” finale Return of the Jedi.
Those three titles for the three distinct eras were “introduced” by Disney over the weekend at D23. Depending on how Disney plans out the next batch of Star Wars movies and the next batch of Disney+ TV shows, The Rise of Skywalker could really be the “end” of Star Wars. I don’t just mean that in terms of the Skywalker/Solo-specific narrative, but the “cradle-to-grave” story that is Star Wars. Will any future Star Wars TV shows or movies, at least anytime soon, take place after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, or will the conclusion to the Rey/Kylo saga also mark the end in terms in terms of forward continuity, of the overall Star Wars myth?
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s planned Star Wars movie(s) are (allegedly) related to the “Knights of the Old Republic” era, which takes place 4,000 years before The Phantom Menace. The shows announced for Disney+ are Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian (which takes place five years after Return of the Jedi), a Rogue One prequel and Ewan McGregor’s Obi Wan Kenobi series. Those will take place between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. The animated Clone Wars and Rebels took place between Episode III and Episode IV. Resistance takes place and during the events of Force Awakens and Last Jedi. Unless Rian Johnson’s planned Star Wars movies go beyond Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker may be the end.
There is enough unexplored history before The Phantom Menace, between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, to fill countless Star Wars movies and TV shows. Disney/Lucasfilm may try to hold onto that time period. The end as revealed in Rise of Skywalker will also mark the beginning of a new challenge for the fabled brand. Will audiences show up in large numbers for Star Wars movies, especially Star Wars movies (I’m less concerned about Disney+ subscribers working up the willpower to turn on the TV and press “play), that aren’t directly connected to the story and characters that made up the New Hope-to-Rise of Skywalker narrative?
What is Star Wars without a Skywalker or a Solo? What is Star Wars without the characters we associate with the Rebels/Resistance versus Empire/First Order storyline that has defined the core movies? Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, a direct prologue to Star Wars which offered familiar characters only in fleeting cameos, earned $1.1 billion in 2016. Solo: A Star Wars Story, which offered “not Harrison Ford” (Alden Ehrenreich) as a young Han Solo, earned just $213 million domestic and (more importantly) just $393 million worldwide in 2018. Rebels, which kept its “Hey, look, it’s Lando!” cameos to a bare minimum, thrived for four years on Disney XD. Again, TV is different, because it’s a different kind of commitment.
That’s especially true since Disney will be releasing new episodes of their shows weekly rather than aping Netflix’s “all at once” model. If casual Star Wars fans think The Mandalorian looks like a pretty great space western, then asking them to commit 45-65 minutes a week for a couple of months isn’t exactly a deal breaker. But the movies, beginning in December of 2022…? That’s a different story. Disney and Lucasfilm will be selling the idea of Rise of Skywalker as the end of Star Wars, either because it is in terms of present-tense continuity or because it’s a surefire marketing gimmick. Heck, it worked so nice for Avengers: Infinity War that they did it twice for Avengers: Endgame.
The Rise of Skywalker may also be a natural jumping-off point for casual Star Wars viewers. If Rian Johnson and the Game of Thrones creators’ movies are disconnected from the core Skywalker saga, then we’ll find out what the Star Wars brand is worth for big-budget fantasies that are otherwise “new” (or new-to-you) movies. Will Star Wars without Luke, Han, Leia, Anakin, Obi-Wan and Yoda, while also existing in a world where every studio has their big-budget fantasy properties, be received much better than Jupiter Ascending ($185 million worldwide), Tomorrowland ($209 million) or Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ($215 million)? Hyperbole perhaps, but Solo showed that a Star Wars movie can bomb if audiences didn’t care.
Disney knows all this and isn’t going to let their portfolio live or die by how well post-Rise of Skywalker movies perform. They seem to be betting Disney+ on the continued interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has its own risks (threading the needle in making the shows must-see events while maintaining the whole “you don’t need to see every MCU movie or TV show to enjoy any MCU movie” appeal), and the cheap ($6.99) entry point which will be worth its weight in gold for parents. And Disney is alternating Star Wars movies with Avatar flicks from Christmas 2021 to Christmas 2022, with the hopes that a bigger-than-big Disney-specific fantasy action-adventure will become a Disney year-end tradition.
The best/core commercial and artistic gimmick behind Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is that it’s the end of the line for the core Star Wars series. But in a world where franchises are never really gone, that finality also represents the biggest challenge for the series, no different from (relatively speaking) the MCU after Endgame. Marvel has established characters (Black Panther, Thor, etc.) and yet-to-be-adapted Marvel superheroes (Eternals, Moon Knight, etc.) to entice fans for stand-alone movies/TV shows. Lucasfilm must introduce new Star Wars characters without the benefit of connecting them to those first three Star Wars movies. New characters in new worlds and new adventures that exist within the Star Wars brand will only get you so far.
Audiences only show up to movies these days if they like the characters, regardless of the brand or the promise of big-budget spectacle. They show up for Venom and Bohemian Rhapsody because they want to see Venom and Freddie Mercury. That’s what separates Harry Potter and The Hunger Games from The Dark Is Rising and The Mortal Engines. If audiences only showed up to The Force Awakens because it was a sequel to Return of the Jedi and featured Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa, then the brand has a challenge going forward. Comparative to its predecessors, how well would a Star Trek movie with entirely new characters play in 2022?
I am confident that The Rise of Skywalker will either match The Last Jedi’s $1.333 billion global take or (give-or-take overseas interest) exceed it. The “this is the end of Star Wars” pitch will only make it that much more of a cinematic event. But after The Rise of Skywalker, will general audiences care about Star Wars theatrical films anymore? Will they treat this next movie as a natural jumping off point? Disney will have to treat the Star Wars IP as a starting point rather than the core pitch (think Sony’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) to craft an otherwise enticing movie. Otherwise, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker could be the last “special edition” of Star Wars.
