Star Wars Is Finally on the Right Track by Adopting the Marvel Playbook

When the Disney-era Star Wars films began to roll out in 2015, the strategy seemed to be to tie everything into the original trilogy as much as possible.

The sequel trilogy was set 30 years after the original trilogy so that the main cast from those films could be used as major characters (without digitally de-aging them). The new films are littered with references to their older counterparts and The Force Awakens is even a direct homage to A New Hope. Rogue One and Solo tie directly into major plot points from the original trilogy without doing much world-building of their own.

What these films tried and failed to do was to establish a foundation from which an interconnected universe could be built. Rey was the only character who seemed complex enough to warrant further storytelling as the original cast were killed off and neither Poe or Finn were given much backstory to build upon. All of the villains from these films were killed, including Palpatine who was awkwardly brought back in The Rise of Skywalker only to be killed again at the end.

Rogue One introduced some characters who I connected with, especially K2SO, whose delightfully sinister humor I couldn’t get enough of, only to kill all of them by the end. It certainly gave their mission more narrative heft by having them all sacrifice themselves to accomplish it, but it also forced a dead end for them that wasn’t really necessary.

But didn’t all of those characters need to die since they didn’t appear in movies that occur later in the timeline? Obviously not because Lucasfilm introduced many interesting characters in The Clone Wars and Rebels without killing them off. The stage for Star Wars is an entire galaxy so not every character needs an excuse not to be in a given story.

Fortunately what those first five films got wrong The Mandalorian got right. First of all it is set only five years after the original trilogy, so it is able to leverage fan-favorite characters like Boba Feta and Ahsoka Tano. While the series does often tie directly into the original trilogy, it does so only sparingly, instead focusing on building up new characters and even mining characters and plot devices from the animated series and the prequel trilogy.

And now it’s time for the Marvel playbook to do its magic. Disney has announced several new series which focus on characters introduced or reintroduced in The Mandalorian. The House of Mouse also seems to have slowed or canceled many projects in development presumably to focus on quality and to add more interconnected elements.

Because of the slowdown we are at the point where we have to wait a year between seasons of new live action Star Wars content, but the MCU also started out slow and deliberate before hitting it’s stride and now we have a seemingly constant parade of new programming in that universe.

While a couple of the new shows will be boxed in by canon, including those focusing on Obi-Wan Kenobi and Cassian Andor (both of whom are dead by the time of the Mandoverse) my guess is that most of them will be set in the same timeline soon after Return of the Jedi and drive a larger narrative forward.

The only way to be fully unrestrained creatively for these shows will be to de-canonize the sequel trilogy, otherwise this new content will be bound to marching towards a future set 25 years hence. Thankfully this is sci-fi where it is the audience is willing to accept (aside from some outraged super fans) the discarding unloved sequels by placing them in a segregated timeline.

Perhaps in a few years the interconnected Star Wars universe will take the Marvel model to its natural conclusion with a climactic film that teams up some of the characters to defeat a threat which has been built up over time. That would be a much more satisfying endgame for the galaxy far, far away than The Rise of Skywalker.