Star Wars Found Itself at a Crossroads in 2024

Star Wars came into 2024 hoping to realize triumphs the franchise had struggled to attain in what was coming up on five years of malaise after the release of The Rise of Skywalker. Across books, films, and TV, the horizon looked bright: The High Republic was preparing for its final act with a revitalized swath of books and comics—an act that was set to climax in one of two big new steps on TV, The Acolyte, which was going to be joined by Skeleton Crew in charting paths that looked at Star Wars through fresh eyes and new perspectives.

Even though there still wasn’t a Star Wars movie on the way any time soon, the first of three major theatrical projects—Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s New Jedi Order movie, helmed by a returning Daisy Ridley as Jedi Master Rey Skywalker—was set to begin filming, paving the way for the galaxy far, far away’s return to the big screen, part of a slate-wide refocusing after years of rumored, announced, and scrapped ambition.

Instead, Star Wars closes the year clouded with uncertainty. One of those projects was publicly scrapped while Lucasfilm and Disney alike stayed silent as its cast and crew weathered a storm of harassment. The other is still tentatively navigating that tightrope, one made more precarious by its child stars (at least for now, one failed manufactured hysteria about lesbian parents aside, it seems not to be rocking that particular boat). The movie slate has once again bloated and re-expanded with projects, as delays and creative changeovers pushed Lucasfilm’s most public cinematic project back, and brought forth another: a re-purposed cinematic spin on The Mandalorian in lieu of a new season to lead the charge instead, a retreat into the familiar. Star Wars as a broad entity cannot help but feel rudderless, a franchise still searching for what it is and what it wants to be after the close of the Skywalker Saga, but never quite so willing to take the steps forward to find that out.

Five tumultuous years of rumored and announced movie projects that either faded into the ether or were scrapped entirely has left Star Wars in the unenviable position of getting people to actively care about its future. Outside of The Mandalorian & Grogu—the first Star Wars movie project since Rise of Skywalker to actually publicly prove it exists in some capacity—there’s little else that Lucasfilm has discussed that feels tangible in any way. And with The Acolyte being the rare project that the studio actively canceled, instead of being left nebulously open to continuation, Star Wars fans have been trained to see almost any announcement about the future, regardless of its source being trade reporting or even Lucasfilm itself, at its own glamorous conventions, through a lens of skepticism. Why invest in something that could be canceled and its threads left dangling? Why be excited by a movie that might be locked in development hell for years upon years or just scrapped altogether? What exactly is an active vision for Star Wars when its most solid project in years is a cinematic continuation of a TV show that has found its star waning with every increasingly convoluted cameo?

© Lucasfilm

Star Wars is a series about hope, and yet a sense of hopelessness is how its 2024 has been defined, a lack of conviction to give any of the feelers it has put out about its future time to flourish. It’s not been all bad. On the literature front, Marvel’s Star Wars comics and the High Republic initiative have gone from strength to strength, reveling in their own playgrounds to push and expand the galaxy far, far away. The Bad Batch came to an amicable end this year, setting the stage for whatever new chapter of Star Wars animation will follow in its legacy. For all its unevenness as a show—and putting those bad-faith controversies aside—The Acolyte did engage new audiences with Star Wars, all the while challenging the franchise’s form and structure. In the here and now, while it’s still early days, Skeleton Crew‘s charmingly retro sense of adventure (one that, at the very least, reflects a nostalgia for filmic inspirations beyond just a love of Star Wars itself) has gained itself critical and public appraisal.

There are things to hope for moving forward as well. Even if Lucasfilm as a studio is no longer confident in exploring the world of The Acolyte, its publishing arm is, planning an array of novels and comics weaving into the setting its novels helped establish in the first place. After a lengthy delay, Andor will return for its second season in 2025, carrying the unenviable weight of following up what is arguably some of the most universally acclaimed Star Wars material of the last decade, let alone recent memory.

But much of Star Wars‘ future remains, as a wise old Jedi once said, always in motion. In 2025, as that future inches closer and closer, Star Wars faces a reckoning over what exactly it should be as it reaches out for a path back to cinematic success: one where, even tentatively, it is willing to stand next to new visions of itself (especially in the face of ascendant grifters in the culture war, emboldened by their “victory” over The Acolyte) and look beyond the confines of the mainline movies, or another where it pins all of its hopes on the familiar, clinging onto nods to a past it can rely on.

Just what path it takes should begin to become clearer in 2025, with all eyes on Star Wars Celebration Japan to begin lighting the way. All we can do now is wait.

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