When SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY dropped this summer, it became abundantly clear there was a limit to how much adventure in a galaxy far, far away SW fans were willing to turn out for. This seemed unthinkable a notion, but then the movie topped out at less than $400 million worldwide, making it one of the biggest misfires of the year. Such a blunder would rightly cause executives to do some pondering, and indeed, Disney CEO Bob Iger has concluded that perhaps more time should be put into how to approach new SW movies.
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The CEO of one of the largest media empires in the world recently did an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, and though it was mostly business talk regarding acquisitions and such, the conversation did veer to specific content like SW. Iger said that though they won’t stop making movies in the franchise, the failure of SOLO did force him to admit they’ve made a mistake about determining how much content would be too much.
I made the timing decision, and as I look back, I think the mistake that I made — I take the blame — was a little too much, too fast. You can expect some slowdown, but that doesn't mean we're not gonna make films. J.J. [Abrams] is busy making [Episode] IX. We have creative entities, including [Game of Thrones creators David] Benioff and [D.B.] Weiss, who are developing sagas of their own, which we haven't been specific about. And we are just at the point where we're gonna start making decisions about what comes next after J.J.'s. But I think we're gonna be a little bit more careful about volume and timing. And the buck stops here on that.
Ever since Disney bought Lucasfilm some years ago the plan had been to release a new SW movie every year. So far, we’ve seen two saga movies, THE FORCE AWAKENS and THE LAST JEDI, and two prequel movies, ROGUE ONE and SOLO. While the Skywalker Saga is coming to a conclusion next year with J.J. Abrams’ EPISODE IX, Disney and Lucasfilm had lots of plans for other spinoff movies, including one around Boba Fett, Jaba the Hutt and Obi-Wan Kenobi. However, since SOLO’s crash and burn a lot of projects seem to be on pause as the studios think things over.
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I love STAR WARS movies just as much as the next fan, but at some point seeing a new movie in the series every single year was going to take its toll. Marvel can pump out content every year as there's a wealth of material to pull from to form a singular universe with interconnected stories. With SW the approach has been to take some franchise favorite characters and create some sort of spinoff movie around them, regardless of if the material (or necessity) is there. The levees were going to break at some point, and I'm glad it happened sooner rather than later because now the folks over there can take a step back and take a more thoughtful approach. My thought? Ho Maybe not plan a $200 million movie around characters that got 15 minutes of screentime in a past movie.