Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

How much is too much Star Wars? Disney preps new film every year forever

Parker Hall
By

Star Wars Annie Leibovitz
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Disney has five Star Wars films officially planned through 2019, but that will not be the end of the film franchise’s comeback, which the movie studio hopes will extend long into the future to become more like the studio’s Marvel franchise, as recently detailed in a new report by Wired. As of now, Disney plans to release a new Star Wars film every year for the foreseeable future.

Super-fans of the iconic sci-fi franchise already know a good deal about the next few films. Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in exactly one month, and will be followed up next year by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which will be the first of Disney’s anthology film spinoffs, and will focus on the team that stole the plans for the Death Star between episodes III and IV of the franchise.

Recommended Videos

The next three planned releases are sequels, with 2017 and 2019 bringing sequels to The Force Awakens, and 2018 slated for the release of the second of the anthology films, which will allegedly focus on Han Solo. According to Wired’s latest report, however, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Related

“The company intends to put out a new Star Wars movie every year for as long as people will buy tickets,” writes Adam Rogers in his recent expose on the franchise, “Let me put it another way: If everything works out for Disney, and if you are (like me) old enough to have been conscious for the first Star Wars film, you will probably not live to see the last one. It’s the forever franchise.”

While that sounds a little hyperbolic, for now it’s a very profitable ideology for Disney to have. Having paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney is cross promoting its slate of planned films with the rights to video games such as the new Star Wars Battlefront, toys, and other memorabilia to maximize its return on the investment.

It’s very much the same model the company has used to promote its licensing rights to the Marvel Comics franchise, with 17 planned releases in the next decade and no end in sight.

However, in regards to Rogers’ comments, the company isn’t willing to share much about the future of Star Wars franchise past 2019 at this point. All we know is that there appears to be no plan to stop producing films until the well runs dry. It seems as though the company itself has no idea where the franchise will go after 2019.

Kathleen Kennedy, brand manager of Star Wars and longtime Stephen Spielberg collaborator, has no idea specifically how the films will continue beyond its already-planned releases, saying in an interview with Wired, “Oh my God, there is so much to get right. It’s by no means laid out beat for beat. I’ll borrow a line from Raiders of the Lost Ark: We’re making this up as we go.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Parker Hall
Parker Hall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Parker Hall is a writer and musician from Portland, OR. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin…
One year ago, Andor changed Star Wars forever
Cassian Andor looks forward with purpose in Andor episode 3.

When Andor premiered one year ago this week, the general response to its first three episodes, which all dropped on Disney+ at the same time, was … interesting. While everyone seemed to welcome the Rogue One prequel with open arms and positive reviews, some were quick to express their concerns over the show’s pace. On the one hand, it’s not hard to see why. Andor's first three installments essentially serve as both the series' inciting incident and its prologue.

The show’s opening chapters split their time between flashbacks to Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) traumatic childhood on the war-torn planet of Kenari and the present-day fallout of his impulsive decision to kill a pair of Imperial-adjacent officials. It isn’t until the end of Andor’s third episode that his backstory has been fully fleshed out and he’s actually left his adoptive planet of Ferrix with Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), the rebel leader who will jumpstart Cassian’s own radicalization. On paper, that might make it seem very little happens across Andor’s first three episodes.

Read more
Did Andor ruin Ahsoka, and maybe the entire Star Wars franchise, by being too good?
Ahsoka Tano holds one of her lightsabers in Ahsoka episode 4.

Disney+’s Ahsoka is a lot of things: A quasi-sequel to Star Wars Rebels, a spinoff of The Mandalorian, a rollicking space adventure. Above all else, though, Ahsoka is a show made by and for Star Wars fans. Created by George Lucas’ chosen protégé, Dave Filoni, the series is overflowing with details, Easter eggs, and characters from past Star Wars films and TV shows — namely, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Rebels. These various references have all been collected in a story that seems designed to serve as the bridge between the Rebels finale and Filoni’s now-announced Star Wars crossover film, which will purportedly close out the New Republic story first introduced in The Mandalorian.

At the center of said story is the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and the Imperial Remnant’s quest to bring him back into the fold. That mission is the driving narrative force of Ahsoka, which pits the show’s heroes against those who wish to find Thrawn and rescue him from his years-long exile in a foreign galaxy. The series is, in other words, a lot less about Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and her personal journey than its title would lead you to believe. In fact, of all of its concerns, Ahsoka’s characters feel increasingly less like its top priority.

Read more
The 10 best lightsaber duels in Star Wars, ranked
Luke Skywalker lunges towards Darth Vader during their lightsaber fight on Cloud City.

Star Wars has contributed countless indelible moments and images to our popular culture, but if there’s one artifact that is most intrinsic to the Galaxy Far, Far Away, it’s the fantastical weapon of the Jedi Knights, the lightsaber. From the very first time audiences saw Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader cross glowing, humming swords aboard the Death Star in 1977, we’ve been absolutely obsessed, and storytellers across multiple media and nearly half a century have been only too happy to indulge our craving for increasingly elaborate lightsaber duels.
Lightsaber fights come in all shapes and sizes, from emotional one-on-one bouts in live-action to wild animated free-for-alls, and selecting our 10 favorites from the franchise to date was no easy task. There are a lot of metrics by which to judge — the excitement of the action itself, how it’s shot, the story behind it, the use of environment, even the music to which it’s set — but the cream of the crop are those duels that either dominate one category or harmoniously balance each one. Will your favorites make the list? You’ll find we’re full of surprises …

10. The Ronin vs. the Bandit Leader (The Duel - Visions, season 1, episode 1)

Read more