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When you try to do too much at once, you get burnt—we’re looking at you, Star Wars.
According to Collider, Lucasfilm is stepping back from A Star Wars Story standalone spinoffs for the indefinite future. This news comes at the tail end of Solo: A Star Wars Story‘s box office blunder, which no doubt played a part in the decision to shift gears. Instead of focusing on spinoffs, the massive franchise will concentrate on the presently unnamed Star Wars Episode IX and a new trilogy that’s in the works.
Read as: The Obi-Wan movie that was rumored to be in the works will be put on hold, and we can silence those whispers about a Boba Fett movie, set to be directed by James Mangold.
Solo‘s measly numbers (for a Star Wars film) rolled in a mere $84.4 million on opening weekend and $192.8 million domestically. Rogue One, the first Star Wars spinoff from 2016, managed to wrangle in $155 million opening weekend and by week four, amassed $424 million. The difference in numbers is staggering, but there were a few key differences between the two releases that had nothing to do with the movies themselves.
Rogue One was riding the coattails of the massive success and hype of The Force Awakens (TFA). It was released during peak Star Wars nostalgia and momentum after fans have been starved of new movies for so long and there was also a whole year between TFA and Rogue One, giving people a solid amount of time to crave a new expansion to the universe while they impatiently waited for the next big trilogy movie. Then comes The Last Jedi—some loved it, many didn’t. Some even claimed the film ruined the franchise for them because of its portrayal of Luke Skywalker. Solo, which released just a few months after The Last Jedi, focused on another main character from our favorite space trio—Han Solo. Just months after a massive portion of the fandom felt like the new trilogy ruined all of their favorite characters, many fans were still too sore to even consider seeing Solo, for fear that the franchise would “ruin” another key character, whose death they already had to painfully sit through in The Force Awakens.
Lucasfilm released Solo in one of the biggest blockbuster periods we’ve seen in a long time. It had to compete with the biggest Marvel movie yet, Avengers: Infinity War, which released just two weeks before Solo. On top of that, Deadpool 2 made its debut shortly after, along with Incredibles 2 a few weeks later, and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom to debut in two days. Nerd alert: That’s a ton of geek movies in just a few months.
While there’s a little bitterness surrounding the spinoff pause, it might be best that the franchise continues to focus on the ninth movie and then cross the other bridges when they get there. And it wouldn’t hurt to space things out a bit so we have the chance to miss the galaxy far, far away.
h/t Collider
