Star Wars identified its greatest strength decades ago, and the franchise’s new movies and TV shows continue to use it to their advantage. In the nearly fifty years of Star Wars movies and TV shows since A New Hope was released in 1977, the franchise has proven its staying power. In fact, while successful sequels are difficult and building a franchise is even more so, many of Star Wars’ best movies came long after the original Star Wars movie.
Now, it seems Star Wars’ new movies and the upcoming Star Wars shows will continue to build upon that history. While the shows and movies are varied in the storylines they cover and their places on the Star Wars timeline, they are all primed to integrate the franchise’s secret to success. One key commonality among Star Wars projects will guarantee that the franchise’s newest shows and movies are able to do precisely that.
Although recent Star Wars projects have theoretically begun to move away from the Skywalker Saga following its conclusion in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in reality, the draw of the original and prequel trilogies continues to shape the franchise. For some time, in fact, Star Wars was more or less equivalent to the Skywalker Saga, with those movies comprising the main threads of the franchise, at least in terms of the big screen. Within the Saga itself, Star Wars also continually played up the characters, stories, and concepts that had already proven popular.
While the Star Wars sequel trilogy has received criticism for allegedly copying many of the themes or plot points from the original trilogy, the prequel movies had already laid the groundwork for such a pattern. In Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, the first movie to follow the iconic original trilogy, familiar faces such as C-3PO, R2-D2, and Yoda were automatically going to excite audiences and draw upon their nostalgia. By nature of being prequels, this was to some extent a necessity; however, Star Wars was very intentional about how cameos were incorporated.
The sequels repeated that strategy, involving fan-favorite characters Han Solo, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker throughout the trilogy and ensuring that new characters such as Kylo Ren/Ben Solo were intrinsically tied to the already popular Star Wars figures. Now, with Star Wars expanding to brand-new territory, the franchise has the opportunity to expand beyond these prominent characters. However, Star Wars is unlikely to fully do so, as upcoming Star Wars projects make clear. The franchise is simply too aware that nostalgia is an invaluable asset.
While shows such as Star Wars Rebels and The Mandalorian have introduced incredible new characters and have become some of Star Wars’ best shows, they nevertheless are still tangentially related to the original and prequel trilogies. In fact, both became increasingly linked to those eras, with Rebels including cameos from the likes of Ahsoka Tano, Captain Rex, and Princess Leia and The Mandalorian shockingly incorporating an age-regressed Luke Skywalker. Even the truly innovative show Andor, which focuses on everyday people, is tied to the Death Star, solidifying its original trilogy connection.
Although the Star Wars sequel trilogy was technically following a pattern begun by the prequel trilogy (which, notably, is now beloved but was originally also disparaged), playing up nostalgia in that trilogy proved more challenging. For the prequels, many of the connections to the original trilogy were organic. The promise of the prequel movies was additional backstory, which required characters like Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi to resurface as younger versions of themselves. With the sequels, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
Worse still, the sequels didn’t always know what to do with nostalgia. While seeing Emperor Palpatine introduced as a grandfatherly, unassuming senator in The Phantom Menace was a pleasant surprise, his return in The Rise of Skywalker was significantly less so, particularly because it felt like a last-ditch effort to recover a trilogy that had exchanged hands multiple times and already received scathing backlash. Similarly, while Luke Skywalker appeared throughout the sequel movies, audiences weren’t pleased to see the Jedi hero turned into a curmudgeon.
While it could be argued that this was a sequels-specific issue, that’s tough to say. Sadly, whether that’s the case may not be answered for quite some time. Currently, the sequel movies are the only Star Wars projects that truly moved forward in time, as they were the furthest into the future the franchise had gone. Now, Rey’s upcoming Star Wars movie promises to claim that spot. However, that still may not address whether Star Wars has a problem with projects set in the future, as surely some portion of the response to Rey’s movie will be drawn heavily from sentiments about the sequels.
It remains to be seen to what extent upcoming Star Wars shows and movies will incorporate nostalgia through things such as cameos or callbacks, but so far, most projects signal some connection to the Star Wars mainstays. Star Wars: The Acolyte is a key example of this. Although the show will be set 100 years before The Phantom Menace, exploring a new era on screen, it will also inevitably tie into the prequel movies. In fact, already, the show is set to elucidate the early fractures in the Republic and the Jedi Order, serving as a prequel to the prequels in that sense.
Moreover, while Rey’s new movie will also be exploring an era not yet seen on screen, as the movie is set 15 years after The Rise of Skywalker, it would be impossible to separate the movie from the Skywalker Saga—particularly now that Rey has adopted the name. While Star Wars is no doubt getting more innovative, the franchise still hasn’t truly broken away from its main stories and characters. In truth, Star Wars’ decision to continue to focus on nostalgia is a smart one; even with criticism in response at times, nostalgia has been key to Star Wars’ success.
The franchise also seems very aware of that fact, having released shows such as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka that are specifically about bringing beloved characters back and connecting the prequel era with the contemporary shows such as The Mandalorian. Ultimately, it isn’t a flaw so long as Star Wars can continue to do it well. While there can be pitfalls to relying on it too much, so far, Star Wars has often found great success by routinely injecting nostalgia into even their newest and most innovative movies and shows.
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