Repeated failures in Star Wars‘ past have caused its owner to become trepidatious. Is Disney the most successful media company in the world? You wouldn’t think so looking at it. I would think anything with the Star Wars logo would make hundreds of millions of dollars, but mountains of money aren’t enough. Since the future is off-limits, Star Wars history might be the next great frontier for the movies and shows to explore.
Star Wars Can Move Forward By Going Back
Every Disney+ Star Wars show has been set between the established trilogies. The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka take place after the original films and before the sequels. Andor begins in the early days of the Empire. Reaching between the events of the movies, fans have already seen has its benefits, but it’s time to try something new. Unfortunately, taking risks isn’t really on the menu for Disney. Pushing forward hasn’t worked out, and though they’ve had prequels fall apart, maybe the problem is that they didn’t go back far enough.
If you stuck to the films and shows, Star Wars would encompass less than a century. The visual media covers about 67 years. They run from 32 BBY to 35 ABY. There’s a 30-year jump between the original trilogy and the sequels. If Disney produced Episodes X, XI, and XII, they’d likely take place sometime around 65 ABY. They could launch thousands of years into the new era, making things unrecognizable and changing things up. Disney won’t do that. It’s too scary. Instead, the writers would have to push back toward the thousands of years of previous material they rendered non-canonical and let a variety of creators repaint Star Wars‘ distant past. Disney has already started the process and just has to get bolder with its Star Wars history.
Star Wars Can Give Itself A New History
When Disney bought Star Wars from Lucasfilm in 2014, it erased most of the franchise’s distant past. Countless novels, games, and comic books dramatized the ancient eras before the events of the films. Some of the material was beloved, but a lot of it died unnoticed. Disney hasn’t capitalized on the opportunity it created for itself. It will begin to explore the history in the upcoming series The Acolyte. That show’s premise takes things back to the early days of the Sith, set around 132 BBY. One hundred years before The Phantom Menace is a good start, but it’s barely scratching the surface of what Star Wars could become. Imagine what they could do with the countless blank pages of history that must have happened before the stories we all know.
The time before the established world of the prequels could be a time of impossible magic, powerful figures, and cosmic horror. The rules can be much looser in a story set thousands of years in the past. Star Wars has been too strict and stuck in its ways for years. I know the temptation to examine the distant ancestors of Luke and Leia would be strong, but there’s so much out there in a galaxy with fewer established rules. A universe with massive, unmapped areas that would later become population centers. A place where magic is still free and unrestrained. We can watch the rules that govern modern Star Wars come into being. The eras before everything made so much sense could be open to renegade creativity — the kind of outside-the-box thinking that made the franchise great in the first place. Disney is too afraid to change anything about the present or to establish a new generation. The writers need to go backward to find something new.
Related: Ahsoka: Time Travel Is the Worst Idea for Star Wars To Explore
The future of Star Wars looks less promising with every new project. Ahsoka has been fun enough so far, but I’d argue it’s the furthest thing from a bold step forward. There are countless Star Wars stories waiting to be told. New filmmakers and showrunners inspired by the franchise they loved, just as George Lucas was inspired by his favorite films, have bold ideas for new frontiers in the galaxy far, far away. Let them explore what happened a much longer time ago.
