Disney has revealed that as of March 2024, it has made almost $12 billion from its $4 billion investment of Lucasfilm, proving the acquisition of the Star Wars franchise to be an incredibly lucrative decision for the company.

The ride, however, has felt about as smooth as a trip on the Millennium Falcon (that is, not at all). The lack of a cohesive story arc for Disney’s sequel trilogy further polarized an already opinionated fanbase, and the studio abandoned an ambitious one-movie-per-year film release structure after Solo: A Star Wars Story became the first Star Wars movie to bomb at the box office.

An Overabundance of New Additions Makes Star Wars Feel Generic & Random

Even as Disney has made streaming television the newest frontier for Star Wars, a near-constant announcement and dropping of upcoming projects and directors (What’s going on with Patty Jenkins’ Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, anyway?) suggests the megacorp could use a firmer grasp on how to manage the world George Lucas created. 

Disney went too big too fast with Star Wars, and though it’s hard to argue with a $12 billion return on investment, the current state of the Star Wars universe feels tenuous in terms of creative success. The universe will expand beyond the bounds of established lore with the post-sequel trilogy Star Wars: The New Jedi Order and the High Republic-era thriller The Acolyte. Still, Disney must achieve a certain kind of balancing act for these exciting new projects to feel like meaningful additions to the franchise. The studio can accomplish that, but only by taking key elements into consideration.

When The Force Awakens hit theaters in 2015, many fans noticed something small that hinted at something bigger: outside of named characters like Chewbacca, viewers found it impossible to spot a single alien species from any of the six previous films. The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker repeated the trend. Paired with a near-total lack of planets from Lucas’ movies, the new world of the sequel trilogy often feels totally unfamiliar from that of the original and prequel films. It’s a big galaxy, but too much ungrounded new material threatens to make Star Wars feel more like a Star Wars-inspired science fiction movie. 

The Rise of Skywalker offers a good example of this trend on a larger scale. That movie introduces concepts like a Sith dagger that doubles as a map and the concept of a Force dyad that conveniently allows Rey and Ben Solo to overcome the “somehow” resurrected Emperor Palpatine.

The dagger and dyad could have rewarded audiences if they had been seen anywhere else in the Star Wars universe. Instead, they stepped out of the franchise’s rich and established mythology into the realm of plot contrivance, which is not something Star Wars has a reputation for.

Forced Retcons (However Well Done) Highlight Controversial Story Decisions

With so much new material tossed into canon in Disney’s Star Wars, it makes sense for the company to retroactively tie it all in with the overall series lore. That path has perils, however, when interesting stories feel like they’re being hijacked to plug plot holes generated by other entries. The return of Emperor Palpatine in The Rise of Skywalker has cast a particularly large shadow over other Star Wars projects.

Take The Mandalorian and Star Wars: The Bad Batch. With The Mandalorian, the first live-action exploration of Mandalorian culture and the captivating introduction of a post-Return of the Jedi force user threatened to be sidelined by a seasons-long cloning storyline clearly designed to set up a future clone of Palpatine.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, an exploration of what happened to the vast clone armies of the Republic in the 19-year span between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, spends much of its third season hinting at the Emperor’s cloning plans. That show’s focus on clones does make the subject feel appropriate, even as it also serves as a reminder of how unexplained Palpatine’s return was in the first place. 

Star Wars Can, and Must, Break New Ground While Staying True to Itself

All this isn’t to say that Star Wars shouldn’t continue to expand the bounds of its universe. Disney-era Star Wars has some fantastic examples of storytelling that break new ground in a way that enriches what came before. Andor may introduce a bevy of new planets and be suspiciously low on aliens, familiar and not (hopefully the show will address this in season 2), but its exploration of the Empire’s infighting and politics on Coruscant make it feel steeped in the world of both the prequel and original trilogies.

Dave Filoni’s work, specifically on Ahsoka, accomplishes this as well. The show quite literally steps outside of the Star Wars galaxy, but does so in a way that explores the origin of the Dathomiri Nightsisters and sets up the continuation of established storylines from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The show’s second season will likely touch on the nature of the Force itself. What could better unify all of Star Wars than that?

Instead of simply throwing a bevy of new planets, characters, and aliens into the mix, Disney needs to steep the next few entries in its Star Wars canon in what audiences already know. Not in a pandering sense–fans have had enough of that–but by having familiar elements from the franchise factor into the story in an important way.

Thankfully, The Acolyte and Star Wars: New Jedi Order both seem primed to accomplish this. Rumor has it The Acolyte will heavily feature Coruscant and intrigue set within the rigid Jedi Order. A new story can lend greater meaning to what viewers saw in the prequel films. With Rey set to rebuild the Jedi Order in her upcoming movie, she may well examine the history of the Jedi to try to right past wrongs.

By telling new stories in a way that truly honors what came before, Disney may soon bring balance to Star Wars.