Disney's Cinematic Galaxy: How Much Is "Too Much" Star Wars?

Hi, my name’s Matt Ferra, and I like Star Wars.

When Disney announced it was making a new trilogy of Star Wars movies back in 2012, I was apprehensive. I liked Star Wars just as two trilogies and whatever was in the expanded universe. I feared that adding more to it would ruin its magic.

But then I got excited once I started seeing it as a continuation of the characters and stories that I loved from the original movies, and I’m still very hyped to see where this trilogy goes.

Then they announced they’d be doing the anthology movies like Rogue One and Solo, and I thought it would be a neat way to show the other parts of the galaxy.

Then they announced that Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, would be given his own trilogy of Star Wars movies to run separate from the Skywalker family saga.

And then it was announced that Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff had also been given their own series of Star Wars movies to run.

At that point, I asked myself: Are we getting too much Star Wars, and is too much Star Wars a bad thing?

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Star Wars, and as long as they keep making good movies, I’ll still be excited for this franchise. But does Star Wars need to be a franchise on par with Marvel?

Disney has begun announcing years ahead of time their plans for the franchise, much like what they do with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The problem is that Star Wars on screen isn’t as massive of a franchise as Marvel. In my opinion, Star Wars worked perfectly fine where the movies were all about the Skywalkers and the battle against the Empire/Seperatists/First Order, with everything else being delegated to books, video games, and TV shows in the expanded universe. The Skywalker saga was a simple good versus evil tale that was very accessible to a widespread audience – as blockbuster movie should be – with the EU being less conventional stories (many of which don’t even featuring our main characters) that were mainly sought out by mega-nerds who wanted to dive deeper into the lore and universe.

The issue with putting that EU-esque material on screen is that it runs the risk of alienating a part of your audience. Most people going into a Star Wars movie want to see lightsaber fights, the Light Side battling the Dark Side, and a climax were something big is blown up by some X-wings. Would a general audience really be interested in a movie about Darth Plagueis, or a story set in the Knights of the Old Republic timeline? Some of those aren’t exactly the “blockbuster” material that Disney looks for.

George Lucas right now (probably).

With Marvel, it’s different. They have such a wide variety of characters that can tell a wide variety of stories: Captain America has spy stories, Thor and Doctor Strange have fantasy, Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man have sci-fi comedies, etc. But at their core, they’re still Marvel stories. If Star Wars decides to stray too far from they’ve shown in their movies thus far, they could potentially stop feeling like Star Wars movies in the eyes of their viewers. On the flip side, however, if they keep putting out trilogy after trilogy of the same “good-versus-evil” stuff, people might complain that it’s getting stale.

With this news, Disney could very well be overextending themselves when it comes to their plans for Star Wars. Giving Rian Johnson his own trilogy makes some sense; he’s proven his worth (to some people) with his work on The Last Jedi. Benioff and Weiss, however, have no experience with Star Wars. And yes, the world building in Game of Thrones is incredible, and it would be cool to see that level of detail and realism brought to Star Wars, but I can’t give them full credit for this aspect of the show. After all, George R.R. Martin did write the books first, they merely adapted them to screen.

It would make more sense giving them a single movie to direct to prove their worth in the Star Wars universe, but a whole movie series? That might be too much. I’m sure Disney knows what they’re doing – considering they’ve been running the MCU for 6-7 years now – but I still get nervous when studios project their plans for the future so far in advance. I’ve seen it fail before, with Universal’s dead-on-arrival “Dark Universe”, Sony’s aborted Amazing Spider-Man cinematic universe, and DC’s “Gosh Darn It, They Sure Are Trying” Extended Universe. But then again, none of them really had the money that Disney had fueling them.

I guess that’s what this all comes down to: Money. As long as Star Wars keeps making Disney the big bucks, they’ll keep on milking this franchise like the thala-siren it is. (You know, that weird alien that Luke milked in The Last Jedi.) And with how much of a financial juggernaut Star Wars is right now, Disney could survive off the toy sales alone.

So…is it wrong for me to want some of these upcoming movies to fail financially so that Star Wars can go back to being this small little movie franchise? They’re already not doing too hot over in China – one of Disney’s biggest overseas markets – so there’s a small chance that Disney might reign back on some of their bigger Star Wars cinematic universe plans.

But considering this is Disney – who are ironically paralleling the evil Empire they cast as their villains – that won’t happen. They’ve already assimilated Fox and Sony into themselves. They cannot be stopped at this point.

All Glory to the Mouse.