Prepare to power down. After ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ arrives this winter, the film series is taking a much-needed break. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any new ‘Star Wars’ media out there, of course. As announced at the big Disney+ press conference, the live-action series ‘The Mandalorian’ will be available to stream when the service launches in November. There will also be a new batch of episodes of fan-favorite animated series ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’, and in 2021, another live-action series starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor will arrive.
It is known that more movies are in the works, including a new trilogy from ‘The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson, and another from ‘Game of Thrones” D.B. Weiss & David Benioff, which will reportedly be set during the time of ‘The Old Republic’. But according to Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger, don’t consider those a done deal.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Iger stated:
“We have not announced any specific plans for movies thereafter. There are movies in development, but we have not announced them.
“We will take a pause, some time, and reset, because the Skywalker saga comes to an end with this ninth movie. There will be other Star Wars movies, but there will be a bit of a hiatus.”
‘The Rise of Skywalker’ is the ninth film in the “Skywalker Saga,” but is the eleventh movie overall, and will be the fifth movie in as many years. Last year, ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ became the lowest-grossing ‘Star Wars’ movie ever. It had a lot working against it, but it certainly didn’t help that it came out just five months after the prior flick, ‘The Last Jedi’.
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One sign of fatigue is the slumping sales of ‘Star Wars’ toys. These baubles revolutionized kids’ playthings in the ’70s and ’80s, but for the second year in a row, sales have declined.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast this past week, even Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill admitted:
“I’m not gonna tell them how to run their business, but is there a possibility of ‘Star Wars fatigue’? Yeah, I think there is. I’ve experienced it, to a certain degree. But they never listen to my ideas anyway, so who needs ‘em?”
