When The Force Awakens dropped its first trailer on Nov. 28, 2014, it promised a return to a version of the Star Wars galaxy that had been largely absent for nine years. Although the prequels seem like a long time ago, in an era, far, far away, by the time Episode VII entered pre-production in 2013, it had only been eight years since the debut of Revenge of the Sith in 2005. That gap is only one year longer than the same gap we’ll have between Star Wars films in the “modern” era. In 2026 when The Mandalorian & Grogu hits theaters, it will have been seven years since the debut of The Rise of Skywalker.
The larger point is that Star Wars tends to course-correct in a shorter time than we tend to remember. And now it seems another course correction is coming. With the unofficial announcement that a new trilogy is in development from Simon Kinberg — and that trilogy will likely comprise Episodes X, XI, and XII — the Star Wars franchise is poised to repeat the mistake of the sequel trilogy. Because what this possible sequel-sequel trilogy can’t afford to do is the one thing The Force Awakens relied on: be just like the old movies.
Of all the sequel trilogy films, The Force Awakens is probably the one that has withstood the test of time the best, at least when it comes to broad popularity. At the time it was released, The Force Awakens was almost universally acclaimed, the fandom ugliness that emerged in the post-Last Jedi era hadn’t happened yet, and everything felt renewed. We wanted to forgive The Force Awakens for having story beats almost exactly like A New Hope, including the wildly unnecessary and strangely underwhelming existence of Starkiller Base.
But the legacy of the sequel trilogy is its odd reliance on story structures borrowed from the original trilogy. The A New Hope parallels in Force Awakens are painfully obvious, but even the supposedly subversive Last Jedi is very Empire Strikes Back. Then with The Rise of Skywalker, nearly all the problems of Return of the Jedi were recreated, too: complicated battles on multiple fronts, a reconciliation with Force ghosts, and, of course, Palpatine as the most important evil thing in the universe, even though he’s barely in the previous two movies — just like the classic trilogy! We all got mad about “Somehow, Palpatine returned” with Rise of Skywalker, but in Return of the Jedi, it was more like, “Somehow, Palpatine is a character you definitely remember and know about.” (Side note: No regular person in the world ever knew Palpatine’s name until the books and comics of the early ’90s because it’s never said once on screen in the classic trilogy.)
The way the sequel films so desperately tried to imitate the story beats of the classic trilogy became all the more frustrating since, this time around, fans felt like there was less of an excuse to be this sloppy. A good microcosm of this is the remnants of the second Death Star in The Rise of Skywalker. When you watch Return of the Jedi, it’s very clear that the entire structure of the Death Star was obliterated, but because Rise of Skywalker wanted an epic return to the Emperor’s throne room, the film inexplicably claims that like half of the Death Star just fell down on another, different Endor moon.
Incredulous plot devices like this (the return of the Skywalker lightsaber, the Falcon just randomly being on Jakku when Rey needs it, Han speaking to Kylo Ren through the Force) pervade the sequel trilogy, and these things are largely there to remind audiences of stuff from the more beloved classic trilogy. Often people say that this is all because the sequels are overstuffed with nostalgia, which is partially true. Many times in the sequel trilogy, the references exist for the sake of being references, rather than having a veneer of plausibility.
But Lucas’ prequel trilogy — for all its faults — proved that Star Wars stories on the big screen don’t have to all be the same. The story beats of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith are far less reliant on referencing the classic films, and, in most cases, have parallels that are much more natural. So, if Simon Kinberg’s next Star Wars trilogy is looking for inspiration for how to structure a three-movie arc, the prequels are a slightly better guide than the other two trilogies for one simple reason: It’s the most different of the three Star Wars trilogies to date.
A new Star Wars trilogy shouldn’t avoid references and callbacks altogether; that would be nuts. But a new group of films can learn from the mistakes of the previous sequels. Easter eggs are fine. Acknowledging what has come before is natural and good. But hokey plot structures and forced parallels are no match for a good, original story on your side. Because that’s the real, new hope of another Star Wars trilogy: that we could see a brand-new kind of story, not just old stories with new faces.
