When Disney bought Lucasfilm for roughly $4bn in 2012, it must have felt like an obvious piece of business: who wouldn’t throw wads of cash at a saga boasting an entire galaxy in a box? For a while, it seemed too good to be true. The Force Awakens made more than $2bn worldwide. Rogue One did more than $1bn. The Last Jedi conjured up more than $1.3bn, even while triggering a culture war so radioactive it could power the Death Star. Most of the fandom hated The Rise of Skywalker, but that most execrable of movies still earned Disney more than $1bn.
Then came Disney+, the perfect delivery system. No more waiting years between films: just hang around for a few months and something else would pop up on the conveyor belt. Andor, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, The Mandalorian. Plot holes were filled, animated side characters got their magnum opus, and we all learned far more about the middle-management structure of galactic fascism than we had ever imagined possible. So why are we, almost 14 years on from that monumental shift in the Star Wars power structure, reading yet another slew of critical notices declaring that the saga has run its course? The Mandalorian and Grogu, at time of writing, has a rating of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, pushing it just into the “fresh” category. The positives, broadly speaking, are that it is charming, brisk, visually polished and has Baby Yoda, a character precision-engineered for adorability. On the negative side, critics have complained the film feels thin, formulaic and weirdly televisual, less a grand restoration of Star Wars on the big screen than three Disney+ episodes.
