Students of film history will be well aware that before 1977, and the release of Star Wars, the modern summer blockbuster was very much in its infancy. It could be argued that Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, released two years earlier, was the first film to really get those queues snaking round the block, but the first instalment in George Lucas’s long-running space opera triggered Hollywood’s love affair with mass same-day openings, high-octane marketing and the sense of a major movie “event” happening across the globe.
How strange, then, that there is no Star Wars movie currently in production and no real date for when we will next get to see the saga in multiplexes. Disney’s sequel trilogy and the associated nine-film “Skywalker Saga” is complete, and thanks to the fact that 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stank harder than a Tauntaun’s guts, there is no appetite whatsoever for spinoffs, prequels or sequels featuring recently introduced characters such as Daisy Ridley’s Rey, John Boyega’s Finn or Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron. People have even forgotten how cute they once thought BB-8 was. It is as if the entire thing has been quietly swept into the Sarlacc’s throat, never to be seen again (unless it is revived in desperation in a few decades’ time, a la Boba Fett.)
