Disney is Just Going Nuts With the ‘Star Wars’ Shows and Movies

The Mandalorian is not only a big hit for Disney+, it’s probably the streamer’s only hit so far. It’s Christmas and you should check out last year’s Christmas film Noelle if you’re a subscriber, but there’s really not a lot of reason to have Disney+ other than to see Din Djarin and Grogu’s adventures.

Someone at Disney got some sort of message from this because one of the big announcements from Disney’s Investor Day was that they’re expanding from one Star Wars tv series to 10. I don’t know if this the right message to take because the success of The Mandalorian is a bit of a lightning in a bottle situation with a confluence of the Western and Samurai film influences, the episodic nature making it feel like a retro Saturday-afternoon syndicated adventure series and Grogu just being fucking adorable making a uniquely enjoyable series that may not be repeatable.

I think we can all agree that up to this point, Star Wars has had a lot more misses than hits, and my personal “all the Star Wars you need” list only has a fraction of any given medium’s Star Wars content because that’s all you need. There are hundreds of Star Wars novels but Heir to the Empire and its two direct sequels are all you need.

Disney’s slate of Star Wars shows starts with two spin-offs of The Mandalorian: Ahsoka, following Clone Wars favorite Ahsoka Tano and  Rangers of the New Republic, which Incan only imagine must be the Cara Dune spin-off we’ve been hearing about unless Disney is giving a show to that X-Wing pilot played by the dad from Kim’s Convenience.

Also on the Star Wars slate is Obi-Wan Kenobi, which we learned will feature Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader, Andor, featuring Diego Luna reprising his role from Rogue One, The Bad Batch, an animated Clone Wars spin-off about a group of Clone Troopers, Visions, an anime anthology series, The Acolyte, a mystery set a hundred years before the first Star Wars movie, an animated R2-D2 and C-3PO series called A Droid Story and Lando, which better have my man Billy Dee Williams, who actually is the coolest cat in the universe.

It was also announced that the next Star Wars movie will be 2023’s Rogue Squadron, directed by Patty Jenkins and that Taika Waititi would be directing a movie as well. That Rian Johnson trilogy just doesn’t appear to be happening, which is good, because you don’t reward the guy who made the worst Star Wars movie (a real feat if you’ve seen The Phantom Menace) with three more Star Wars movies; you let him focus on making his “totally-not-Hercule-Poirot” films that are actually good.

So is it going to be worth watching ten different Star Wars TV shows? If they’re all as good as The Mandalorian it will be. That seems unlikely, but Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka and The Bad Batch will probably be pretty good, and Lando and Obi-Wan Kenobi should be worth watching. And hey, that’d be like a 60% hit rate, that’s way higher than the Star Wars movies have had to this point.