Disney is milking the Star Wars franchise harder than a thala-siren

The original trilogy, prequel trilogy, sequel trilogy and future trilogy is to be followed up with a new 'series' of films. Also there's TV shows.

(Disney/Lucasfilm)

As if by algorithm, the creators of Game of Thrones were tapped to helm a new series of Star Wars films last night, with Disney/Lucasfilm lining up David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to both write and produce. Whether the pair, who have adapted a fantasy series for HBO very successfully for the most part, have the chops to imagine their own one remains to be seen, but regardless of the talent on board, this new slew of films feels an exhausting proposition.

I enjoyed The Last Jedi immensely and it made me excited about Star Wars again in a way that The Force Awakens didn't. And yet, when the trailer for second anthology film Solo: A Star Wars Story dropped this week, it was with a feeling of 'already?'. The Last Jedi hasn't even left cinemas yet but another Star Wars property will open in them in May. A backstory for Han Solo feels somewhat unnecessary and has a hard task ahead winning critics and fans over, especially as (following widely-reported directorial troubles) it doesn't look to have taken the opportunity a completely standalone film affords to try something different. "I'm putting together a crew," Woody Harrelson's character says in the trailer, because apparently every sci-fi film must now involve doing so, and visually it looks as grey and smoggy (because it's in the past, I guess) as the fairly dreadful and perfunctory Rogue One that came before it.

With nine Skywalker-centric saga films, three spin-offs from this corner of the universe and a new trilogy from a different corner under Rian Johnson's charge either released or slated, Benioff and Weiss' last Star Wars film (assuming they make at least three of them with this "series") could be the 18th Star Wars film. This is to say nothing of the mooted Star Wars TV series, of which Lucasfilm is apparently developing "a few".

In milking the Star Wars franchise as fervently as Luke Skywalker did the green milk-lactating thala-siren in The Last Jedi, Disney risks losing Star Wars its "event movie" reputation. It might be hard to imagine audiences being indifferent to a new instalment, but we probably would have thought the same with Batman during his The Dark Knight apotheosis. Here we are, just a few years later, cringing as he is shoehorned into every DC movie possible, the future of the studio's once iconic superheroes now looking troubled, to say the least.

If we are to still be talking about Star Wars into the 2030s, as Disney is betting on with these deals, it must diversify and fast. If Johnson's new trilogy will be in the vein of the original saga, albeit it with completely different characters/planets/threats, Benioff and Weiss' films, at the very least, need to be a completely different proposition. Before it's even been released, the presale record-breaking Black Panther has shown that taking a gamble can seriously pay off for studios, as did X-Men's genre switch for Logan, and what Star Wars needs is to experiment with movies that tonally are a major departure from what we're used to. It's not about boardrooms ensuring content "feels like Star Wars" but, if anything, exciting new filmmakers actually being given the room to make sure it doesn't.