Entertainment

New Star Wars Trilogy Release Dates Seem Primed to Fight Star Wars Fatigue

by Jake Kleinman
Lucasfilm

The Rise of Skywalker will put an end to the Skywalker saga later this year, but Star Wars isn’t going away anytime soon. Disney just revealed the release dates for a new Star Wars trilogy of movies, and it seems Lucasfilm may have taken all those warnings of “Star Wars fatigue” to heart.

Disney announced an overhauled movie release schedule on Tuesday, via The Hollywood Reporter, including the new Star Wars trilogy coming after Episode IX. We still don’t know anything about these movies, including which spin-offs they even are, but at least we know when they’re coming to theaters.

UNTITLED STAR WARS (DIS) is the updated title of previous UNTITLED DISNEY LIVE ACTION dated on 12/16/22
UNTITLED STAR WARS (DIS) is now dated on 12/20/24
UNTITLED STAR WARS (DIS) is now dated on 12/18/26

There’s two important details here that suggest Disney’s learned a hard lesson from Solo. First, there’s not enough that’s interesting to support one movie per year. (When asked about fan “fatigue” in an earlier THR interview even Mark Hamill agreed: “Yeah, I think there is. I’ve experienced it, to a certain degree.”) And second, Star Wars movies should release in December.

Beyond that, there’s not much we can say with any certainty about these movies. We know that Rian Johnson is working on a new Star Wars trilogy set far, far away from the Skywalker story. We also know that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are working on a trilogy of their own.

These three new Star Wars release dates could represent either of these trilogies (or maybe even a combination of them both). If we had to guess, we’d say Johnson’s movies are coming first because we’re pretty sure they were greenlit first, but there’s really no way to say for sure.

At the very least, you can rest assured that more Star Wars movies are coming, just not at the one-per-year pace Disney originally seemed determined to pull off.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker hits theaters on December 20, 2019.

Related Tags