Make Star Wars cheap again

polygon.com:

The Star Wars franchise is constantly producing a stream of profitable new merchandising and material, including video games, novels, comics, and animated shows. But the film and TV side of Star Wars feels like it’s struggling. Over the past five years, Disney has repeatedly announced plansfor new movies, then unceremoniously canceled themor just kept them silently back-burnered. Disney Plus’ recent Star Wars live-action shows keep promising new directionsfor the franchise, thenpulling backand mixing messages. There’s no clear vision or coherent narrative direction for the screen versions of the franchise, even though they’re the most visible and mainstream part of Star Wars. Everybody seems to want something different out of this grand, sprawling story.

So Polygon is gathering some thoughts about the franchise’s future under the loose banner of What We Want From Star Wars. These opinion essays lay out what we love about the Star Wars universe, and where we hope it’ll go in the future … or a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Star Wars is in a state of interrupted transformation. Disney’s slate of films and TV events are straddling the gap between the auteur-driven hero’s journey and a fully franchised system of blockbusters. Some of the individual installments are managing it pretty well. Others have, let’s say, growing pains.

Disney’s newest Star Wars movie trilogy isn’t tentpoles so much as the actual tent that most of modern Star Wars content can shelter in. Those films are divisive — a word that undersells one of the touchiest fan conflagrations of the online era, a conflict that drove Lucasfilm into a hiatus of consideration. The controversy grew to encompass many things, but was rooted in competing