The future of Star Wars is the Skywalkers — just not in the way you’d think

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, then pulling 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.

At the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — the (appropriately) maligned final entry in the multi-decade, nine-film storyline that made up the backbone of the Star Wars series — Force-wielding protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley) visits the desert planet Tatooine. She visits the deserted farm that used to belong to original-trilogy Star Wars characters Owen and Beru and their whiny nephew, Luke Skywalker. She ceremoniously packages up the lightsabers of the galaxy’s greatest twins, Luke and Princess Leia Organa, and symbolically buries them. Moments later, a passerby asks her to identify herself. Staring at the Force ghosts of Luke and Leia, with John Williams’ iconic music swelling behind