Disney Reaffirms Star Wars Films Going on Hiatus, TV Content Increasing

Solo: A Star Wars Story and the surprisingly mixed reaction to Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi gave Disney a lot of pause last year. So much so that the studio put further Star Wars movie development into a slab of carbonite, a status that Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, says is still ongoing.

On a recent earnings call, the man who heads one of the largest entertainment conglomerates in the world said that the Disney films will go “into a hiatus” once Star Wars: Episode IX – Rise of the Skywalker hits theaters. This echoes his previous comments that the franchise needs some time to figure itself out after Solo disappointed at the box office and it appeared that maybe their rampant release schedule wasn’t actually what fans wanted. Back then he was referring to the slew of origin films that Disney had planned, but now it applies to even more of their efforts.

D.B. Weiss and David Benioff just left over creative differences and time commitments, putting Disney back to square one with film development, and Rian Johnson’s trilogy is nowhere to be seen. His movies never had release dates, rumors of plots, possible production schedules, or anything really, so it’s possible they can just sit until the hiatus is over or maybe get scrapped entirely. Considering the director is in all-out marketing mode for his upcoming Knives Out, we probably won’t learn anything about it soon.

However, if you are hankering for more Star Wars and the upcoming The Mandalorian just isn’t enough, do not fret. Iger says that Disney+ is going to carry on the brand aggressively on the smaller screen. You’ve got the return of Ewan McGregor in an Obi-Wan Kenobi series and the upcoming return of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

As if that weren’t enough content, Iger also teased three more Star Wars shows that will be landing on Disney+ at some point. One of those may be the Obi-Wan show, but that would still leave two more mystery shows to be revealed. It seems a bit odd that they’d put the movies on hiatus thanks to oversaturation and then go full bore into saturating their television shows, but streaming is a much different beast than theatrical release so they may think what failed in one place will work in another.