Is 2025 the Reset Year Star Wars Needs?

Star Wars fans were well-catered for in 2024, with four streaming series set in a galaxy far, far away dropping in the last 12 months. The same can’t be said of the franchise’s 2025 slate, which (as it currently stands) isn’t exactly Jabba the Hutt-sized.

Just two productions set in a galaxy far, far away are confirmed for the year ahead (not counting Skeleton Crew‘s remaining episodes), both of them Disney+ shows. The long-awaited second and final season of Andor drops in April, with the third helping of the animated anthology series Star Wars: Visions arriving at some point further down the line.

On the face of it, this is a real bummer. After all, being a Star Wars devotee means always being hungry for more (even when you insist you’re not). Yet I’m increasingly convinced that Star Wars‘ relatively modest 2025 slate is a blessing in disguise: the reset year the franchise needs now more than ever.

Star Wars Has an Overexposure Problem

First and foremost, Lucasfilm and Disney dialing back Star Wars‘ would go a long way to solving its overexposure problem. Simply put, there’s so much Star Wars media flooding the market at the moment that none of it feels special. Back when George Lucas launched the franchise in 1977 with A New Hope, there was nothing else like it, so it felt like an event. Ditto for that flick’s sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi; they were a big deal because (comics, novels, and video games notwithstanding) they were our only fix of Star Wars, and they arrived years apart.

The same held true of the prequel trilogy over a decade later. Sure, there was a mountain of Expanded Universe material, but as far as casual Star Wars fans were concerned, The Phantom Menace and its follow-ups were all that mattered. It wasn’t until years after the final prequel, Revenge of the Sith, premiered in 2005 that Lucas released the spinoff Clone Wars movie and series. Production logistics aside, this seemingly reflects Lucas’ grasp of audience behavior; how they respond more enthusiastically after a multi-year hiatus. But in the post-Lucas, Disney-owned era of frequent, high-profile Star Wars releases, that novelty factor is dead. Indeed, the closest we’ve come in recent times to the franchise’s hype heyday was the 2015 sequel trilogy opener The Force Awakens – and that’s because it was the first live-action Star Wars movie in 10 years.

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From here, excitement for the revived Star Wars saga gradually waned as Lucasfilm ramped up its cinematic output. Part of that is likely due to the franchise’s creative direction under Lucas’ successor as Lucasfilm president, Kathleen Kennedy (more on that later). But the sheer frequency of Star Wars movies – one every year for five years – can’t have helped. Why turn out for a spinoff like Solo: A Star Wars Story (the franchise’s first financial flop) when there’s another, potentially more satisfying Star Wars installment just around the corner? Lucasfilm eventually got the message, pumping the breaks on future film projects after 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker and focusing on a single property, the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, that same year. And for a time, Star Wars felt special again.

It didn’t last. Lucasfilm and Disney quickly fell back into old habits. In 2021, multiple Star Wars live-action and animated shows debuted on Disney+ (a trend that continued in subsequent years). In fairness, this wasn’t entirely the production company’s fault. Disney reportedly pushed Lucasfilm to greenlight more Star Wars shows as part of a since-abandoned initiative to pad out the Disney+ content library. But whatever the reason, new entries in the franchise – once an automatic highlight on any year’s pop culture calendar – have become an unremarkable occurrence. That needs to change, and a Star Wars-lite 2025 would go a long way to making that happen.

Lucasfilm Needs to Get Its Star Wars Strategy Sorted

Another downside of pumping out Star Wars movies and TV shows in bulk is that quality takes a hit. That’s not to say that everything Lucasfilm has served up in recent years is bad; far from it. The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2 were a blast, while Andor Season 1 arguably redefined the types of stories the franchise could tell (and audiences it could target). Animated fare such as Visions, The Bad Batch, and Star Wars Tales has been consistently solid, as well. Even more divisive efforts such as The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, The Acolyte, and Skeleton Crew have their vocal backers (and, in most cases, have enjoyed strong viewership figures).

But there’s also no escaping that the more Star Wars material Lucasfilm puts out, the less satisfied the broader fanbase seemingly becomes. I’m not just talking about the “culture war” crowd, either. Lucasfilm canceled The Acolyte because people – agenda-free fans, as well as anti-woke types – straight-up stopped watching it. They gave up, because for all its ambition and despite a strong start, The Acolyte was ultimately too uneven to maintain a consistent following. That’s what happens when a studio like Lucasfilm is spread too thin to give each project the attention it needs.

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This bleeds into the strategy side of things. A valid criticism of Disney-era Star Wars is that it’s felt increasingly directionless. Yes, the franchise is a big tent that can (and should) be home to standalone projects that don’t further an overarching narrative. Heck, such stories can offer welcome relief from the demands of keeping up with shared universe adventures. But when you sign up for a “bigger picture” Star Wars story, whether it’s the sequel trilogy or The Mandalorian and its spinoffs, you expect the folks in charge to have a plan. At present, that’s only partly the case.

Lead Star Wars TV architects Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni seemingly have a clear idea of where they’re taking that corner of the franchise’s universe. Yes, their MCU-inspired, increasingly nostalgia-driven execution is sometimes unfocused. But Favreau and Filoni are ultimately building to two feature films, the latter of which will pay off every Mandalorian-adjacent storyline. Sadly, everything else on the screen side of things is a mess. Notably, the wave of films Kennedy announced in 2023 is progressing well below lightspeed, and my guess is because there’s no internal sense of their reason for being, individually or as part of the wider franchise tapestry. If I’m right, that’s a big red flag. Fortunately, Lucasfilm execs should have plenty of room in their calendars to address it in 2025.

2025: The Year Lucasfilm Rebuilds Star Wars

It also doesn’t hurt that Andor and Visions are the two Star Wars projects scheduled for this year. They’re probably better placed to foster goodwill among the more jaded segments of the franchise’s fandom than anything else. Andor Season 2 is poised to wrap up a story showrunner Tony Gilroy mapped out years ago; the odds it drops the ball seem slim. Meanwhile, Visions Season 3 is a bunch of non-canon animated shorts that only the most ardent of Disney-era detractors could take issue with (at worst, they’ll just ignore them).

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Collectively, this is just enough Star Wars – just enough good Star Wars – to remind us why we love the iconic space opera in the first place. We’ll head into 2026 desperate for more. And if Lucasfilm can capitalize on this – with a curated, coherent line-up of eventized movies and shows – then Star Wars will get the reset it so desperately needs.

The complete Star Wars collection is currently streaming on Disney+.