The time has come. Er, gone. At long last, Disney has officially waved the white flag and announced surrender. In the not-so-distant future, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World will un-anchor itself from its strict setting in the Disney-produced “sequel trilogy” and open the floodgates to a new (or as the case may be, old) corners of the Star Wars universe. Here’s what happened.
The Timeline Lock
When Disney officially purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 for a staggering $4 billion, there was no question that one of the major outputs of the acquisition would be a Star Wars-themed land at Disney Parks. Star Wars would finally give Disney its “Potter Swatter”; a timeless, intergenerational IP worthy of an immersive land. There was just one issue: where and when should it be set?
As the story goes, Lucasfilm and Disney executives drafted plenty of ideas for lands drawn from Star Wars films before deciding on a “high risk, high reward” idea: that the future of Star Wars didn’t reside in the past. Basically, the decision was made that a Star Wars land needed to be set in the world certain to serve as the anchor of all new Star Wars development going forward: the time and place depicted in the Disney-produced sequel trilogy in development at the same time as the land.
We know how that went. It turned out that the three entries released between 2015 and 2019 introduced a compelling cast of characters and fascinating new locales, but each film declined in critical and commercial success. The finale – 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker – was as close to a bust as Star Wars is likely to have, ending Disney’s sequel trilogy with a whimper… and more to the point, ending it at all. Suddenly, Disney found itself with a permanent land narratively tied to a concluded – and not especially enduring or uniformally-loved – corner of the Star Wars universe. Oops.
That might’ve been fine except that Galaxy’s Edge had been a sort of “purity test” for Disney. Imagineers must’ve prided themselves on the in-universe lingo used by Batuu’s “residents” (“Bright suns!” “The refreshers are this way!”), the land’s immovable allegiance to canon (leaving popular Grogu merchandise exiled to a cart just outside of the land given the timeline-shattering implications), and even its complete lack of a musical score (since, of course, there wouldn’t be John Williams music playing in a “real” remote outpost).
But neither fans nor the general public were sold. And especially given the cooling interest in the “sequel trilogy” (and indeed, the fact that subsequent hit projects like The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett are set in the original trilogy’s time), it sure looked like Disney had made a major mistake…
