There’s a Star Wars movie coming out this month and I genuinely had to think for a second about whether I’d seen a single advertisement for it outside of a Super Bowl spot. And that is a really strange thing to say about a Star Wars release. Because if you were alive during the prequel trilogy era or especially during the sequel trilogy run, you know how inescapable the marketing was. It was in every magazine, every commercial break, fast food cups, Mountain Dew cans, Happy Meals, action figures for characters who were barely in the movie. You could not get away from it no matter how hard you tried.
So why does this new one feel like it’s barely trying?
I think the honest answer is that Disney and Lucasfilm have genuinely damaged the brand to the point where the aggressive marketing push just doesn’t make sense anymore. When the Force Awakens came out in 2015 there was real excitement behind it. It had been ten years since Revenge of the Sith. J.J. Abrams was coming off the Star Trek reboots that people actually liked. The hype was real and the marketing matched it.
Then The Last Jedi came out and split the fanbase right down the middle. Then Rise of Skywalker tried to course correct and ended up being one of the more baffling blockbusters in recent memory. And then came the shows. The Mandalorian was good, people liked that. But then you had the Boba Fett show, the Kenobi show, The Acolyte, and a string of releases that ranged from mediocre to genuinely bad. The only one that got widespread critical praise in recent years was Andor, and even that took a while to find its audience.
By the time you stack all of that up, the average person who used to love Star Wars has had their enthusiasm worn down pretty significantly. So spending a fortune on a massive marketing campaign for a new theatrical release feels like throwing money into a hole. They probably put out the Super Bowl spot because that’s what you do for a big movie and then decided to let it breathe rather than shove it everywhere and remind people of all the stuff they didn’t like.
The actual problem with the sequel trilogy when you really get into it comes down to characters and consistency. The original trilogy worked because the characters were just really good. Han Solo is a character you can’t really manufacture. He just came together perfectly. The prequels had their issues, mainly that George Lucas genuinely cannot write dialogue and Anakin spent most of three movies being whiny and emo in ways that made it hard to root for him. But at least by Revenge of the Sith you could feel the weight of the story they were trying to tell.
The sequels set up interesting characters and then didn’t know what to do with them. Finn and Poe Dameron were both set up in the first movie as characters with real potential and then kind of just existed in the background of the next two. Kylo Ren had a version of Anakin’s problem where he came across more like a kid throwing tantrums than an actual menacing villain. And what they did to Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi was genuinely hard to watch if you grew up with the original trilogy. The whole arc of those three movies was Luke believing in the good in Darth Vader when no one else did. And then in the sequels the reason the entire conflict exists is because he almost killed his nephew over a bad dream. It’s completley out of character and it undermined everything that made his original story meaningful.
The prequels honestly deserve more credit than they get at this point. Storywise there’s actually alot going on. The Jedi Council being kind of bureaucratic and in the wrong, Anakin’s jealousy and isolation, Palpatine’s patient manipulation of the whole system over decades. The bones of it are genuinely good. The dialogue is rough and some of the CGI hasn’t aged great, but the story itself holds up better than people give it credit for.
Anyway the point is Star Wars fatigue is real and it was entirely self inflicted. The question now is whether a Mandalorian movie is the thing that brings people back or just another entry that gets watched once and forgotten. Based on how quiet the marketing has been I don’t think even the people releasing it are totally sure.
