Star Wars Needs To Get Over The Original Trilogy
A new hope is needed.
With the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the saga gets another entry that ties right back to the very first movie.
The events of Solo track Han between the ages of 19-22-years-old, taking us from around 13 years before A New Hope to approximately a decade before it. The comes after Rogue One, Disney's other anthology/spin-off/standalone movie, led directly into the original Star Wars, right down to a CGI recreation of a young Princess Leia.
The franchise may be one of the biggest in the world, with more than $9bn in box-office and counting over the course of 41 years (and untold amounts in merchandising) and yet, 10 movies deep (or 11, if you include The Clone Wars), it hasn't even begun to explore its true potential as a universe.
The timeline of Star Wars is based around A New Hope's climactic Battle of Yavin, with the events of The Empire Strikes Back taking place three years later, and Return of the Jedi a year after that.
If we go back to the Prequel Trilogy, then we start off around 32 years Before the Battle of Yavin in The Phantom Menace, and end up in 19BBY with Revenge of the Sith. Solo is then 13-10BBY, and TV show Star Wars Rebels roughly charts the period 5-1BBY.
Going the other way, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi take place 30 years after Return of the Jedi, placing them around 34ABY.
All told, this brief history lesson gives us a defined time period of every single Star Wars movie of a sixty-six year span which, aside from the presumably coincidental relation to the Order to kill the Jedi, isn't all that much when you consider how big this galaxy is (the old Expanded Universe, for what it's now worth, took things back tens of thousands of years).
This has never really been a major problem with the episodic Skywalker saga, which has followed the throughline of the one all-powerful Chosen family and seen movies released a few years apart.
However, with the saga now eight episodes in and the Disney-owned Lucasfilm attempting to diversify the brand with non-Skywalker stories, it does create something of a problem.
Next Page: Rogue One, Solo & Beyond