Star Wars Needs To Get Over The Original Trilogy
2. The Marvelisation Of Star Wars
This strategy makes it feel like Star Wars is being somewhat Marvelised, with the episodes serving as the galaxy's equivalent of The Avengers, and then certain key characters having their own solo movies to fill the gaps between them (it's not, obviously, an exact parallel, but you can see the joined-up thinking and logic here).
The reasoning from Lucasfilm is pretty clear: these characters are their most well-known, and generally speaking the most beloved, and that's even more the case if we apply it to the era as a whole. It's something recognisably Star Wars, but can be given a slightly different feel to the episodes, whether that's making a more overt war movie (Rogue One) or a heist-meets-Western (Solo), and theoretically much easier to brand to fans new and old.
It does, however, limit the storytelling potential. Rogue One and Solo both have their merits, with the former really putting the War into Star Wars and serving up a stunning finale, while Solo is a thoroughly enjoyable, fun movie that deepens its lead character. But we go into them with a sense of knowing: the Rebels will get the plans, but also have to die, and Solo will see him meet Chewie, perform the Kessel Run, win the Falcon and so on, with any new characters unable to have too great an impact because of the proximity to the pre-existing movies.
While a Kenobi movie that shows us his years in exile on Tatooine, or a Boba flick charting his rise to the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter, or a Jabba film that depicts him as the head honcho of the criminal underworld, each have their own merits and will probably be at least decent, they'll also suffer from some of the same drawbacks.
The Star Wars trilogy is (in my opinion, at least) the greatest ever made in the history of cinema, a rich, fertile world for stories and characters who go on to become legends (or, in the Disney-era, Legends), and while it's very exciting to see where Episode IX will go - in part precisely because The Last Jedi started to move beyond the Skywalker story - these anthology movies or other film series do need to go further away.
Final page: The Galaxy's New Hopes