Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is no flop, but it’s well down on the more recent entries in the Skywalker saga.
And in the end, it might just be that nobody quite got what they wanted.
After the divisive reaction to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and the disappointing box office of Solo: A Star Wars Story, Disney was hoping that the last film in the saga for three years at least – The Rise Of Skywalker – might take things out on a high.
But not so. The Rise Of Skywalker has been met with low to middling reviews on the whole. Furthermore, the fanbase of The Last Jedi has, in part, been stung by how the new movie overrides some of the work done in the last. The feeling is that Disney wanted a safer Star Wars movie, one that rounded off a nine-film arc. Thus, JJ Abrams was hired to put The Rise Of Skywalker together.
And yet the film has failed to course correct the Star Wars box office, with the movie now set to fall a good deal shy of The Last Jedi’s takings.
It’s hardly a flop, but as things stand, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker has a box office take of $918m worldwide, so should still cross the $1bn mark. Yet The Last Jedi brought home $1.3bn, and The Force Awakens crossed $2bn. The Rise Of Skywalker will just about make half of that amount, a long tumble for a franchise that’s been a licence to print cash in the past.
Separately, the TV show The Mandalorian has proven a bigger hit. And it all leaves the entire Star Wars franchise in a strange place, where it’s not the box office juggernaut it’s always been assumed to be. Still huge, obviously. Just in flux, on the big screen at least.
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