Star Wars: Disney CEO Not Ruling Out Future Trilogies

Since the Star Wars franchise began it has been a series that deals in threes. The first three movies became the "Original Trilogy" with the "Prequel Trilogy" following it and now the "Sequel Trilogy" set to conclude the Skywalker saga with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Taking it a step further, the saga is made up of THREE trilogies. Even when announcing new projects since the Disney acquisition, Lucasfilm has specified they are trilogies which is why it surprised many earlier today when a new interview with company president Kathleen Kennedy revealed they would be moving away from that structure in the future....or are they?

Speaking with Variety, CEO of The Walt Disney Company Bob Iger was asked about this new development, seemingly throwing water on the idea as perhaps too premature to consider.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Iger said when asked about the company distancing from the trilogy format. "She and I have said, 'Well, maybe trilogies are too hard, so maybe we'll make one film and then a sequel,' but we don't know."

Though most of the films released under Disney by Lucasfilm have been critical and commercial hits, this decision of taking movies and franchises one step at a time was perhaps spurned by the dismal box office of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film, which killed the "A Star Wars Story" branding and had very public behind-the-scenes problems, brought in $392 million worldwide, making it the lowest grossing live-action Star Wars movie by a significant margin.

It is worth noting that Iger's current contract with The Walt Disney Company is set to expire at the end of 2021, a full year before the next Star Wars movie is scheduled to be released in theaters (that film was supposed to star the trilogy by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, but what it will be now remains to be seen). Perhaps Iger's successor will have different ideas about how the franchise should work moving forward, but for the time being it seems like Lucasfilm will not count their intergalactic chickens before they hatch when planning their franchises

"I think it gives us a more open-ended view of storytelling and doesn't lock us into this three-act structure," Kennedy said about not sticking to trilogies. "We're not going to have some finite number and fit it into a box. We're really going to let the story dictate that."

In the meantime, Lucasfilm and Disney aren't worried about the idea of fatigue for the franchise in a galaxy far, far away setting in in theaters. A second season of The Mandalorian is already in the works for Disney+ plus a Rogue One prequel series focusing on Diego Luna's Cassian Andor and an Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Ewan McGregor set to reprise his role.