Lots to celebrate, but no Star Wars Celebration in 2018

With the next Star Wars Celebration slated for an unknown city at an unknown date in 2019, what does skipping a year mean in the Star Wars universe?

Star Wars Celebration, a Lucasfilm love fest for Star Wars fans, has been known to move to locations around the world to provide a much more planetary approach to the fandom. It has even skipped years since its inception in 1999. However, the past few years there have been consecutive as Celebration moved from Anaheim in 2015, to London in 2016, and was most recently hosted in Orlando.

But there will be no Star Wars Celebration in 2019. And that seems a little strange given how much is going on around the Star Wars universe.

There was much speculation that Star Wars Celebration would be an ongoing convention given that there are so many Star Wars movies on the horizon. 2015 saw the release of the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. 2016 is when fans first saw Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and the highly anticipated trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi was revealed during The Last Jedi panel in Orlando.

The standalone Han Solo movie is due in 2018, so the big question is why skip a year and miss the opportunity to debut the trailer?

2019 is not only the year when Episode IX is released, but it also happens to be the year that Star Wars Land opens at Disneyland in Anaheim. It’s possible that the Powers That Be are hoping to put all of their eggs in a collective basket and go big or go home with one big Celebration, likely in Anaheim to encourage guests to go across the street from the Anaheim Convention Center to spend some time at Disneyland.

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Regardless of the reasoning, there will be a void in 2018 without Star Wars Celebration, but lots to look forward to in 2019.