Star Wars: Can ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ meet expectations?

ANAHEIM, CA – AUGUST 15: Chairman of the Walt Disney Studios Alan Horn took part today in “Worlds, Galaxies, and Universes: Live Action at The Walt Disney Studios” presentation at Disney’s D23 EXPO 2015 in Anaheim, Calif. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

What’s the rush?

On Tuesday, Fast Company released an interview with Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Episode VII) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker director J.J. Abrams. One of the more interesting aspects of the interview is how Disney has put such a scheduling surge on Star Wars since the Lucasfilm acquisition in 2012. Here’s what Abrams had to say about Disney’s “backwards” way of announcing release dates before having anything else in place:

"“To have no script and to have a release date and have it be essentially a two-year window when you’re saying (to yourself), you’ve got two years from the decision to do it to release, and you have literally nothing . . . . You don’t have the story, you don’t have the cast, you don’t have the designers, the sets.”"

From a creative standpoint, this makes little sense. Nothing can be done without the story/the script, so that gets rushed right from the beginning. Then, of course, you are constantly rewriting the script as you shoot. But you need to get the shoot done fairly quickly because there is so much post-production on films of this scale – no matter how many practical effects you use.

This is basically the same timetable that Abrams was on for The Force Awakens, but he somehow made it through. Yet Disney stuck with spreading the sequel trilogy into two-year gaps (2015, 2017, 2019), instead of the traditional three-year gaps of the original (1977, 1980, 1983) and prequel (1999, 2002, 2005) trilogies.

None of this makes sense from the perspective of making the best possible film. Disney has since slowed down from its mantra of one Star Wars film per year – mostly because of last year’s lackluster box office of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Yet nothing has been learned in the interim, as The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t moved to 2020, or even 2021. And the reason for that is quite simple.