Disney Would’ve Been Better Off Making No New Star Wars At All.

Disney would’ve been better off not making any new Star Wars at all than making mediocre to bad Star Wars. The brand has been damaged as a result, and even the evergreen Original Trilogy isn’t as profitable as it used to be.

Disney defenders claim that it’s not mismanagement. Star Wars is just an old brand and tastes have changed.

But Batman proves this theory dead wrong. I’ll explain below.

On April 29, Disneyland debuted roaming meet-and-greet appearances by Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo inside Galaxy’s Edge.

Stormtroopers, R2-D2, and Chewbacca too. The land also started playing more of the classic John Williams film scores throughout the area, and expanded its in-world timeline to include original trilogy elements.

It’s the course correction Star Wars fans have been asking for since the land opened in 2019.

It’s also seven years late.

I went to Galaxy’s Edge a bunch of times. Including media access while it was still being built.

When I walked through the tunnel from Grand Avenue at Hollywood Studios for the first time, I expected the John Williams horns to hit. That’s how you walk into Star Wars. That’s how Universal does it with Harry Potter at Wizarding World. You cross the threshold and you’re in the movies.

I got a lot of nothing.

The land was beautiful and detailed, full of stormtroopers patrolling Black Spire Outpost, but it didn’t feel like Star Wars.

It felt like a Star Wars-themed area in a theme park, which is not the same thing. The merch was new-canon characters and creatures from a planet most guests had never heard of. The music was generic in-world tavern stuff.

Disney built a version of Star Wars that was technically Star Wars and emotionally something else.

Universal’s Harry Potter doesn’t make that mistake. You walk into Diagon Alley and the score swells and you are nine years old and the Potter movies are real. Disney spent $1 billion on Galaxy’s Edge and didn’t get there.

The Disneyland correction this year is great. It’s also the company quietly admitting that what they built in 2019 wasn’t doing the job.

The Numbers Are Telling on Disney Now in Ways That Won’t Stop

Galaxy’s Edge underperformed in 2019.

The $300 million Galactic Starcruiser hotel closed in 2023 after eighteen months and ate a roughly $300 million depreciation charge per Disney’s filings. Eighteen months. Three hundred million.

Box office on the films declined steadily after The Force Awakens hit $2 billion in 2015. Solo and The Rise of Skywalker came in well below studio expectations.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for an $80 million Memorial Day opening per Deadline. That would be lower than Solo. The cope on that one is going to be interesting.

Merchandise tells the same story. Hasbro reported Star Wars sales declines in its 2025 full-year results.

Sequel-trilogy figures sit on clearance racks at Ollie’s and Ross. Videos from earlier this year showed more than 50,000 unsold Star Wars action figures at a single Ollie’s location.

The one bright spot in Hasbro’s recent Star Wars history was the 2020 Grogu spike, which drove a reported 70% revenue jump that year. Old IP done right still works. New IP designed by committee doesn’t.

On Disney+, Skeleton Crew posted franchise-low premiere numbers. Andor was the strongest live-action series at 7.4 billion minutes viewed. But classic films pulled 44.2% of total Star Wars engagement in 2025 per Variety.

The audience keeps voting for the original trilogy because that’s where the actual cultural weight still lives.

In video games, Star Wars Outlaws sold roughly 1 million copies in its first month. Ubisoft slashed its 2024-25 net bookings forecast by approximately 30% and the planned sequel was reportedly canceled.

In January 2026, Lucasfilm replaced Kathleen Kennedy with Dave Filoni.

Filoni comes from Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. Those are projects that lean hard on original-trilogy aesthetics and George Lucas’s sandbox. The executive change is the same admission as the Disneyland change. Disney is course-correcting back toward the IP that already worked.

The Cope Is “Fans Have Aged Out.” Batman Says Otherwise.

The standard explanation for Star Wars’s commercial slump is that the franchise is old, the original audience aged out, and the cultural moment passed.

It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong, and Batman is the receipt.

Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. He is thirty-eight years older than Star Wars. By the aged-out theory he should be commercially vestigial.

He’s not.

Robert Pattinson’s The Batman did $772 million worldwide on a $185 million budget in 2022. The Penguin on HBO in 2024 was a major hit and a Critics’ Choice award winner. The Batman Part II is in development. Warner Bros. ran a theatrical re-release of The Batman in 2025 that put the property back on the box office charts.

In comics, Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta is selling roughly 300,000 copies per issue, twenty issues in.

Per Comics Bulletin, the first fourteen issues sold more than 3 million copies. The Absolute Universe sold 8.2 million units in 2025. Absolute Batman has been the number one Direct Market title more months than any other series since launch.

Snyder, per Popverse, said his initial hope was that issue #1 might break 100,000 and the series might “settle somewhere in a healthy mid-list range and just survive like Detective Comics.”

Instead it became the best-selling comic on the market for nearly two years. DC executive Chris Conroy described the success as beyond bewildering.

DC overtook Marvel in Direct Market share in Q4 2025. In Q1 2026, DC held 34.7% to Marvel’s 29.4% per ICv2. Two years earlier, Marvel was at 39% and DC was at 20%.

The reversal is dramatic and it’s largely Batman doing the work.

Meanwhile in February 2026, the Star Wars franchise had zero comics in the Top 50 best-sellers per Comic Book Revolution. Zero. None. Not one.

In March 2026, zero in the Top 10. One in the Top 25. Shadow of Maul #1 debuted at #24 and was expected to drop out of the Top 50 within an issue or two. The mainline Star Wars #10 fell from #99 to #103.

Same parent company on both sides of this comparison. Disney owns Lucasfilm. Disney owns Marvel. Marvel publishes the main Star Wars comics.

Disney’s flagship franchise can’t crack the Top 50 monthly. DC’s flagship character is selling 300,000 copies a month with a stripped-down reboot starring a working-class Bruce Wayne who isn’t even a billionaire anymore.

That’s not the audience aging out. That’s a management problem.

What Disney Could Have Done for Fourteen Years

George Lucas built the licensing structure that made Star Wars one of the most valuable IPs in entertainment between 2005 and 2015. He did it without new theatrical releases. Just animated series, novels, video games, and disciplined merchandise licensing carrying the brand for a decade.

The Lord of the Rings franchise pre-Amazon ran the same playbook after The Hobbit trilogy ended in 2014. Hello Kitty has operated for decades on 50,000 licensed product SKUs without a single major animated event. Peanuts generates real money on holiday specials and merchandise without a yearly blockbuster. James Bond routinely takes multi-year breaks between films and the licensing keeps moving.

Disciplined holding pattern is a real strategy.

Disney instead chose continuous high-volume new content production, built the largest IP investment in studio history around it, and discovered that audiences punish franchises that produce more story than the audience asked for.

The math from the acquisition still works on paper.

Disney bought Lucasfilm for roughly $4 billion in 2012, and the IP has reportedly generated about $12 billion in value through 2024 filings. The acquisition isn’t a loss.

It’s just that the holding-pattern alternative would likely have generated comparable returns without the brand damage, the canon arguments, the merchandise glut, the theme park course corrections, and the executive shuffle that just happened.

The Filoni Era Is Disney Quietly Saying It Got This Wrong

Disney spent fourteen years and billions of dollars on new Star Wars to learn what Lucas already knew.

Filoni replacing Kennedy is the executive admission. Galaxy’s Edge playing John Williams is the operational admission. The Vader, Luke, Leia, and Han walkaround in Disneyland is the on-the-ground admission. Three different layers of the company saying the same thing.

The brand still has enormous goodwill and an irreplaceable foundation. Filoni knows the IP. The Mandalorian and Grogu could perform on Memorial Day weekend even if it tracks lower than anything in the last decade.

There’s a path back to a healthier Star Wars. It just requires Disney to keep doing what they’re now finally doing. Lean into the original trilogy. Lean into the characters and music that built the property. Lean into the licensing discipline that worked for forty years before the acquisition.

Batman is older than Star Wars and people still care about Batman. They keep proving it every month at the comic shop and every weekend at the box office.

Disney just had to remember that what worked for Star Wars for forty-five years probably still works.

This article was brought to you in part by The Reefers of more.clownfishtv.com. Subscribers there get the full Clownfish TV podcast feed including livestreams and members-only episodes that don’t make it to the free side, plus articles like this one delivered to their inbox. Free subscribers get the articles. Paid subscribers get everything. You can also find the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV.

About the author:

Thom “Kneon” Pratt is a former newspaper journalist and working comic book creator turned accidental podcaster, accidental YouTuber, and accidental game maker. He co-hosts the Clownfish TV podcast and the Pirates & Princesses podcast, both with Geeky Sparkles, where they cover our weird timeline, geek culture, tech, games, theme parks, and occasionally the paranormal. Gen X, eclectic, based in Pittsburgh. Follow him on X at @kneon.

Hat Tips:

• Disney Parks Blog, “Star Wars Heroes Bring New Energy to Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland” (April 28, 2026)
• Variety, “Lucasfilm Replacing Kathleen Kennedy With Dave Filoni, Lynwen Brennan as New ‘Star Wars’ Bosses” (January 16, 2026)
• Deadline, “Box Office: ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu’ Eyes $80 Million Opening” (April 30, 2026)
• Jedi News, “Hasbro Unveils Strong Financial Results for 2025 But Star Wars Sales Decline” (February 11, 2026)
• Variety, “Star Wars Day 2026 Viewing Data: 33 Billion Minutes Watched in 2025” (May 2026)
• Comics Bulletin, “Absolute Batman by the Numbers: An Overview of Its Unprecedented Success” (April 2026)
• Popverse, “DC’s Absolute Batman is now selling 3 times what Scott Snyder expected” (April 20, 2026)
• Comic Book Revolution, “March 2026 Comic Book Sales Rankings”
• ICv2, “Top 50 Comics – March 2026” (Direct Market share data)
• Box Office Mojo, The Batman (2022) financial data