Star Wars announcements suggest it’s becoming the new MCU

2023’s Star Wars Celebration has barely started and there’s already been a myriad of huge reveals, making the future of the franchise a bit clearer: it’s turning into the MCU.

It’s been suggested before that the current slate of Star Wars Disney+ shows were building towards something big, but now we know that’s the case. With the first Ahsoka trailer following up on plot threads set up in The Mandalorian’s second season and the announcement of three new Star Wars movies, the path forward for Star Wars as a whole is starting to take shape.

One of the announced films, directed by Dave Filoni (in his feature film directorial debut) will focus on tying together and culminating the storylines from several Disney+ Star Wars series, namely any connected to The Mandalorian. It’s likely that this means a big crossover where Din Djarin, Grogu, and their Mandalorian buddies team up with Ahsoka, the Rebels crew, the characters from the upcoming Skeleton Crew series, and Boba Fett to take down Thrawn.

Does this sound familiar? It might, because it’s essentially the same business model that made The Avengers such a smash hit in 2012. Make a vaguely connected series of solo films (in this case, streaming series) that culminates in a crossover film event. As we know, the success of that crossover idea resulted in a sprawling ‘cinematic universe’ that we now know as the MCU.

Other announcements include a James Mangold-directed film set 25,000 years before the other Star Wars films and a movie featuring Daisy Ridley’s Rey after the events of the sequel trilogy. These may not tie directly into The Mandalorian storyline, but they do set up two new timelines that could be expanded upon even further.

Kathleen Kennedy has been talking about Lucasfilm’s goal of ‘interconnected storytelling’ since 2014, and it looks like their vision is finally being realised. Can the cinematic universe model work for Star Wars? Only time will tell, but some might argue it’s not even working for Marvel at this point. In the current media landscape, over-saturation is a real problem that studios have to deal with, especially with franchises as big as this one.

What does it mean for LEGO, though? Well, only good things. Even if any Star Wars movie or show ends up being bad, LEGO fans can rest easy knowing there will probably be lots of new spaceships for them to build. More Star Wars means more LEGO spaceships, and that’s never a bad thing.

It’s hard to take new Star Wars film announcements seriously these days, though, as movie after movie has been announced and cancelled back and forth. Patty Jenkins and Chloé Zhao were both announced to be directing Star Wars films that have since been canned, just to name a few. Are today’s announcements the ones that will finally stick around? Let’s hope they do – at least for the LEGO spaceships.

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