{"id":392878,"date":"2026-01-07T01:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T01:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392878\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T01:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T01:20:08","slug":"the-year-ahead-in-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/392878\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year Ahead in ‘Star Wars’"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Whitbrook is the Lead Editor of io9, with an expertise in covering Stars of the Wars and Trek varieties, as well as anime, games, and collectibles. You can follow his coverage here, and email tips to [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Top Story: <\/p>\n

Since 2019,\u00a0Star Wars has found itself a new form as a primarily streaming franchise, as plans to use the series to anchor Disney\u2019s then-new streaming service with high-profile universes gave us a whole new slice of Star Wars in the form of\u00a0The Mandalorian<\/a>. In the years since, we\u2019ve gotten giddy highs<\/a> and dizzying lows<\/a> for\u00a0Star Wars TV, but behind the scenes, a regular cycle of movie project announcements crumbling into dust has all but eroded confidence in Lucasfilm and Disney\u2019s ability to actually release a Star Wars movie\u2014a wild thing to consider for a franchise that has spent generations revolutionizing the moviemaking world.<\/p>\n

All that changes in May 2026, but maybe not quite as much as we think it could. The Mandalorian & Grogu, the first\u00a0Star Wars movie in the best part of a decade, jetpacks the series that made\u00a0Star Wars a streaming stalwart (for better or worse) into movie theaters for the first time. Even with five months to go, the film is tightly under wraps with just a singular, vibes-heavy teaser<\/a> to its name so far\u2014but all eyes will be on its performance as the galaxy far, far away tries to chart its way back to the big screen in a major way.<\/p>\n

What We\u2019re Waiting For <\/p>\n

Another interesting aspect of\u00a0Star Wars\u2018 transitory year back to the box office is that, for now at least,\u00a0Star Wars\u2018 streaming TV future is uncertain in a way that it hasn\u2019t felt like during any point in the last seven years. Just three TV projects have projected 2026 dates\u2014the animated miniseries Maul: Shadow Lord<\/a> and the series-length continuation of the\u00a0Star Wars: Visions short<\/a> \u201cThe Ninth Jedi\u201d, as well as the sophomore season of<\/a>\u00a0Ahsoka\u2014but little has been revealed about any of them beyond early initial details showcased at last year\u2019s Celebration Japan.<\/p>\n

On the book and comics horizon, with the\u00a0High Republic series having wrapped up last year, it wouldn\u2019t be too surprising to see Random House Worlds and Lucasfilm put the spotlight on another new era for a major publishing project (perhaps it\u2019s time to go back even further and explore the Old Republic in earnest, after last year\u2019s late shock announcement<\/a> of Fate of the Old Republic, the first\u00a0Star Wars media set in the era since the reboot of continuity back in 2014). On the comics front, Marvel finally moved its\u00a0main\u00a0Star Wars series beyond the events of the original trilogy last year, with its current volume set to wrap up in February. Will it continue, or will Marvel already jump ship to another era of\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0storytelling?<\/p>\n

Star Wars is also going to have a fun year in video games, with two intriguing genre explorations for the franchise set to launch at some point this year: Bit Reactor is set to bring\u00a0Star Wars to turn-based tactics with the arrival of Zero Company<\/a> this year, while Fuse Games will speed us back into\u00a0Star Wars racing games with\u00a0Galactic Racer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While 2027 will be a huge year<\/a> for\u00a0Star Wars, celebrating its 50th anniversary, things could potentially kick off this year thanks to a related one: 10 years since the launch of the\u00a0New Hope prequel,\u00a0Rogue One. Even as\u00a0Star Wars prepares to go beyond the original trilogy elsewhere, it won\u2019t be surprising to see the celebrations start kicking off a little early this year.<\/p>\n

Unconventional Wisdom <\/p>\n

While most of\u00a0Star Wars\u2018 plans this year will lean more towards the celebratory, Disney\u2019s deal with OpenAI<\/a> last year is set to cast a challenging shadow over all the subsidiaries in the House of Mouse\u2014and given the deal\u2019s restriction to masked and non-human characters (as well as prior Star Wars-affiliated experimentations with generative AI, like the sale of James Earl Jones\u2019 voice allowing it to be used to\u2014albeit briefly\u2014yell slurs in\u00a0Fortnite<\/a> last year), it wouldn\u2019t be surprising if\u00a0Star Wars is a prime candidate for exploitation as Disney pitches its AI investments to the public.<\/p>\n

Whether that will go down well, of course, remains to be seen. While Disney spent 2025 broadly facing a lot of successes (including netting not one, but\u00a0three films in the billion-dollar box office club), it also faced a sea of withering criticism as various backlashes surrounded the studio\u2019s broader capitulations to the demands of the Trump administration and the explosive backfiring<\/a> of its decision to briefly suspend talk show host Jimmy Kimmel over comments made in the wake of the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Given a broad public pushback against generative AI\u2019s increasing encroachment elsewhere in our daily life, when Star Wars becomes a battlefront in that particular debate, expect things to get loud and messy very fast.<\/p>\n

Longshot Bets <\/p>\n

With the release of\u00a0The Mandalorian & Grogu this year and Star Wars: Starfighter<\/a> in 2027, one thing is very clear from the last nearly seven years of waiting for a Star Wars movie project to happen: Lucasfilm\u2019s plans have changed almost constantly as the studio has moved on from one idea to the next. Neither a Mandalorian movie nor\u00a0Starfighter was on the cards as the vanguard of Star Wars\u2018 theatrical return until the last couple of years, but their arrivals beg a big question: what, if anything, is still going to be moving forward from the ambitious slate<\/a> of films Lucasfilm announced back at Celebration Europe in 2023?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s definitely some projects likely safer than others out of that trio\u2014David Filoni\u2019s \u201cMandoverse\u201d Thrawn vs. New Republic film, James Mangold\u2019s \u201cDawn of the Jedi\u201d origin film, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy\u2019s New Jedi Order film with Daisy Ridley\u2019s return as Rey\u2014but as Star Wars charts a different path back to theaters, it wouldn\u2019t be too surprising to see some of these original plans shuttered for good.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Whitbrook is the Lead Editor of io9, with an expertise in covering Stars of the Wars and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,3494,75,29756,337,21883],"class_list":{"0":"post-392878","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-disney","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-lucasfilm","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-star-wars"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}