Jon Watts, the director who proved in Spider-Man: No Way Home that dead characters can be resurrected to rapturous applause, has been hired by Lucasfilm to direct the first film in a new Skywalker trilogy. Simon Kinberg will write it. Daisy Ridley is reportedly being eyed to return as Rey. The films have not yet been greenlit. That last detail is doing a lot of work. The Skywalker saga has technically ended twice. The first ending was Return of the Jedi in 1983 — Vader redeemed, Palpatine dead, galaxy saved. The second was The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, sold explicitly as the conclusion to all nine films. Disney is now positioning itself to end it a third time, which is less a creative choice than an admission that nobody at Lucasfilm has figured out what Star Wars is without this family at its center. The Rey problem is real and the article names it clearly: she is a Skywalker only by her own declaration at the end of a film most of the fanbase treats as non-canonical. She is a Palpatine by blood, trained briefly by Luke, socialized into the Resistance by Leia, and then simply announced a surname change. Building a new trilogy around her continuation requires accepting The Rise of Skywalker's premise — a significant ask. And if she is not the draw, then who is? The piece's roll call of possible returnees — Jabba, Owen and Beru, Greedo, Grand Moff Tarkin, Mace Windu on a windowsill — lands the argument efficiently: these characters are beloved precisely because they are gone. The sharpest point the Guardian piece makes is one of contrast rather than complaint. The genuinely interesting Star Wars of the past decade has not been Skywalker content. It has been Rogue One, Andor, and the early Mandalorian — work that found traction by stepping outside the family melodrama and treating the galaxy as a place rather than a stage for one clan's psychodrama. Andor in particular demonstrated that Star Wars can carry genuine political and human weight when it is not obligated to deliver a lightsaber duel in act three. A new Watts trilogy points back toward the clan, not outward. The Watts hiring is the article's one concession to optimism, and even that is framed as a structural gamble rather than a creative promise. No Way Home worked because it was honest about what it was — a nostalgia mechanism built with craft and affection. The question is whether that skill set translates to a context where the nostalgia itself is the problem. The franchise's challenge is not that audiences dislike the Skywalkers. It is that the Skywalkers have no story left. Watts proved he can bring back the dead with enough spectacle to make audiences cheer. The harder trick — convincing a franchise that some things should stay dead — is a different film entirely. The real diagnosis underneath all of this is institutional: Disney has spent a decade trying to expand Star Wars and retreating every time the expansion didn't immediately perform. The Acolyte cancelled. Willow cancelled. Solo underperforming. Each retreat has pushed Lucasfilm back toward the known IP, which accelerates the franchise's dependence on it. A new Skywalker trilogy is the logical endpoint of that pattern — not a creative decision but a defensive one, the studio equivalent of a corporation liquidating its R&D budget to protect the quarterly number.
