The business plan of Disney's Star Wars has a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones, often put out simultaneously. One of the most interesting questions concerns which stories get sent to Disney+ to become series, and which ones get a full-length feature film.
Obi-Wan Kenobi is here, and like every modern feature of the franchise, the fanbase is divided on its quality. Clips from the show, often back to back, will show up in social media posts as a method of praise or of criticism. Whether one is a fan of the show or not, it's entirely possible that a lot of the show's writing and pacing problems would have been addressed by a simple change of the medium.
There's an old adage that suggests that any work of art could be improved by forcing its creator to cut out a significant chunk. Taking the editor's scissors to a text is difficult, but it demands its author to reassess the necessity of every piece of the puzzle. With four episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi released to the public so far, the series is currently about 180 minutes long. That's the runtime of a very long movie, and the series will likely nearly double in length by its ending. Editing down the story of the series into the runtime of a movie would require taking off around half of its content. That's drastic, but it would also likely excise all the show's worst excesses.
The journey of Obi-Wan evading the deadly force of The Third Sister as he contends with the guilt of his past actions is a powerful one. Star Wars has always had a fascination with Campbell's Monomyth and The Hero's Journey, and the show has followed the typical structure so far. Comparing the series to other Star Wars streaming efforts creates an interesting contrast. The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett feel like detached stories set in the iconic galaxy, but they didn't necessarily feel like the stories of the films. Obi-Wan feels exactly like an outing that Star Wars would bring to the big screen in tone, message, and gravity.
The Mandalorian is a space western with a largely episodic format and an overarching story that mostly lives in the background. The Book of Boba Fett is a crime drama that spends far too much of its time advertising for other Star Wars properties but still builds as a TV show. Obi-Wan Kenobi is the quest of one of the most important characters in the franchise, and ropes in a ton of the other big names. It's about the Jedi, it's the first comprehensive look fans have at average life under Empire rule, and it features Darth Vader's first return to the franchise since Rogue One. This is Vader's first live-action appearance in the Disney+ series; he usually doesn't show up for less than a feature film. Despite being a prequel, the series contains so much that Star Wars fans have wanted to see on the big screen for years. Surprisingly, it's been relegated to Disney+, but the reasoning is fairly clear.
Among the many problems with the Star Wars franchise, Disney is often too quick on the draw when it comes to big changes. One financial disappointment will send the entire 10-year plan right into the garbage. The financial failure of Solo and the resulting death of the Star Wars Stories label has had massive implications on the franchise. Disney continues to fail to understand the myriad problems with that film. They assumed after the controversial, but new and interesting experiences of The Last Jedi, fans would want to return to marketable characters. They were wrong, and few fans were interested in the earlier life of Han Solo.
The life of Obi-Wan, however, lacks the production disaster and public negativity surrounding it. One of the benefits of moving a project to streaming is that Disney+ doesn't often release viewer numbers. There's no box office report for streaming series. If Obi-Wan had failed, no one would really know outside the company. Disney is hedging their bets because they still don't know what people want.
Obi-Wan Kenobi has good parts and bad parts, like most of the franchise's recent output. The series tends to rely on too many callbacks as Rogue One did before it. Moments with Leia occasionally feel silly. Yet, there are plenty of interesting details on display, the villain is one of the best in years, and the journey feels like an important connecting element to the franchise. Most of all, unlike almost any other prequel, Obi-Wan feels thematically important. What it establishes in the canon is secondary to how it develops the characters. It's not like Solo or Rogue One, which felt like shameless cash-ins on marketable names. It's not like The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett, which told new and interesting stories in the galaxy. Obi-Wan Kenobi feels like the kind of story that could carry a feature film, and it would benefit from a few notes from the editor.