All attempts to prove that Star Wars: The Last Jedi failed spectacularly really just make it more successful. The film had one of the most profitable opening weekends of all time. During its worldwide theatrical run, it made well over a billion dollars. Critics praised the movie more than just about any other installment in the franchise. And four years after its release, The Last Jedi is still the most talked-about Star Wars property.

How is it that a movie achieving every standard metric of success is still so often thought a failure? A small but vocal portion of the Star Wars fandom has loathed The Last Jedi since its release. They have spent years attacking the film and urging Disney to erase it from history, to redo the entire sequel trilogy if necessary.

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In some ways, those fans are right about The Last Jedi. As a transformative installment in the Star Wars canon, the film has failed. The life it breathed into a galaxy far, far away has been sucked back out by The Rise of Skywalker. Disney worked to give the angriest fans everything they wanted. In doing so they took the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back and turned it into a failure.

Going In With No Plan

Snoke from Star Wars The Last Jedi

Disney started the Star Wars sequel trilogy half-cocked. After purchasing Lucasfilm in 2012 for an insane amount of money, Disney felt the need to generate a quick return on their investment. A sequel trilogy seemed the best option, as fans had been waiting for one since before the disastrous prequels. George Lucas had scripts ready for the sequels, but Lucas is an uneven film writer at best, so the studio decided to move in their own direction.

After leaving Lucas by the wayside, Disney bizarrely split their focus on the Star Wars sequels. They hired J.J. Abrams to write and direct what would become The Force Awakens. However, Disney didn't approach Abrams about handling the rest of the trilogy until after production on The Force Awakens had started. He turned them down, so Disney hired Rian Johnson to write The Last Jedi before The Force Awakens was even finished.

Of course, spontaneously produced series have worked in the past. When Star Wars came to theaters in 1977, sequels hadn't been planned. Star Wars wasn't already a global phenomenon at the time, either. When Disney began planning in 2012, they knew they were making a trilogy of films.

What The Last Jedi Tried

Rian Johnson directing Star Wars The Last Jedi

When Rian Johnson started work on The Last Jedi, he had access to Abrams's script for The Force Awakens and not much else. Though of course, the studio had final say on everything Johnson did, Disney gave him total creative control over the second installment in their trilogy. Thanks to Abrams's "mystery box" storytelling style, Johnson had plenty of loose plot threads and no ideas which ones would become important to fans after they saw The Force Awakens.

What Johnson noticed about The Force Awakens was that it set up a story doomed to repeat the exact same beats as the original trilogy. A young, Force-sensitive kid fights against an evil galactic empire with only the advice of an older generation, who's fought this fight before, to guide her. Unless The Last Jedi made some drastic changes, the Star Wars sequels would become little more than a money-grabbing re-hash of a once-loved series.

Johnson focused on what he found most interesting about The Force Awakens and made moves to force Star Wars to evolve. Abrams had created clear surrogates for the Emperor and Darth Vader with Snoke and Kylo Ren. So Johnson had Ren kill Snoke and take control of the galaxy. Abrams had set up the "mystery" of Rey's parentage in a way that screamed "dramatic reveal incoming." So Johnson revealed that she came from no one in particular and would truly rise from nothing to become a galactic hero. Abrams reinstated an evil galactic empire but didn't address how past Rebels like Han and Leia felt about losing the galaxy a second time. So Johnson played out the reality of the loss with Luke Skywalker.

Rian Johnson struggled to push Star Wars forward while also addressing the various plots Abrams had begun. Some characters, like Finn and Poe Dameron, were woefully downgraded to background cast members. As a whole, though, The Last Jedi was wildly inventive and gave Star Wars the chance to feel new again. Then some fans revolted.

What The Rise of Skywalker Did

Between the release of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, fans became incredibly invested in tearing apart Abrams's film and theorizing what reveals were coming. They obsessed over Rey's parents and wrote endless forum posts debating Snoke's origin and motives. When The Last Jedi thwarted their theories and refused to be a by-the-numbers Star Wars movie, they weren't willing to accept it.

Disney panicked. They hired Colin Trevorrow to finish the trilogy. He wrote several drafts of a script called Duel of the Fates before Kathleen Kennedy fired him. At this point, Disney's primary focus became placating fans. The little effort they'd been putting into legitimate storytelling went away entirely.

Abrams came back to finish out the trilogy with The Rise of Skywalker. He and Disney decided to undo most of what Johnson had done in The Last Jedi. To replace Snoke, they resurrected the original trilogy's Emperor with a single sentence in the title crawl. To please fans upset by the reveal of Rey's parents, they created a new reveal, making her the Emperor's granddaughter. Needless to say, these sudden shifts felt out-of-place and unearned.

Worse than the film's ret-conning was its treatment of the side characters. If The Last Jedi under-served Finn and Poe, The Rise of Skywalker abandoned them entirely. The only semblance of an arc for Finn is that he has something important to tell Rey. The film never lets them have the conversation and doesn't even address what it is he needs to say.

Room for Hope

Star Wars Rian Johnson Rey Kylo Ren

The Rise of Skywalker feels almost unrelated to the films that precede it. It reopens and rewrites plot threads that The Last Jedi had tied off. Despite Abrams himself making the film, it entirely forgets about any loose threads still hanging from The Force Awakens. It didn't have to be this way. Disney could have made even a rough plan for their series. They could have committed to what Johnson did with The Last Jedi. Instead, they surrendered to the angriest minority of the Star Wars fandom. Instead, they strove blindly forward, entirely motivated by profit margins, and ruined the trilogy they created.

There's hope in that the story isn't over. There will be more Star Wars, on the big and small screens. There might even be another trilogy, this time lead entirely by Rian Johnson. But for now, Star Wars fans must live with the disappointment.

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