Star Wars has to deliver a proper movie with The Mandalorian and Grogu – otherwise the franchise is dead

The long-suffering saga has been kept alive this decade by TV alone – but even that will perish if the new movie fails to extend its universe

Star Wars has always been big on prophecy. Yoda peers into the future like Nostradamus with messed-up syntax, the Emperor cackles that everything is proceeding exactly as he has foreseen, Darth Vader breathes doom through the front grille of his shiny death helmet. And yet not even the most omniscient of Jedi could have predicted that the franchise responsible for practically inventing the modern Hollywood blockbuster would end up as a TV-centric operation with only occasional forays on to the big screen. Which is why it comes as a genuine shock to realise that, ahead of the release of new movie The Mandalorian and Grogu later this month, it has been more than six years since Star Wars last hit the multiplex.

Then again, perhaps the real humdinger is that it hasn’t been longer. The most recent Disney Star Wars film, JJ Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, did not so much conclude the long-running space saga as destroy several decades of perfectly serviceable mythology and ruin all sense of congruence with previous films. It was frantic, weirdly apologetic (about previous instalment The Last Jedi) and overstuffed with dodgy fan service. It was essentially a $590m act of narrative panic.