It’s been a very long time since anybody has gone to a theater to see a Star Wars film. Three years, the truth is. It was Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker, in late 2019. It was earlier than Covid-19 closed theaters, earlier than Disney CEO Bob Iger slowed the pace of the Lucasfilm cinematic universe. Quite a bit has modified. 

The largest shift, after all, is that followers began watching plenty of their Star Wars content material on Disney+. During early pandemic lockdowns, The Mandalorian grew to become a balm for a lot of. So did The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, with maybe barely much less culture-shifting impression. It’s no shock, then, that out of the three—sure, three—new Star Wars options Lucasfilm announced Friday at Star Wars Celebration in Europe, one in every of them will probably be directed by Dave Filoni and can “close out the interconnected stories told in The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka, and other Disney+ series.”

What is shocking is that that record doesn’t explicitly embrace Andor. Not as a result of that story would match with the others, however as a result of Andor is the perfect factor Lucasfilm has made in years, and I’d relatively watch a two-hour story of Cassian’s revolution in opposition to the Empire than two hours of any of these different exhibits mixed. Which brings me to my level: Make an Andor film, you cowards!

Of course, there’s a counterargument to this. I can hear it already: There already is an Andor film, Rogue One. Yes, the Disney+ collection was a derivative from a movie, however so had been Obi-Wan, Boba Fett, and the others. While it’s true that there isn’t a complete lot of fabric to be mined within the five-year narrative time-frame between Andor and Rogue One—and there’s already a second season of Andor within the works—followers have spent a lot of time following the event of New Republic. And, I dunno, perhaps there’s one thing else these films may very well be tapping into. (The alliance of Cassian and Luthen Rael is a film in itself.) 

Moreover, Andor’s vitality is likely to be what Star Wars wants proper now. One of the explanations the present resonated so deeply is that it felt tangible, human. There had been no Jedi (that the viewers is aware of of), no lengthy monologues in regards to the Force. Instead, there have been actual, disenfranchised individuals preventing tyranny—upheavals on jail colonies and rebellions within the streets. Star Wars has all the time been about escapism, but it surely has an ethical core, one which Andor has tapped into extra successfully than arguably another installment within the franchise. A movie primarily based on the present’s characters might lack lightsabers and pew-pew motion, but it surely may have one thing extra: soul.  

In addition to Filoni’s new film, Lucasfilm introduced a brand new Star Wars from Logan director James Mangold about “the dawn of the Jedi,” and one from Ms. Marvel director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy that may “feature Daisy Ridley back as Rey as she builds a new Jedi Order.” That’s … plenty of Jedi, plenty of woo-woo. Both of those movies, notably Obaid-Chinoy’s, sound promising. But extra may very well be executed to satisfy Star Wars’ promise. As newly returned Disney CEO Iger faces off in opposition to Florida governor Ron DeSantis over what Iger sees as retaliation for the corporate’s opposition to the so-called Don’t Say Gay invoice, perhaps a film a couple of totally different type of riot is precisely what the studio wants.