TCTTS said:
You're leaving out some key facts here. The primary "A Star Wars Story" movies planned post-Solo were a Boba-Fett-centered movie and an Obi-Wan-centered movie, both of which became series instead. Basically, two things happened in 2018/2019 that changed everything - Solo failed at the box office, while The Mandolorian saw massive success on Disney+. Given those two factors, and the fact that they couldn't crack Boba Fett's and Obi-Wan's stories as movies, they redeveloped each as Disney+ series. That, and then the pandemic in 2020 was a huge reason to shift to series/productions that could essentially be shot in a controlled environment on sound stages in Manhattan Beach, as opposed to traveling to exotic locations for movies (Andor being the exception). The point is, none of those decisions had much, if anything at all, to do with the reception itself to The Last Jedi/The Rise of Skywalker. Yes, there was some vague Poe/Finn Disney+ series that was rumored at one point, and then there was the failed Rogue Squadron movie as well, but that was about it (the latter of which would have been out by now, but it sounds like Patty Jenkins could crack it/the script was never up to snuff). Sure, the reception to the sequel trilogy certainly didn't help any of this, but the reason there hasn't been a new movie since 2019 has way more to do with the failure of Solo, the succession of Disney+, and the pandemic than anything else. Now they're simply taking their time to get the first post-TROS movie right, which I'm thankful for.
Yes, Solo was a collosal failure and killed (or delayed in retrospect) a lot of future projects. That's why I said Disney took a break after RoS and Solo. Solo was objectively bad on its own, but the unpopularity of TLJ 6 months before it was released really did it no favors. I agree with why things got pushed to D+, but then again a lot of what we've seen on D+ since 2019 is really just things like Boba Fett and Kenobi that were
What is kind of dead, for now, is new SW movies and any kind of content from the sequels. For that, I think we can thank the sequels. Solo bears some blame as well, but things seemed to be going well for the SWCU idea until TLJ (R1 had just over a $1 billion at the box office), which only had 65% of TFA's box office. Then things kind of went off a cliff. Since then, we've seen very little serious effort to develop anything post sequel or sequel based, and we won't see anything from it until probably 2025. There's also been no real news content development aside from taking advantage of The Mandalorian. Solo may have shelved/delayed ASWS projects Disney was exploring at the time, but RoS really killed any thought of a near term movie or sequel based content.
Had RoS done better, I think we would have seen follow up content, or at least talk of it, on movies/stories about Poe, Finn, etc. After all, new content like R1 was proven to be profitable, while fan service backstory like Solo was not. It could be reasoned, if RoS was successful, that shelving Boba Fett and Kenobi while moving forward with Poe and Finn or even someone else made sense. ASWS projects and the wider idea of the SWCU could have been based around that and been successful, but instead were killed for the foreseeable future because RoS's performance signaled a continued decline in SW theatrical releases and that the source content just wasn't popular enough to move forward with in any form. Think about it: Clone Wars came about 3 years after RotS, so content from the prequels was being discussed and produced fairly quickly. Despite having a streaming platform for it, Disney has done nothing with the sequel content.
You could certainly pin some of this on the pandemic, but the MCU released several movies from 2020-2022 and has more set to release. They also produced and released several D+ series at the same time. It's not like Disney couldn't have done the same with SW.
