Here’s some money. Go see a Star War.
The rise, and fall, and rise again, and fall again of Star Wars. Did things get marketed the right way, or would it have even mattered?
This month, I am plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank. To get more information, or to find out how to donate your time/money/food, visit their website: https://stlfoodbank.org/
Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U_9wsZZAJOq1mFZBYAnbjhanHTTuCNKZgl5r2Me94xo/edit?usp=sharing
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TRANSCRIPT:
When I was just three years old, I got to go with my dad to see my first ever feature film in a movie theater: Return of the Jedi, the third film in the original Star Wars trilogy. I don’t remember a whole lot about it besides being scared of Jabba the Hutt, but I know I was really excited in the years that followed to watch the Ewoks cartoons and made for TV movies, play with the Kenner toys and even bring my plastic Rancor monster to school for show and tell.
Like a lot of things from the 1970s, Star Wars fell out of fashion in the 1980s, and while people still liked the movies, they were over and done and we were moving on. George Lucas was also very clear that he wasn’t interested in writing any sequels because in his mind, the story was over. So in the early 1990s when Lucasfilm started authorizing official new Star Wars content in the forms of novels, comic books and video games, I was there for all of it, and you’d better believe I went to see the Special Editions of the films re-released for theaters in the mid-1990s and got hyped up about the sequel trilogy that launched when I was in college in 1999.
And yeah, even though the prequel films were kind of bad, I saw all of them in the theater and wasn’t about to miss out on any more opportunities for reliving that magical feeling I’d had as a kid seeing Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda and the evil Emperor Palpatine and all the other familiar characters I’ve grown to love up there on the big screen.
Funny thing, though. I like Star Wars – I’m even what you’d call a fan, at least for the original movies. But there are fans and then there are fans, and there’s this whole subculture of Star Wars fans who put pretty much any other fandom to shame. They build their own detailed costumes, they consume every piece of ancillary media, they have strong opinions about things, and not just whether or not Han shot first – he did, by the way – but about tiny little details that turned into major plot elements for the official cartoon shows, novels, comics and video games, sometimes because those details needed to be further explained to make any sense, and other times because the people making this stuff are often as big of fans as the people watching it.
George Lucas got really tired of the fans, too. He actually said at one point in an interview with the Times, “Why would I make any more [films] when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”
So when Disney came around in 2011 and started negotiations to buy Lucasfilm for what wound up being a $4 billion deal in 2012, they did so by promising George Lucas they could keep his distinct vision alive while also expanding it into something that would have real value beyond their investment.
But while many fans were excited that Disney was going to crank up production of a new trilogy, multiple other films, them park expansions and even continue the cartoon shows George Lucas and Dave Filoni had already started, other people pointed out that Disney might be more interested in the merchandising and licensing rights to Star Wars than the films themselves.
And if there’s one thing merchandising and licensing need to be successful, it’s content to keep them current.
10 years later, Star Wars ain’t what it was during those early days of Episode VII: The Force Awakens and Rogue One when the movies could generate a billion dollars in ticket sales
And I think the argument can be made that Disney, that company so well-known for infusing magic into everything it owns, has lost the magic of Star Wars – and perhaps the built-in market of fans that comes with it.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So let me frame today’s discussion with a disclaimer: I’m not going to talk about Star Wars from the perspective of a fan. Our discussion is going to be about the business side of things, and that means that all of the inflammatory rhetoric you read online about how Star Wars has lost its way or how the fandom needs to accept that The Last Jedi was the right direction or any of that other stuff like that won’t be part of our discussion today.
Star Wars is a popular media property, but it’s also big business. It’s one of the most lucrative franchises ever created, with close to $50 billion in revenue since its debut in 1977. There are only three media franchises that exceed it, in fact – Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse & Friends and Pokémon.
And for all of these franchises, by far the most revenue they’ve made has come from merchandise sales. For Star Wars, it’s about $30 billion. Winnie the Pooh’s at $50 billion in merchandise, and Mickey Mouse is at $60 billion. And Pokémon? Over $100 billion and still going strong.
And beyond having three of those top four media franchises, Disney also owns the Disney Princess line, worth around $45 billion and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, worth around $35 billion. This stuff isn’t just media – these are the properties that show up on kids’ clothing and lunchboxes and stickers and pencil cases and birthday party decorations and bandages and fruit snacks. They’re pervasive, part of everyday life, and definitely part of a marketer’s toolset when it comes to slapping a popular license or cross-promotion on an otherwise ordinary product.
So here’s what happened with Star Wars. Before the original film came out in 1977, movie and TV merchandising wasn’t really that big of a thing. Sure, you had some toy lines based around The Planet of the Apes or model kits based on starships from Star Trek, but the idea that you needed to release all of this merchandise to go along with the launch of a blockbuster film hadn’t really manifested because the blockbuster film was itself a fairly new idea that began in 1975 with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
George Lucas came up in the same generation of filmmakers as Steven Spielberg. Lucas actually wanted Spielberg to direct Star Wars, and the two have historically been good friends who’ve collaborated together on projects including the Indiana Jones movies. But whereas Spielberg has always been focused on his films being the main product, Lucas was savvy enough to recognize that there was a bond between movies and viewers that extended beyond what happened in the theater. He took the idea of movie souvenirs and turbocharged it, working with a toy company called Kenner to produce a line of Star Wars action figures to go along with the film.
Since no one really thought Star Wars was going to be a success, the toy company was caught completely off guard when the demand was much higher than anyone anticipated. Kenner famously launched a box in time for Christmas promising the buyer would get the toys when they were ready, and once the toys did make it to shelves in 1978, they proved quite popular. When The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, Kenner was ready, and when The Return of the Jedi finally debuted in 1983, there were so many toys available that my family and I used to watch the movies intently trying to figure out where characters like “Prune Face” or “Klaatu” or “Ree-Yees” or “Squid Head” actually appeared onscreen.
As I mentioned, Star Wars mania largely died out in the latter half of the 1980s, and while the films were still well-regarded and popular, it didn’t seem like we were going to get any more. LucasFilm made a couple of Ewoks movies for TV and some cartoon shows based around the Ewoks and Droids, but had no interest in making any more feature films. Lucas eventually started extending out the universe with a theme park ride at Disneyland called Star Tours, which opened in 1987, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s, when George Lucas re-released the special editions of the films with new scenes and computer graphics, that Star Wars mania began rising again as people who’d never been able to see the movies on the big screen finally got a chance.
And it all hit a fever pitch as Lucasfilm announced a trilogy of prequel films was coming starting in 1999.
Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace wound up being one of the highest-grossing films of all time in terms of box office receipts, right behind James Cameron’s Titanic, which was pretty much the movie of the 1990s.But more importantly, it kicked off an incredible merchandising machine, and you could not go anywhere without seeing characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jin, Padme Amidala, Master Yoda, Young Anakin Skywalker, Darth Maul or, *sigh* Jar-Jar Binks staring back at you from promotional displays, cereal and snack food boxes, in-store signage and even Pepsi soda cans.
Of course, The Phantom Menace was such a letdown of a movie that after the initial excitement died down, people were far less excited about Episode 2, Attack of the Clones, which came out in 2002 and promised more action and less Jar-Jar. Episode 3, Revenge of the Sith, debuted in 2005 and really pushed the merchandise hard because this was not only going to be the last Star Wars film George Lucas would ever make – and he was adamant about that – but also the origin story for Darth Vader, who’d make a full-on appearance in his classic black caped space suit and helmet at the end of the film.
Now, say what you will about the prequel films – I personally think they’re pretty awful – but they generated billions of dollars in ancillary merchandise over that six-year period, and they definitely had a strong appeal to adults who didn’t want to miss out on another round of what were sure to be collectible toys in the years to come. Lucasfilm also continued the films with an animated series called Star Wars: The Clone Wars that originally ran from 2008 to 2013, creating a whole generation of new fans who got interested in the TV storyline and for whom the prequel trilogy has turned out to be a pretty nostalgic corner of the franchise.
So when Disney swooped in around the end of that show’s run to buy Lucasfilm for $4 billion, two things seemed pretty certain. One, there were more stories to tell beyond George Lucas’s original foundations, and two, Disney was going to make a lot of money.
And they did, at least initially, with the excitement around their 2015 sequel film Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens, a sort-of-reboot into a new era of Star Wars with new characters and villains, but also some familiar characters like Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO and R2-D2. Disney was still really high on their success with the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the time and announced a whole slate of movie projects, including movies about characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Han Solo and Boba Fett from the original series and an immediate prequel to the original Star Wars called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Most of these planned projects fell through, but Rogue One did make it out and is actually widely considered one of the better Star Wars projects under Disney.
Unfortunately, Disney’s new Star Wars trilogy of films saw diminishing returns. The Force Awakens grossed $2 billion worldwide, then Episode 8: The Last Jedi grossed $1.3 billion, and then Episode 9: The Rise of Skywalker grossed $1 billion, as did Rogue One.
And the 2018 prequel Solo: A Star Wars Story was a flop by comparison, making just under $400 million and actually losing Disney money after production and marketing costs were factored in. It was the first sign of several that maybe Disney didn’t have quite the strong grip on the Star Wars fandom that it had seemed to, and while I think it’s a better movie than many people gave it credit for, it’s also far from a great one.
You might be saying, “well, at least Disney made their money back and a little bit of profit overall,” and they did, especially on merchandise sales, which added billions of dollars more to their coffers over the last 10 years. But every year since The Force Awakens debuted, Star Wars has also become less and less popular as a franchise, and it’s been showing in the declining merchandise sales, the major shift from making movies for the big screen to creating smaller shows for the Disney+ streaming service and also the Disney theme parks.
“Wait a minute, you mean Star Tours?” you might ask. “Why would anyone expect a ride from 1987 to still be a big draw today?”
But I don’t mean Star Tours. That ride closed down in 2010 in Disneyland and Disney World before Disney even acquired Star Wars as a property. They’ve since made a new version of Star Tours that’s running today with adventures that run through segments of most of the movies, but it’s not their big draw anymore.
No, what I mean is the massive Galaxy’s Edge area of Disneyland and Disneyworld that was supposed to be a canonical part of the Star Wars universe, telling immersive stories about the Blake Spire Outpost on the frontier planet of Batuu. And the whole purpose of this attraction was originally to connect the fandom to the new, Disney-ified take on the Star Wars universe, complete with a build your own lightsaber lab and connections to the modern media.
But lately, Disney’s been slowly backing down on all those connections to their trilogy and retooling the Galaxy’s Edge into, well, the more familiar Galaxy Far Far Away from the 1970s and 80s Star Wars films, featuring more cameos from the most popular original characters and a lot less connection to their current media.
Disney is also still recovering from the devastating loss they suffered from an immersive alternate reality hotel concept they launched in 2022 called Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, a resort where guests would check in for a two-night stay and feel like they were on an interstellar cruise line thanks to all the theming and special effects inside. The experience was supposed to include many opportunities for fans to interact with a broader storyline and to have an out-of-this-world experience immersing themselves into Star Wars alongside costumed actors and animatronic creatures performing both scripted and improvised encounters.
The hotel was a huge flop and closed in 2023. If you want all the sordid details, a Youtuber named Jenny Nicholson made a 4-hour video explaining why it failed, and I put in a link to that video in the show notes. Suffice it to say that a stay at the hotel was incredibly expensive, had a number of additionally expensive add-ons guests were expected to indulge in, included surprisingly small rooms given the price and wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining or engaging as it needed to be to justify spending far more money you than you might drop on a nice family vacation visiting an actual destination on Earth.
But these theme park attractions have also been an indicator of how Disney has been thinking about Star Wars lately. Most of the recent Star Wars productions have been streaming TV shows meant to prop up Disney’s streaming service Disney+, and several of them, most notably Star Wars: The Acolyte, have underperformed and are considered failures. Many of the shows are interconnected with other Star Wars media and it can be exhausting to try to keep the storylines and continuities straight, particularly in terms of how they relate to the original movies.
The most critically successful series, Andor, is not only a prequel to the original Star Wars, but also to the prequel film Rogue One, in which the character Cassian Andor first appeared. Despite its quality and its currency as an examination of fascism, it’s also one of the least popular Star Wars shows.
The biggest show has been The Mandalorian, and both its title character, also known as Din Djarin, and its breakout character Grogu, also known as Baby Yoda, helped gain a lot of early attention for Disney+. The show is still one of the most popular Star Wars shows on the streaming service, but fans’ decline in interest over three seasons has been well-recorded.
Disney+ itself is also struggling, shedding nearly 30 million subscribers between 2024 and 2025 due to a price hike and then finding itself embroiled in activist cancellations due to the seeming cancellation of ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live last year. Star Wars is not only not helping bring subscribers back, but most of the upcoming shows are being developed for niche fandoms, not mass market audiences.
Star Wars is also slated to return to theaters soon with the upcoming feature film The Mandalorion and Grogu, which connects several of the shows together in an Avengers: Infinity War approach. It may be a hit when it releases in May of 2026, but it may also turn off audiences who haven’t kept up with the small screen stories. We’ll see.
Star Wars fatigue has certainly set in for many of us. When you see people talking about Star Wars fatigue, though, it’s often because they’re less interested in the new content and prefer to stick to their nostalgia for the original George Lucas films that didn’t require as much dedication and involvement.
There was a certain magic to those films that plunked you in the middle of a story a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away without needing to explain things or require you to keep up to date on ancillary media or go to theme parks or ride on fake starcruisers to fully get what was happening.
Disney was happy to acquire the franchise to capture all the money that fans were willing to spend. And they’ve exploited the franchise like crazy by giving those fans more opportunities to spend even more.
But in the end, I’d argue the magic of Star Wars has never been immersive storytelling or fun characters or lightsabers or starships or merchandising hooks.
It was the connection it built with its audience to deliver that rare but exciting feeling that something truly special was happening, and we all got to be a part of it.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
PLUG
This month I’m plugging the St. Louis Area Foodbank, which is a not-for-profit organization that gathers and distributes food to over 500 food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and community program partners in the Greater St. Louis Area. This is a time of year when people are fighting not just the cold, but also the hunger that comes with higher heating bills, and supporting a food bank is a great way to have a powerful impact on your local community.
Over 40 million people in America struggle with food security and rely on government programs and charitable services to put food on their tables. Food banks are also facing more hardship than ever before due to operational strains from late 2025 due to the government shutdown and increased demand for assistance. They need us to step up and be donors and volunteers, and I encourage you to, at the very least, donate a few bucks today to help out.
While I always recommend supporting local food banks if you can, the St. Louis Area Foodbank is also a great choice because they provide so much support to so many organizations and are extremely transparent about how they utilize their funds. They have a perfect score on CharityNavigator and are an accredited charity with the Better Business Bureau and a partner with the United Way and Feeding America.
You can learn more at http://stlfoodbank.org/
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