Welcoming the death of Star Wars

American cinema may finally be recovering from a 50-year disease.

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“And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords,” news anchor Kent Brockman said in one of the greatest jokes of The Simpsons’ golden age.

Today, I, for one, welcome the death of Star Wars.

The end of this 50-year franchise, once the most lucrative film series in history, appears to be inevitable with the mediocre box office of its latest installment The Mandalorian and Grogu, which within a week of its release was swiftly outdone by two low-budget horror movies.

It had all been presaged, of course. As early as the late 1990s, the “prequel trilogy” had been savaged by the franchise’s notoriously unsatisfiable fans. After Disney purchased the series in 2012, there was a brief respite when the “sequel trilogy” commenced with its first installment The Force Awakens and the follow-up Rogue One, which audiences rather desperately adored.

It was swiftly followed, however, by fear and loathing when the horrendously bad Last Jedi and the depressingly mediocre Rise of Skywalker were released in turn. Along the way, the stand-alone Solo bombed, to be succeeded by a series of increasingly unpopular streaming shows, which finally soured nearly all fans, casual or otherwise, on the franchise.

The question facing Disney now is: where do they go from here? The answer is, in all likelihood, nowhere. The fan base still has its “original trilogy” and will likely be satisfied with it from now on. A younger generation is reassessing the prequels. No one likes what has followed, with even the wildly popular Force Awakens found wanting in retrospect. Like the Marvel films and comic book films in general, Star Wars is now moribund and, it appears, over.

Some of us cinephiles are breathing a sigh of relief. “Finally,” we think, “we may be free of this thing.” We know that, in the end, Star Wars was a blight on American cinema, a 50-year disease that killed the last golden age of movies and polluted the art form for what seemed to be forever.

I do not say this with any happiness. Like most children of my generation—the tail end of Generation X—I adored Star Wars as a child, and when I watch the original film, I still feel some of the youthful joy I first experienced at the age of three.

But when I became a man, or simply a teenager, I put away childish things. I realized Star Wars was, in the end, a fairly shallow children’s film, and there were works infinitely greater to discover, from The Godfather to The 400 Blows to Citizen Kane to DW Griffith’s Intolerance and Buster Keaton’s masterpieces. There was all the vast history of the art form, yet for so many, its richness had been buried by Star Wars and the empty blockbuster industry it founded.

This was no better illustrated than by the fate of the era from which Star Wars emerged: the great and fleeting moment of the 1970s New Hollywood. Kicked off by Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, this era moved us through The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and numerous other masterpieces before its brutal last gasp with Martin Scorsese’s transcendent Raging Bull. In that era, movies were daring, ferocious, and above all, better than anything that had come out of Hollywood since its previous Golden Age of the 1930s and ‘40s.

Perhaps this great moment had to die. After all, as Orson Welles once noted, even the Renaissance only lasted 80 years. But the New Hollywood did not dissipate on its own. It was murdered, and this murder was Star Wars. George Lucas’s children’s film made so much money so quickly that the rulers of Hollywood simply could not resist its temptations.

Combined with the successes of Steven Spielberg, Star Wars convinced Hollywood that the big budget special effects blockbuster was the future, so those were what they began to make and keep making: more Star Wars and more Star Wars and more Star Wars, until with the Marvel films, American cinema became nothing but Star Wars and, as Scorsese has rightfully asserted, ceased to be cinema at all. The great transgressions of the 1970s proved a fleeting interregnum and were made no more.

Of course, great films continued to emerge, but they were almost always a struggle to finance, made on small budgets that limited their reach and scope, and always in danger of being recut and bastardized by the powers that be. Cinema, in effect, went underground, often financed and produced independently of a Hollywood that was now Star Wars and nothing else.

However, we now have some reason for hope, because Star Wars has, at long last, stopped making money. With the twin flops of Solo and The Mandalorian and Grogu, we now know that Star Wars is not impervious to time and growing indifference. It does not print money by default.

Thus, a new interregnum may be coming, one in which great filmmakers finally have the room to create new and daring work. Indeed, if history has proven anything, it is only when Hollywood begins to fail, when its illusions are shattered, and it has no idea what to do that filmmakers enjoy their greatest freedom to be transgressive and original.

It is possible that the disease Star Wars became is being cured by failure and American cinema may be given a new lease on life. After all, we now know that people still want to go to the movies, but they no longer want to see Star Wars. Something, hopefully better, will fill the gap.

It is not all certain, of course, that this will be the case. The rise of social media, the plethora of terrible TikTok videos for those with negative attention spans, and the growing mediocrity of the streaming services may yet destroy cinema as we know it, but I doubt this will be the case.

Even if cinema turns to new mediums, new methods of delivery, its language will remain the same. Montage, juxtaposition, and the immersive long take will remain, because it is the only language in which an art form of images can speak. Like any art form, it will continue to speak, if only due to the enthusiasm of the artists who can know no other language. It is through them that the renaissance will come.

Star Wars is dead, long live cinema.