The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Is Not Canon

Note: spoilers about any and all Star Wars movies herein.

As I left the theater after watching The Rise of Skywalker with my son, a discomfort with the film that I had also felt after the previous two episodes came into fuller focus. I didn’t hate the movie — I actually kind of liked it — but I just couldn’t fit it in with the rest of Star Wars in my head. I couldn’t help but feel that I had just watched some incredibly high-budget, well-acted fan fiction. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was true. The new movies weren’t part of the canon at all.

Let me explain.

I’m 45 years old, and the first movie I can remember seeing in a movie theater is the original Star Wars, now known as Episode IV or A New Hope. I was not as big a fan as some of my friends (I was much more drawn to the Superman movies), but I still loved it, I still had the action figures, and I still knew the lines and characters. It was part of the culture in a time when culture was much less fractured than it is now. Episodes V and VI completed the original trilogy, and we all loved them. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t, and the idea of not liking Star Wars, at least of a kid not liking it, seemed foreign.

Then there was nothing, for a long time. There were just those three movies. I mean, yes, there were novels and all that, but those were for the hardcore fans, which I wasn’t. Everyone knew those three movies were parts 4–6 of a larger story, but as the years passed, the idea that the first three episodes would ever be made gradually became something few expected to see happen.

The Prequel Trilogy

Then, in the mid-90s, the universe stirred again. Lucasfilm released the “special edition” versions of the original three, which were a mixed bag, but they came with the intriguing announcement that production would begin on the prequel trilogy that few of my generation had ever expected to see. We would finally get to see how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader. Maybe we’d get a peek at the mysterious Clone Wars. Maybe we’d see more than two lightsabers at a time.

I was eight years old when Return of the Jedi came out. I was twenty-five when The Phantom Menace hit theaters. Sitting down in a theater and hearing the blaring fanfare of the theme and then seeing a brand new title crawl come up was surreal. There had only ever been the original three, and this was something entirely new. I was captivated.

Unfortunately, as much as I really wanted to love The Phantom Menace, I just didn’t. Don’t get me wrong. It was exciting to see, and I actually saw it three times in the theater. It was Star Wars, after all. But in the intervening years, we’d all kind of developed pet theories about the past of the original trilogy. Some people had only vague notions, while others developed their own fully fleshed out ideas. Remember, most of us never expected the prequel trilogy to actually happen, so we tended to settle on certain stories. The Phantom Menace did away with most people’s ideas of what happened before A New Hope. It didn’t replace them with anything particularly compelling, either. I won’t get into criticism of the prequels here, but suffice it to say that most of my generation who saw them were, for one reason or another, very disappointed by the first two prequels. It was a bit disheartening. After The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones demystified the Clone Wars, previously little more than a throwaway line that left very much to the imagination, and solidified parts of the story that many of us thought of in a very different way.

While many of us greatly disliked the prequels, very few people argued that they were not part of Star Wars canon. After all, they had sprung directly from the original creator, even more directly than Episodes V and VI (which were not directed by him). Over time, many just grudgingly accepted that the story of Anakin’s downfall was not what they wanted it to be. We now had a complete, if flawed, story, told over six episodes, of the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Lucas himself said that the story was over. That was it.

The Sequel Trilogy

When the sale of Star Wars to Disney was announced, I was shocked but uplifted. The prequels had suffered from being directed by Lucas, who is a great large-scale storyteller without the temperament to mind the details or handle actors or dialogue well. Disney would surely hire good directors to take things in interesting new directions. They had done such a great job with their burgeoning Marvel franchise, and I thought they were a great choice to carry on Star Wars and take it in new directions. When J.J. Abrams was brought on board, I was excited. He’d done something interesting with Star Trek, which had badly needed a new approach, and I thought his touch would be great for the other big “Star” franchise, especially because he was already a big fan himself and was knowledgeable about it. I didn’t know where he would take things with the new trilogy, but I was sure it would be interesting.

After promising-looking trailers, I went to see Episode VII with high hopes. This time, I greatly enjoyed it. The movie was no Empire Strikes Back, but it featured much better acting and dialogue. However, there were three issues I had with it. First, as many noted at the time, it was highly derivative of A New Hope in ways it did not need to be. Rather than extending into new kinds of stories, it basically rehashed Episode IV but made everything bigger, with (very) thinly-veiled stand-ins for the Rebellion and the Empire. Second, as a result of this, it seemed to diminish the triumphant ending of Episode VI. So the big victory there only set the stage for the same thing to happen again 30 years later? That takes a lot of the luster off the accomplishments of Luke and company. Third, and most nebulously, it didn’t feel right. It didn’t seem like a continuation of the story, but rather an add-on. That’s what happens, I suppose, when you try to extend a story that is complete, but the rehashing of the original really served to make Episode VII feel pointless. Still, it set in motion some interesting things and I was curious to see where they would go.

Episode VIII surprised me. Mostly in a good way. Unlike the many vocal detractors of it, I thought it was the highest quality Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Back. Yes, I thought it was better than Return of the Jedi (which is really a mediocre movie that turns very good in its last act). Again, it wasn’t perfect (the Canto Bight sequence, in particular, dragged it down), but it was daring and original. It set up ideas that I really liked, encapsulated by Kylo Ren’s line, “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” It sought to make something new in Star Wars, to branch it out. It wasn’t surprising to me that so many people had issues with it, but I loved what it was going for.

The only thing was… it still didn’t feel like Star Wars. It was really great and fun, but it seemed even more distant than the previous movie, although its ending promise of an awakening force awareness among the no-names of the galaxy, and it’s theme of the potential in even those with no great birthright, was poignant.

Episode IX, though, was a bit of a mess. It did away with (through retconning or ignoring) the very best elements introduced in Episode VIII and returned to aping the original trilogy, with the most egregious mistake (in my opinion) of bringing back Palpatine without any earlier foreshadowing and in a way that was clearly not thought out in advance. It greatly detracted from the climax of the original trilogy and made it seem that the whole idea of Anakin restoring balance was completely irrelevant. It brought back a dead guy and killed him again. It gave Kylo Ren the exact same arc as Darth Vader, turning on his master (the same guy!) and saving the hero while others fought in a big space battle. It just rehashed everything. It didn’t take Star Wars to a new place. It just restored it to the same place where it was at the end of the previous trilogy.

What is Canon?

That got me thinking about the concept of canon in regards to a fictional universe. The idea of “canon” comes, of course, from religion. The relevant definition in the OED, dating from as early as the fourteenth century, is “the collection or list of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and inspired.”

Religion, as we know, purports to be something real and true. Defining what is officially a part of a religion is rather essential if you are trying to build a coherent belief system. Canon, in this sense, is a declaration of what is included in a particular worldview that is embraced by followers as truth. Extending that to a fictional universe, even one whose devotees are often as dogmatic and zealous as the most fundamentalist of religious adherents, is problematic.

For one, none of it is true. No one, aside from maybe a very out-there set of very special people, is arguing that Lucas was divinely inspired or that the movies and stories depict real events that occurred a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. How can we speak of something being “genuine” when we know that it is not even meant to be?

When Disney bought the rights to Star Wars in 2014, they bought the rights to create and distribute materials related to the franchise from that point on. But they didn’t buy — they cannot buy — the right to tell people what to consider a part of it in their own minds, or among themselves. If everyone up and decided that the Disney Star Wars movies were not canon, it wouldn’t matter how much Disney said about it. They wouldn’t be.

Of course, that isn’t what will happen. For the most part, people will accept that because Disney gave George Lucas billions of dollars, they now get to say what is “real” in the Star Wars universe. But that isn’t something George Lucas could sell. It wasn’t an ability Lucas himself had. Instead, in keeping with the theme of Episode VIII that Disney tossed for Episode IX, it is something we all, as individuals, have.

Some people feel like the only canon is the original trilogy. Some people feel like it’s the first movie alone. Some people feel like Episodes I-VI are the full story. Others feel like VII-IX fit in. It’s not so much about the quality of the material as how well it fits together. Personally, I think the entire sequel trilogy was better in quality than the first two episodes of the prequel trilogy, and VIII is the second best movie of the nine. But I can’t wrap my head around VIII-IX as being Star Wars. It doesn’t feel the same. It has no clear focus or vision. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not canon. And that’s OK. Disney doesn’t get to tell you that it is. If you felt that the EU stories now relegated to “Legends” status make for a better story, let that be your canon. Sure, it won’t be getting any follow-ups because Disney owns the right to make follow-ups (or at least to distribute them for money), but the fact that they have declared them unofficial doesn’t mean that you have to accept them as such.

Personally, I feel like Episodes I-VI, Rogue One, and the Clone Wars series make for a good canon (I haven’t seen Rebels, but I might end up including that if I do). These are the ones that feel like they belong together in my mind. I think The Mandalorian is in there now, too. If someone makes other stuff that fits in my mind, I’ll take it. If not, I won’t. If they end up making Episodes X or beyond, and they feel like they fit better to me, I’ll take them, even if they depend on events in the sequel trilogy. Maybe I’ll change my mind at some point in the future.

The point is that none of it is a reflection of real events, so what you consider to be canon is simply a matter of taste, and not something that can be mandated by a company just because they have a lot of money. If some mother’s-basement-dweller concocts a brilliant story that fits better as a follow-up to me, I’m going to declare it part of canon and consider it as such.

But what is canon, then, really? Is it entirely meaningless? If everyone can make their own canon, isn’t that just a big mess? Doesn’t the idea of a canonical universe provide a framework through which one can discuss that universe with others? Don’t you need an agreed upon “reality” in order to even have a discussion? Yes, of course. Without wading too far into some very scary waters, I’ll say that modern politics shows a case where discussion is hindered by the lack of agreement about what is real. Of course, that concerns real reality, and what I’m writing about is, for want of a better term, fake reality, but the essence is the same. A canon that exists independently of individual minds is useful as a way to establish the bounds of a conversation, and conversation about a story can be as important as the story itself.

That doesn’t mean that we all have to be in uniform agreement over what is Star Wars canon. It just means that the further from the most commonly accepted canon your own personal one is, the more limited you are in the range of conversations you can have. Just as a Catholic and a Protestant can still have religious discussions about areas in which they agree, despite some fundamental disagreements about many other things, so too can Star Wars fans with one set of canon discuss those areas of overlap with those who have other sets, so long as there is enough mutually agreed upon material.

Certainly there will be some major divisions. There will be those who accept only the movies vs. those who consider the shows and books to be canon. There will be those who only accept the original trilogy. There will be those who take the first six movies and a particular set of “Legends” stories. There will be those who only recognize material coming directly from George Lucas as canon, regardless who has the rights now. Again, the further from mainstream you go, the harder it will be to find a discussion partner. Maybe you think the Muppets and Sesame Street are part of the same universe, and that Gover and Miss Piggy are alternate manifestations of Yoda. Fine, but you won’t have many people sharing that particular canon.

The most mainstream, at least for now, is whatever Disney says it is, simply because most people are happy to cede authority on the matter to them. As we live in a capitalist society that recognizes the rights to an intellectual property as something that can be bought and sold, most of us will just accept that. How much time is the average person willing to spend in their lives on the idea of what constitutes canonical Star Wars? Probably less in their entire lives than I have spent writing this.

Beyond Star Wars

While Star Wars is probably the most intense fan base going right now, there are certainly many others. Some are much more identified with individual authors, such as Rowling’s Wizarding World or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is much easier to come to agreement in such cases because there is that central figure who is seen as the creator. Even then, there are divisions, but there is at least a general consensus in some regard. Other fan bases are much more fractured, like the Alien or Predator universes (or is it the same universe?)

I actually have a friend who is a huge fan of the Alien franchise, which has a rather spotty track record. Last I checked, the first two movies, Alien and Aliens, are all that he considers to be a part of it. I know another person who considers only the James Cameron-sanctioned Terminator movies to be official.

There is certainly a desire to attach a single person (sometimes a duo, but rarely more than two) to a particular franchise. The Wachowskis made the Matrix movies. Lucas made Star Wars. Roddenberry made Star Trek. This makes sense. We like to see something as being the product of a singular vision. Even when there are many heads involved, we like to feel like a single person is in charge, and we blame or credit them. See Kevin Feige for the Marvel movies or Benioff and Weiss for the Game of Thrones show. We don’t like the idea of something emerging from a committee or a faceless group. That’s why we’ve seen the rise of the “showrunner” for television shows.

We do this in many domains (e.g., we credit the President of the US with the state of the economy, despite his having comparatively little effect on it in the grand scheme), but it shows up all the time in entertainment. I’ve often heard it said that you can tell if a movie will be good by how many screenwriters are credited (fewer=better; it’s actually more of a measure of how much money the studio has sunk into it, but there’s probably something to be said for the argument at large scales, as more writers are needed if a script needs a lot of polish). The idea of someone having ultimate authority over something is comforting, even if it’s an illusion.

If you want to cede authority over what is canon in any particular fictional universe to another entity, whether that’s Disney or an author or a showrunner, that is fine. There is enough real-world matter to think about without worrying about which parts of fiction are more or less fictional. But by no means should anyone feel beholden to accept a particular prescribed canon as the one and only way that a particular “universe” can be enjoyed. Ultimately, the material is all there, and you can take or leave what you will. You can even make up your own, as humans have done since prehistory. Just as there can never be an “official” version of Greek myth, you can choose what to include or discard, or to keep it all or discard it all. Just be aware that others may make different choices, and no choice is truly the “right” one. In the end, it’s all just “Legends.”