'Star Wars must abandon one thing in order to survive'

"It wasn’t that I didn’t like [Star Wars]. It just wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t in awe of it."

These are not the words of someone's apathetic aunt or a rather-too-tribal Star Trek fan. Those words were said by Tony Gilroy — creator of arguably the best chapter of Star Wars storytelling since the original trilogy with Andor — in a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

In an era where superfans dominate and every Star Wars creator feels the need to lay out their lifelong credentials as someone who has been wielding toy lightsabers since they first learned to walk, there was something refreshing about Gilroy's perspective. And the proof of the pudding was in the eating. Both Rogue One, which he co-wrote and partially directed, and Andor — which returns for its second season this year — sit at the peak of Star Wars in the Disney era.

This story is emblematic of something Star Wars needs to shed immediately if there's to be a future to the galaxy far, far away: its obsession with its own "lore".

Star Wars is an enormous and tangled universe packed with characters and worlds, within the "main" movies and TV shows and also an entire extended universe of written and additional material. This is a world in which a single cameo in last year's series The Acolyte could trigger a weeks-long war of words around the online information hub Wookieepedia.

But Star Wars is much better when everyone simmers down and enjoys the stories. When people sat in cinemas to watch the first three movies in the 70s and 80s, they weren't worried about timelines, planetary parliaments, and consistent character ages. They just wanted rollicking sci-fi adventure stories — and they got them.

Read more: Where does Skeleton Crew fit in the Star Wars timeline? (Yahoo Entertainment, 3 min read)

That's the genius of Andor. It isn't bogged down in tying together every event or dragging in tonnes of half-remembered characters from the past. It simply tells a self-contained story populated with rich characters and complex morality, within the expansive galaxy that George Lucas created. That's a better tribute than any overwrought Yoda cameo.

Cameo obsession has been a thorn in the side of Star Wars ever since Disney picked up Lucasfilm. We all had fun with The Force Awakens, but it was essentially a glorified "greatest hits" compilation, while recent TV shows like Ahsoka and The Acolyte have handed fans all sorts of scraps of cameos, from Anakin Skywalker and Yoda all the way through to Darth Plagueis.

Read more: Star Wars Fans Have A Lot Of Feelings Amid Reports About The Future Of The Acolyte (HuffPost, 7 min read)

There's a sign, though, that lessons are being learned. James Mangold, who is currently promoting his Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, is hard at work on developing a Star Wars movie set 25,000 years before any of the stories we've seen before.

He told Deadline this week that he relishes "the freedom to make something new", adding: "It’s an area and a playground that I’ve always [wanted to explore] and that I was inspired by as a teenager. I’m not that interested in being handcuffed by so much lore at this point that it’s almost immovable, and you can’t please anybody.”

This suggests that Mangold is taking a leaf out of Gilroy's book. The best way to do Star Wars is to exploit the audience's love for the universe to do something completely different. The further you fly away from the depths of Star Wars lore, the less likely you are to inadvertently whip the fan base up into a toxic frenzy.

It's also the case that, as Mangold puts it, the enormous weight of Star Wars history places metaphorical handcuffs around the wrists of any creative person. Only by freeing creatives of that pressure and restriction can we experience the joys we felt when we first saw those original movies — fresh, exciting, and utterly unique.

Read more: Will Disney’s Star Wars TV gamble survive another cancellation? (Yahoo Entertainment, 5 min read)

As Kylo Ren so famously said: "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be." It seems bizarre to say that Star Wars should learn a lesson from one of its most notorious villains, but his words are wise. Everyone needs to make like Tony Gilroy and just stop caring so much.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is streaming now on Disney Plus. Andor season 2 is due to premiere on 22 April.