The drama over Star Wars never seems to end. From ‘woke’ politics being injected into the series to hostile financial takeovers to South Park to George Lucas himself strangely endorsing Disney’s leadership as their main individual stockholder, the Star Wars saga goes on and on and on. Only now, it’s not about adventures from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it’s about money, politics, and fan rage. Money and politics are always involved in any successful movie or TV series. What I want to talk about now is the fans.

Keep in mind, one of the reasons George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney in the first place was the fans. The Star Wars fan base has been angry and toxic since at least The Phantom Menace in 1999, which was a very divisive film that marked the beginning of a significant portion of the fans turning on George Lucas. They never forgave him for what they perceived to be a fundamental misunderstanding by Lucas of what made Star Wars special in the first place, especially Jar-Jar Binks.

Lucas got tired of listening to the never-ending complaints and anger about Jar-Jar and casting Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy. The fans never forgave him for injecting politics (Star Wars politics) into The Phantom Menace, young, innocent Anakin acting like a young, innocent child, and teenage Anakin’s growing pains as he went through his cocky, awkward teenager phase in Attack of the Clones. Anakin Skywalker the character ended up being significantly different from Anakin Skywalker the legend that had been built up for two decades in between the two trilogies, and the fans didn’t take it well at the time. At all. There was a lot of anger around the prequel trilogy in the early 2000s, some of it justified, but a lot of it wasn’t.

‘Star Wars’ creator George Lucas and the most infamous character in ‘Star Wars’ history, Jar-Jar Binks.

The original Star Wars trilogy made such a severe impact on the childhoods of so many kids in the 1970s-’80s that living up to the nostalgia two decades later became almost impossible. That’s not to say the prequel trilogy films didn’t have their problems because they absolutely did. However, they didn’t deserve the flogging they got, and now since Disney has taken over the direction of the series, we see why. Now we know what truly bad Star Wars is like thanks to Disney.

I can’t imagine that at least some part of George Lucas isn’t laughing to himself after the years of abuse from fans over the prequel trilogy. And now they expect him to come riding to their rescue? Why would he do that? He put two people he trusted, Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Favreau, in charge of LucasFilm. How much he still trusts them after seeing what’s been done to Star Wars is debatable, but at least at the time, he thought the IP was in good hands.

In this whole giant, years-long argument between Star Wars fans and Kathleen Kennedy’s LucasFilm and her writers over the direction of the series, I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with both sides. I’m old enough to remember this same fan rage, much of which is justified now, directed against George Lucas twenty years ago, much of which wasn’t justified then. The fans were wrong before, but they’re right now. If George Lucas did take control of Star Wars again, would anything change from fans? Would they realize how good they had it, or would they just revert back to the same abuse they heaped on Lucas for years over Jar-Jar and The Phantom Menace?

In spite of the anger from fans, not all of Disney Star Wars has been terrible. After the admittedly awful sequel trilogy and the lackluster Solo film, Disney stopped making Star Wars movies altogether, tacitly admitting they didn’t know what they were doing. However, that being said, everyone seems to forget about Rogue One, which was superb. Gareth Edwards crafted a perfect prequel film that led seamlessly into A New Hope and made it almost feel like one giant movie when you watch them back to back. The Mandalorian was fantastic as well, especially the season finale to Season Two. Even the Obi-Wan show, in spite of some very obvious, glaring problems with one of the main characters, had a finale that was as amazing and compelling as anything we’ve seen in the history of the series.

The point I’m trying to make is, yes, Disney fell flat on their face with the sequel trilogy. The Force Awaken, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker are awful. They’re really, really bad. Shockingly terrible. I was one of the first ones sounding the alarm when the rest of the fan base was initially praising The Force Awakens for “fixing Star Wars” and “bringing Star Wars back to its roots” in 2015-2016 when it first released. However, we have been seeing some slow improvement since then.

I don’t know what the dynamic between Kathleen Kennedy and Jon Favreau is really like, whether they’re moving forward together as a team, or fighting against each other with two competing visions. However, I also don’t know what it would take to pacify the Star Wars fan base at this point. They’ve been angry about the direction of the series for a quarter of a century now.

The current caretakers of ‘Star Wars’: Bob Iger, Kathleen Kennedy, and Jon Favreau.

I wish I could say the future of Star Wars looks bright because it doesn’t. It actually looks pretty bleak. George Lucas has publicly endorsed Bob Iger’s failed leadership of Disney and LucasFilm. The Acolyte is almost doomed to failure in spite of the intriguing decision to cast Carrie Anne-Moss as a Jedi. Disney is in a financial tailspin and is trying to fight off a hostile takeover from Nelson Peltz and Elon Musk, which might be the best thing that could happen to Star Wars at this point: a complete takeover at financial gunpoint like Han Solo taking over the deflector shield on Endor in Return of the Jedi.

In the end, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Star Wars fell victim to its own insane success and popularity. The fans were never going to be happy and let Lucas tell Anakin’s story without howling that he was ruining their collective childhoods. Also, Kathleen Kennedy never had any intention of bringing Lucas’s vision of Star Wars to a new generation without turning it into a vehicle for her own feminist political agenda. So maybe Star Wars needs to go away for now, take a break like it did in the sixteen years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, find itself again, and make a return. All the arguing and perpetual anger over a series that used to bring so much joy, awe, astonishment, and wonder is sad and exhausting. Star Wars will never die, but for now, it needs to be put in carbon-freeze. For its own good.