Disney Retconned Its ‘Star Wars’ Land, but Does That Actually Fix Anything? | Analysis

Last Wednesday, throngs of fans, theme park bloggers and YouTubers plus a few journalists flooded into the “Star Wars”-themed section of Disneyland.

They were there for the biggest change to the area since it opened nearly seven years earlier. The land, called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, was reset to include the original characters from the 1977 film like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, upending the original timeline and grand ambitions that were hand-crafted for Galaxy’s Edge.

It’s a not-so-subtle acknowledgement that, as Disney prepares to release the first new “Star Wars” movie in seven years, “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” its original ambitious plan of creating an intensely immersive world featuring more recent characters failed to take root with Disneyland guests. Now the company has found a way to just play the hits and ditch those immersion plans, largely removing the tie-ins to the sequel trilogy that relaunched “Star Wars” to a new generation to decidedly mixed results in the 2010s.

It’s a time of great change for the company as Josh D’Amaro takes over as CEO and Dave Filoni and Lynwen Brennan take over Lucasfilm — and Disneyland is no exception to the winds of change.

The shift at the park also comes after Lucasfilm has struggled to find a way forward for “Star Wars” after 2019’s critically shellacked “Rise of Skywalker,” developing and abandoning several new movies that would have continued that storyline and even failing to get a greenlight for a Kylo Ren movie from Steven Soderbergh and Adam Driver.

_

**