50 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN, THE TURBO-LASERS FALL SILENT: Welcoming the death of Star Wars.
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.
Though they sowed the seeds of their own destruction, as James Lileks wrote 20 years ago:
And what an ending, eh? Han Solo — Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last — conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force — which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics — and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes.
After a generation of movies with tortured antiheroes who couldn’t order a sandwich without making A Statement, it seemed remarkably fresh.
It saved science fiction. You could argue that “Star Wars” saved “Star Trek” as well; the success of the movie had everyone greenlighting space operas now, and the first Trek movie — a long, serious film by the director of “West Side Story” — was released a while later, leading to three more decades of Trek.
Fast-forward to 2026. As Will Jordan, aka the Critical Drinker, told an interviewer from GBNews recently, “I don’t know where [Disney goes] from here. ultimately they might be better off just trying to sell off the [Star Wars] IP to someone else because they’re not turning a profit from it.”
On the other hand, there’s one more cash grab left for Disney, and I’m eagerly looking forward to contributing to their coffers: “Disney has announced that it will be releasing the original theatrical version of the original Star Wars in theaters once again on February 19.”