Introduction: From the House that George Built to the House of Mouse

In 2005, the release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith officially marked the end of the Star Wars phenomenon—as a live-action film series at least. Spin-offs and tie-in narratives would, however, continue to exploit gaps in “hyperdiegetic” (Hills 2002) continuity and chronology, such as CGI animated film and TV series The Clone Wars (2008–2015) and the continuation of the Expanded Universe (EU) of novels, comics, video games, as well as new merchandise, toys, and action figurines. Plans for a live-action TV series set between Episode III and Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), with the working title of Star Wars: Underworld, remained in the early stages of planning and preproduction, principally due to budgetary concerns and constraints. In 2010, at a screening of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) in Chicago, George Lucas said that the TV series was “on hold” for the time being, “because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do them. Because, they literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them [at] a tenth of the cost. And it’s a huge challenge . . . [a] lot bigger than we thought it was gonna be” (quoted in Rosenberg 2010). At the same event, fans reportedly questioned Lucas about the possibility of a new live-action flm, which he clearly rebuked. The Star Wars flm series as the saga of the Skywalker family, it seemed, was over with, done and dusted. As David Brin (2006: 1) announced, “The sci-f legend of our generation is now complete.