'The only one of the three that actually tried something': The Last Jedi is winning the sequel war
A Reddit post set out to declare the movie bad once and for all. A hundred replies later, it proved the opposite.
The post on r/StarWars this week ran under a familiar banner — "I feel like we're all starting to realise how much of a bad film this is" — and nine years ago it would have been preaching to a furious choir. Instead, the replies filled with defenders, and the top of the thread reads like a verdict:
"This is the only one of the three that actually tried something. Rise of Skywalker is far far far worse. It is literally the only Star Wars movie I've only ever seen one time."
— a commenter on r/StarWars (20 upvotes)
The pushback wasn't polite disagreement, either:
"We? Who's we? Speak for yourself. I love it more every time I see it. Firmly in my 3rd place of my SW rankings."
— a commenter on r/StarWars (12 upvotes)
How different this is from 2017
Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi opened in December 2017 into the loudest fan civil war Lucasfilm has ever had: a 91% critics' score against an audience score that cratered into the 40s, petitions demanding the film be struck from canon, and a harassment campaign ugly enough that Kelly Marie Tran left social media. The movie still made $1.33 billion, and the discourse still treated it as the franchise's open wound.
The Rise of Skywalker arrived two years later built to soothe that crowd — and inverted every number. Critics dropped to roughly half fresh, audiences scored it in the 80s, the box office fell by about a quarter of a billion dollars, and J.J. Abrams' course correction pleased the room without leaving anything behind to argue about.
The movie with the 40-something audience score is the one fans now line up to defend. The one scored in the 80s is the one they admit to watching once.
My scorecard, nine years on
I think the thread is right, and I'll put it in those terms: TLJ won the sequel war. Rewatchability is the currency a franchise actually runs on, and the fight in that thread is itself the evidence — people don't spend a Tuesday defending a film that left no mark. Nobody starts arguments about The Rise of Skywalker; there's nothing in it to argue with.
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The irony sits with Lucasfilm, which drew the opposite lesson in real time. The studio announced a Rian Johnson trilogy in 2017 and has quietly let it gather dust ever since, while the sequel era's planned continuations — Daisy Ridley's New Jedi Order film among them — keep sliding around the calendar. The director of the entry fans migrated back to is the one who never got to make another, and this December, when The Last Jedi turns nine, the thread under the anniversary posts is going to look a lot like this one.
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