Star Wars’ Biggest Mistakes, Ranked by Fans

Few franchises in entertainment history have inspired the kind of passionate, decades-long devotion that Star Wars commands — and few have also managed to frustrate that same fanbase quite so consistently. Since George Lucas introduced audiences to a galaxy far, far away in 1977, the series has grown into a $10 billion-plus box office juggernaut spanning a dozen films, multiple live-action and animated series, and an entire expanded universe of books, comics, and games. The scale of it is genuinely staggering.

But scale doesn’t equal perfection. And the bigger Star Wars has gotten, the harder some of its stumbles have landed.

The Sequel Trilogy’s Streaming Problem Is Worse Than You Think

Here’s a number that should give Disney pause: not one of the three sequel trilogy films — The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, or The Rise of Skywalker — cracked the top 10 most-streamed Star Wars titles on May the Fourth last year, according to Nielsen data. Not one. The list was dominated by the original trilogy, the prequels, and a couple of Disney’s own TV entries, most notably Andor.

Fans have been vocal about their disappointment with the new trilogy for years, but this is something different. It’s not just criticism — it’s indifference. People aren’t rewatching these films. They’re not revisiting them for comfort or nostalgia. They’re simply moving on.

The reasons are well-documented at this point. The writing felt rushed and at times contradictory, particularly between The Last Jedi — directed by Rian Johnson — and The Rise of Skywalker, where J.J. Abrams returned to course-correct in ways that created their own continuity headaches. The result was a trilogy that felt less like a planned story and more like three different directors arguing with each other across three films, with audiences caught in the middle.

What Happened to Luke Skywalker

Of all the creative decisions made in the Disney era, none has been more polarizing than what The Last Jedi did with Luke Skywalker. Mark Hamill himself has spoken about his initial disagreements with Rian Johnson’s vision for the character — a broken, reclusive hermit who had turned his back on the Force and on hope itself. For many fans who grew up watching Luke as the beating heart of the original trilogy, seeing him reduced to that felt like a betrayal.

Hamill came back. He played the role. But the version of Luke presented in that film — world-weary, self-exiled, almost contemptuous of his own legend — hit differently than anything the franchise had done before. Whether that was bold storytelling or a fundamental misreading of what audiences needed from that character is a debate that hasn’t cooled down years later.

Finn’s Arc and a Wasted Opportunity

John Boyega, who played Finn across all three sequel films, didn’t hold back when he went public with his frustrations about how Disney handled his character. Boyega argued that Finn — introduced with real promise in The Force Awakens as a stormtrooper who breaks free and finds his conscience — was steadily sidelined in the final two installments.

He wasn’t wrong. Finn’s arc across the trilogy is one of the more glaring examples of a character with genuine potential being written into increasingly marginal territory. By The Rise of Skywalker, a character who had been set up as a central hero was essentially running around reacting to other people’s storylines. Whatever the reasons — and Boyega framed it largely around race, which sparked its own conversation — the end result was a compelling character who never got to fulfill what the first film promised.

The Comics Have Been Quietly Doing the Repair Work

While the films have struggled, something interesting has been happening on the page. Disney’s Star Wars comics — published under the Marvel banner, and through licensing deals with Dark Horse and IDW — have become an increasingly bold creative space, and some of the most important character rehabilitation in the franchise’s recent history has happened there.

Take Qi’ra. Emilia Clarke’s character in Solo: A Star Wars Story was one of the more intriguing figures introduced in the Disney era — a survivor, a manipulator, a woman who chose power over loyalty and paid a complicated price for it. When Solo underperformed at the box office, it looked like Qi’ra might simply disappear. Instead, she was reintroduced in War of the Bounty Hunters, a crossover comic event built around the scramble to claim a carbonite-frozen Han Solo. Qi’ra wasn’t a footnote in that story — she was a genuine power player, and the comic gave her the menace and complexity the film had only hinted at.

That led directly into Crimson Reign, a story centered on Qi’ra’s Crimson Dawn syndicate taking on both the Empire and the Sith. By the time those comics were done, the character had been transformed from a one-film love interest into one of the more compelling figures in current Star Wars canon. She’s since appeared in Star Wars Outlaws. If she ever returns on screen, there’s an entire architecture of story waiting for her.

Then there’s Jaxxon — and yes, that name will mean something to a very specific kind of Star Wars fan. First appearing in Star Wars #8 back in 1977, the rabbit-like smuggler created by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin was essentially the franchise’s attempt at comic relief, a kind of Bugs Bunny in space. He faded from view for decades. Disney brought him back in the Star Wars Adventures Annual in 2018, published through IDW, and the response was warm enough that Jaxxon has been popping up in comics ever since. The Clone Wars even snuck in a skeleton of his species as a background detail. A full screen appearance feels less like a question of if and more of when.

It’s a reminder that the comics have always been where Star Wars takes its risks — lower stakes, smaller audiences, more room to experiment. When those experiments work, they quietly reshape what the larger franchise can do. When the films misfire, the comics are often the ones quietly cleaning up.

Star Wars at its best has always been about hope — which makes it fitting that even after some of its biggest creative stumbles, the franchise keeps finding ways to course-correct. The question is whether the films can catch up to what the rest of the universe is already doing.