A massive Star Wars reset is coming, and Disney has all but said so. It just said it through Marvel.
Marvel’s path is public. Avengers: Doomsday arrives this December, Avengers: Secret Wars follows in December 2027. There are no other MCU films being released in the meantime.
And per Kevin Feige himself, what comes after is a reset, with the X-Men rebuilt from scratch at the center of a new MCU and new actors expected to step into legacy Avengers roles.
The rumors go further, claiming Doomsday rolls everything back to Endgame outright.
Robert Downey Jr. and the writer of X-Men have also both said that goal is to fix Marvel.
Star Wars is following the same script beat for beat, minus the press conference.
Put Marvel’s playbook next to what Lucasfilm has actually been doing, and the years of reset rumors, the Kathleen Kennedy exit, and our own insider reporting stop reading like noise and start reading like a plan.
Marvel Wrote The Playbook In Public
The useful part of Marvel’s announced reboot is not the reboot. It is what Marvel’s behavior looked like once the reset was decided.
The output went safe: Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps were bridge product, made to keep the machine warm until Doomsday flips the board.
Nobody spends real creative capital on a continuity that is already being wound down.
So Marvel gave everyone the decoder ring. A franchise in pre-reset mode plays it safe, because the current version of the franchise no longer matters to the people running it.
More importantly, playing it safe kept Marvel from driving even more fans out the door before the reset even arrived.
Star Wars Checks Every Box
Now hold that up against Lucasfilm.
On this week’s episode of The Town, Puck’s Matt Belloni said Star Wars “played it absolutely safe and it’s blown up in their face,” and pinned The Mandalorian & Grogu on Kennedy by name as her movie.
Look at the safe play itself.
Lucasfilm took a series that had dropped nearly 40% of its Nielsen audience, repackaged two episodes for theaters, and called it the franchise’s grand return after seven years. That’s the real reason they released it.
Belloni notes Favreau was a director for hire and the theatrical call “was coming from Disney.” Kennedy herself confirmed on the way out that Star Wars projects are on hold.
Now look at what is actually on the books.
Looking past Star Wars: Starfighter next May, the release calendar is empty. The only live-action series in the pipeline is Filoni’s own Ahsoka Season 2, thought to be its last.
For the crown jewel of Disney’s film library, the shelves past 2027 are bare, and shelves do not go bare by accident.
We broke down what the safe era cost all three franchises at the box office in our look at the vanished superhero floor. This is about what the safe era was for.
And remember who owns both shops. Disney is not running one playbook at Marvel and a different one across the hall at Lucasfilm. They’re both the same.
The Reset Rumors Suddenly Read Like A Schedule
CBN readers know the paper trail, because we have been covering it for years.
The rumors that Disney is resetting Star Wars. The reports it wants The Last Jedi erased or written around. The claims that Kennedy’s exit was tied to the reset long before it happened.
Jon Favreau himself addressed the reset talk and waved it off at the time. But while promoting The Mandalorian Season 3 in 2023, he also confirmed the conversations were real: “There’s definitely a conversation that’s going on… I know that there’s some discussion, exploration going on about what happens after it.”
Any one of those reports was dismissible on its own. All of them together, sitting next to Marvel’s announced version of the exact same maneuver, is a pattern.
Kennedy Out, Filoni In: The Reset Got Its Regime
Then January happened.
Kennedy was officially out, with Dave Filoni named Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer and Lynwen Brennan stepping up as Co-President.
Even the framing around the announcement treated the change as resetting the franchise toward a more fan-favored vision.
Six months later, the trades are assigning the old era’s failure to Kennedy by name. That is the mechanism to watch.
The outgoing regime absorbs the blame so the incoming one starts clean, and you only need a clean slate if you intend to write something new on it.
Our Insiders Already Told You The Strategy
The corporate layer confirms it in plain language.
As we reported in our exclusive on Disney prepping for the Paramount-WBD war, Disney is shopping for outside material, with other studios acquisitions “not out of the question,” and our insiders explained exactly why.
We were told, “They need new material to rest their legacy IP before they relaunch them again.”
Rest, then relaunch. That is Marvel’s announced plan and Star Wars’ leaked one, described in a single sentence from inside the machine.
The outside IP is there to hold the male and family audiences while the brands cool off, because those are exactly the moviegoers Star Wars bled when it lost as much as 85% of its viewers.
Starfighter Is Not The Relaunch. It Is The Last Safe Play
Do not mistake Star Wars: Starfighter for the new era.
Belloni closed the segment pointing right at it: “We’ll see what Shawn Levy does next year with Gosling. One final kissoff from Kathy Kennedy.”
Disney’s own leadership announcement confirms it, listing Starfighter alongside The Mandalorian & Grogu as the films Kennedy stays on to produce.
The movie fits the rest phase, not the reset.
Per plot leaks, it is a standalone built on the most familiar template Star Wars owns, an older loner looking after a Force-sensitive kid, the same well Lucasfilm just drew from with The Mandalorian & Grogu. And standalone says it all.
A one-off commits the new regime to nothing while the brand cools, but keeps those current fans still around content (again, same pattern, just like Disney did with Marvel).
The Reveal Has A Date, And It Is Not Hall H
Lucasfilm hits Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, two weeks from now, with the 50th anniversary machine queued up for 2027.
Expect era-turning language. We are not expecting the new plan.
The plan likely gets its own stage. Star Wars Celebration lands in April 2027, the first Celebration of the post-Kennedy era, one month before Kennedy’s final movie even opens into the anniversary.
If Disney is going to spell out the new Star Wars direction anywhere, our money is on that stage. It has an empty slate to fill and a 50th anniversary to sell.
The open question is the method. A hard retcon has always seemed unlikely, but Favreau’s own framing points at the softer version: set the new stories long after the Sequel Trilogy and simply never look back. That is the same trick as Marvel’s rumored rollback to Endgame, erasure by distance instead of decree.
One thing to keep in view as the new era gets its coronation: Belloni made a point of saying Filoni “is not blameless” on The Mandalorian & Grogu.
The safe era was co-authored by the man now running the relaunch, and a reset fixes continuity, not philosophy. The rest of Hollywood has already figured out which one of those sells tickets.
The reset is coming either way. Hall H is the warm-up. Celebration is where Disney has to say what Star Wars becomes.
