Earlier this week, Disney announced an updated schedule of theatrical releases in the coming years, and among the changes is that we’ll have to wait a little bit longer for Star Wars to return to theaters.
Disney pushed back the Star Wars movie that was originally scheduled to release on December 19, 2025, instead filling it with Avatar 3. The Star Wars film has been moved to May 22, 2026, and the franchise is currently keeping the December 18, 2026 slot, marking two films planned within seven months. There’s also a December 17, 2027 date for a Star Wars movie as well.
The changes to Disney’s release schedule are nothing new this far out, as the dates have kept shifting around, and while no reasoning was given, the widespread changes across all of the company’s studios indicate that the ongoing writer’s strike could be a factor.
This far out there’s not a lot to note on these dates, except to say that they’ll probably change again before they arrive. But it’s especially curious to me to see Disney now schedule two Star Wars movies within the same year. When The Last Jedi premiered in December 2017 and then Solo in May 2018, the latter’s middling box office performance was blamed on two Star Wars movies coming so close together. Disney CEO Bob Iger has spoken several times since then about the lessons that they learned from that experience, and one of those lessons clearly seemed to be that he didn’t believe Star Wars should release movies that close together.
Granted, this one is a bit further apart (seven months compared to five), and I think following up a May release with a December one rather than the other way around is much more logical. But it’s just interesting to me to see so much of the rhetoric of the last few years regarding Solo seemingly dismissed here. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as I’m not convinced Disney was drawing the best lessons from it to begin with. A bigger problem was that the marketing approach to Solo was a confusing mess, and that it came out just a month after Avengers: Infinity War, one of the biggest box office successes in movie history.
But, well, here’s the interesting thing: the next Avengers movie, Avengers: Kang Dynasty, was pushed back to May 2, 2026. So, at least as currently scheduled, Disney plans to trumpet the return of the Avengers (after a seven year hiatus) and the theatrical return of the Star Wars franchise (which also sees a seven year break) within 20 days. With how important this first Star Wars movie back in theaters seems to be for Disney and Lucasfilm, that seems like an odd choice all around.
I prefer the December releases, but Star Wars has historically proven it can dominate a May release. So it’s not so much the time of year as it is the fact that Disney has seemingly disregarded everything they thought they learned from Solo. That movie was overshadowed by an Avengers movie and was released close to another Star Wars one, and, well, here we go again.
Like I’ve said, I expect plenty more changes to come. But for now, we’ll be getting three Star Wars movies in a two year span from 2026-2027. It’s expected that the Daisy Ridley-led New Jedi Order will kick things off with the May 2026 movie, but nothing official has been announced on that front.
Star Wars Thoughts 