Disney Now Has To Pay To Get Star Wars Trending
Disney paid to promote a post on Twitter to get the Star Wars Day phrase 'May the 4th be with you' hashtag trending online.
Typically, Star Wars fans are able to keep the fandom momentum going pretty well on their own. However, Disney wanted to make sure May the 4th would be trending today regardless of how much anyone actually cared about it. If you check out the ‘May the 4th be with you’ hashtag on Twitter today, you’ll see that Disney+ actually paid to promote it:
Undoubtedly, Disney is wanting to get people to jump over to their streaming platform today to check out the new Star Wars content. Today, Disney dropped the second season of the fantastic animated anthology series Visions. So, to their credit, at least they’re promoting some of the best content they have.
For those who missed the first season, Star Wars: Visions features short animated stories taking place in the galaxy far, far away, with each short animated by different studios from all over the world. For Season 2, the animation studios are El Guiri (Spain), Cartoon Saloon (Ireland), Punkrobot (Chile), Aardman (United Kingdom), Studio Mir (South Korea), Studio La Cachette (France), 88 Pictures (India), D’art Shtajio (Japan), Lucasfilm (United States), and Triggerfish (South Africa).
The first season was some of the most exciting and original content we’ve got from the IP in years (other than Andor), so it’s definitely worth checking out.
Despite Andor and Visions being quality Star Wars projects, it does seem like people are starting to get IP fatigue from the franchise, which might explain why Disney felt like they needed to promote the hashtag today. The third season of The Mandalorian just finished to middling reviews, and people are excited about Ahsoka and Andor, but the franchise definitely isn’t drumming up as much excitement as it once did. This is especially clear after Disney recently announced the new movies they have in development, and the reaction from fans was relatively quiet.
Understandably, fans are pretty wary about new movies considering they were burned pretty badly with The Rise of Skywalker. While the movies they have in the works seem fairly promising, it’s going to be hard for Disney to gain that trust back. While the franchise name alone will probably be enough to make these films profitable, the quality will have to be top-notch to make people want to go to the movies to see Star Wars again.
Amongst the movies announced is a movie that will star Daisy Ridley as Rey rebuilding the Jedi Order 15 years after Rise of Skywalker. While Ridley’s performance was one of the consistently good things about the sequel trilogy, it doesn’t seem likely that fans are going to want to revisit yet another film focused on the Jedi. As evidenced by Disney’s streaming experiments, people have been more interested in other parts of the Star Wars universe in shows like Andor and The Mandalorian.
This is why one of the most exciting upcoming films is probably the Dave Filoni-directed film that will tie together several of the Disney+ shows. However, we’ll just have to wait and see if that Avengers-style team event can live up to the hype. In the meantime, you can celebrate May the 4th today by checking out Star Wars: Visions or by playing the recently released Jedi: Survivor game.
