Liam Neeson Hates Star Wars For One Big Reason
Liam Neeson hates all of the spin-offs to Star Wars and thinks that the franchise has become diluted and lost a lot of the magic from the original trilogy as a result.
Liam Neeson joined the Star Wars universe back in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace as Obi-Wan‘s Jedi Master, Qui-Gon Jinn. Gamespot reports that in a recent interview on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, when asked about the second-best sci-fi franchise, Neeson decided to explain what he doesn’t like about modern Star Wars. Given his response, it’s hard to fault the Taken star for his reasoning:
There’s so many spin-offs of Star Wars. It’s diluting it to me, and it’s taken away the mystery and the magic in a weird way
Liam Neeson on what he hates about Star Wars
For decades, Star Wars comprised only three feature films, a Holiday Special that should never have been made, and a few tv-movies starring the worst aliens in the galaxy. That relatively small scale kept the franchise accessible for everyone as with one good afternoon, a family could watch every film in order and know everything. Now, as Liam Neeson mentioned, with so many spin-offs ranging from animated series to Disney+ streaming shows, and even side-story films, it would take weeks of non-stop viewing to fully understand every part of Star Wars.
“Too much of a good thing” is an expression that might apply in this case, or it might not depending on your views of Disney’s management. At the moment watching everything Star Wars related will entail viewings of the following: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, Resistance, The Bad Batch, Tales of the Jedi, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba-Fett, Obi-Wan, Andor, Ahsoka, The Skeleton Crew, and The Acolyte. Proving Liam Neeson’s point, that is just all of the television shows, and doesn’t include the 11 feature films.
When it was announced that Marvel would start making television shows, there was a joke that eventually the Great Lakes Avengers would star in their own series. A joke team that is never taken seriously, one of their members, Mr. Immortal, was actually featured in an episode of She-Hulk. The mystery and magic of Star Wars will likewise start to fade just as Liam Neeson mentioned when there’s a separate show for all of the bounty hunters from The Empire Strikes Back.
Disney is almost at that point considering Boba-Fett, the worst bounty hunter in the galaxy, has his own show and The Mandalorian brought back IG-88. Dengar was voiced by Simon Pegg in The Clone Wars, Bossk also is in the animated spin-off, leaving just Zuckus as only one that never appeared again. Loss of mystery sure does sound like a valid complaint when four out of five side characters in one scene together have appeared multiple times in the franchise over 30 years after their first appearance.
Starting with the Star Wars franchise today is similar to starting with the MCU, just getting “caught up” is a huge time commitment, 147 hours to be exact, and that’s only counting everything that’s aired as of February 2023. Adding to the confusion, which Liam Neeson doesn’t mention, is that some parts of the shows are considered canon and others are simply ignored, for example the whole Darth Maul resurrection and his connection to The Mandalorian.
While it may be fun to mock Liam Neeson’s opinion regarding spin-offs when there was no need for Taken to become a trilogy, all of those films can be watched in one evening and not nearly a full week.
