Disney may be ready to walk back a major part of its Star Wars era, and the reason looks simple on paper. The decanonization of the sequel trilogy may be a rumor, but the facts are that it made billions at the box office, but it failed where it matters most in modern Hollywood. It did not sell toys.
The three films pulled in about $4.47 billion worldwide. The Force Awakens led with $2.07 billion, followed by The Last Jedi at $1.33 billion and The Rise of Skywalker at $1.07 billion. Those are strong numbers on paper. The merchandise sales numbers tell a different tale.
Star Wars merchandise peaked at around $700 million in 2015 when The Force Awakens hit theaters. By 2019, the same year The Rise of Skywalker arrived with a massive marketing push, Hasbro’s Star Wars line dropped to about $150 million. That is a steep fall during the very run of the trilogy meant to carry the brand forward.
Then came 2020. There were no new movies. A streaming series, The Mandalorian, had limited global access at first. Even so, Hasbro’s Star Wars revenue jumped 70 percent year over year. One small character named Grogu managed to outsell three years of sequel trilogy merchandise. That result speaks for itself.
The sequel characters struggled to move product at any level. Figures of Rey, Finn, Poe, and others sat in clearance bins for years. Diamond Select’s president said sales tied to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi “were not too strong.” Hasbro quietly stopped producing figures from The Rise of Skywalker before the line even finished. Several major characters never received mass-market figures from that film. License holders appeared to lose confidence before the trilogy even ended.
Viewership data points in the same direction. Nielsen numbers show fans still prefer older films. In 2025, viewers streamed 33 billion minutes of Star Wars content on Disney+. About 44.2 percent came from live action movies. The top titles were Star Wars, often called A New Hope, The Phantom Menace, and Rogue One. None of the sequel trilogy films ranked near the top.
Disney paid $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm, betting on a merchandise machine that once defined the industry. That machine ran on characters from the original trilogy. Adjusted for inflation, Kenner’s best year selling those toys beat the entire Disney era combined. That is the asset Disney thought it was buying.
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The same pattern shows up in the theme parks. Disney spent over $1 billion per park to build Galaxy’s Edge, set in the sequel era, not highlighting the classic characters fans fell in love with, but actually erasing them to focus on the new Disney characters. Naturally, attendance fell far short of projections. Now Disney is expanding with elements tied to The Mandalorian, a move that looks less like a plan and more like a correction.
If reports of a reset are true, Disney may erase years of story development. That would be one of the most expensive course corrections in entertainment history. The message from fans and retailers is clear. Characters like Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Grogu still drive revenue. The sequel-era cast does not.
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