Last week, almost seven years after Galaxy’s Edge opened at Disneyland, Lucasfilm and Disney Parks announced sweeping changes to the land that by and large amounted to a singular conclusion: Disney was throwing its hands up and going, “Fine, have the Star Wars you know.”
It marks the final slash in what has really been a death by a thousand cuts since Galaxy’s Edge made big promises to deliver more than just the Star Wars we knew: a whole theme park land experimenting with storytelling ideas and theming to make audiences feel like they were whisked away to the galaxy far, far away for real, instead of simply going to Star Wars Land. Some of those cuts came in the ideation process, planned ideas and interactions that never made their way to opening day. Some came in drips and drabs, like the acquiescence to providing the food and drink in the land with more plain names compared to the Star Wars names they launched with, or less use of Star Wars terminology in interactions between cast members and the public.
Then there was the arrival of characters from The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, only for things to get more explicitly weird when the Mandalorian version of Luke Skywalker started showing up. As time went on, and Galaxy’s Edge‘s setting between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker became less of a contemporary moment, the way the continuity and story of the land—and the planet Batuu that was created for it, fleshed out in reams of comics, novels, and games—started being treated less as its own thing and more as a snapshot in time that could, in turn, open Galaxy’s Edge to having different eras of Star Wars exist within its setting at a given moment, at the expense of the unique story and worldbuilding Galaxy’s Edge had put at its core.
In many ways, this was always something of an inevitability. When I first visited it in late 2019, I was struck by both how excellently Galaxy’s Edge felt like it had created something that was like stepping into a different world with its heady mix of sound design, architectural tricks, and commitment to the theme, and by how utterly unsustainable that commitment was going to be, given the expectations the average Disney parks visitor was going to have of a Star Wars theme park land. If anything, it’s a miracle that it’s taken Disney almost seven years to restrain itself from shoving Darth Vader in there, that it held on so long to the land’s original vision, even as that vision was slowly carved away and diminished in time.
But something that was an inevitability can still suck when it finally happens, and it really sucks to see the experimental edge of Galaxy’s Edge give way to broad nostalgia for a singularly specific kind of Star Wars. And it especially sucks that Disneyland is going about that process in what feels like the most half-hearted way possible.
Although still significant in what they represent, much of what’s being done to transform Galaxy’s Edge to a celebration of the original movies is broadly cosmetic. Only Rey will remain out of the current crop of sequel-era characters that roam Galaxy’s Edge; although Chewbacca and R2-D2 currently appear with her, they will now be transferred to the original trilogy crop of characters, including the aforementioned Vader and Imperial Stormtroopers, and Luke, Leia, and Han, who will wander Galaxy’s Edge‘s primary thoroughfares—leaving Rey isolated on the fringe of the area near the queue for Rise of the Resistance. Much of the land’s original soundtrack and ambience, which included new work composed by John Williams and is pumped throughout the land to make it feel like a more lived-in space, will be replaced by Williams’ classic compositions from the original trilogy.
Only one of Galaxy’s Edge‘s storefronts—the awkwardly fascistic merchandise hub of First Order Cargo, home of the Disneyland-branded roleplay handcuffs—will be updated with the change, rebranding as “Black Spire Surplus,” a military salvage store that now sells items from the Galactic Civil War. The TIE Echelon parked beside it, unique to the park and developed by early teams working on what would become The Rise of Skywalker? That’s now been hand-waved as suddenly being an Imperial-era ship, part of his grandfather’s legacy that Kylo Ren was obsessed with, so now it’s totally fine if Darth Vader stands near it instead.
There will be no significant changes to the land itself when the transition begins at the end of April; neither will there be immediate changes to either of its rides, which will remain themed around the sequel trilogy (for a little while, at least—Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run will eventually receive a new ride story inspired by The Mandalorian and Grogu that will replace the original theming, timed with the release of the film on May 22). It’s equal parts an almost complete demolition of what Galaxy’s Edge was as its own, unique place in the Star Wars universe as it was first envisioned, and yet also somehow lackluster, like Disney is simply ignoring the intentionality of what came before it and shoving original trilogy characters into it and calling it a day.
Sure, it’s not entirely reasonable to expect Disney to close down Galaxy’s Edge so it can demolish a bunch of things and bring in some more original trilogy designs (although it wouldn’t be surprising if it made some tweaks eventually, like swapping the Falcon‘s radar dish back or replacing the Resistance-era starfighters with their Alliance counterparts) now that it’s been open to people for years. And at the very least, canonically speaking, having the original trilogy characters wandering around will be set up by a new comic book series from Marvel, Echoes of the Empire, exploring what brought the Empire and Alliance to Batuu decades prior to the Resistance and First Order’s interest in the planet.
Even then, what Galaxy’s Edge has lost over the years—and will lose even more significantly when these changes come in—isn’t so much being destroyed but more being painted over, with a small acquiescence to the original and innovative ideas that were once envisioned in it pushed to the edge. For all the fanfare that the changes will see Galaxy’s Edge embrace all eras of Star Wars, it’s clear the embrace will now be much tighter around the familiar and the nostalgic, rather than the new.
Either way results in a loss of that experimental commitment that made the whole idea so captivating in the first place, and maybe that would sting less if Disney had simply decided to level it entirely and start over.
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