Star Wars and the Forever Franchise

"You Won't Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie," Adam Rogers taunts in his December 2015 article in Wired. Maybe not. But by raising the specter of mortality, Rogers points out one of the exciting (and actually, not new) possibilities of what Rogers calls the "Forever Franchise." Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have recently been bought by Disney, and Disney projects spinning stories within these universes for the foreseeable future, a potential "forever." This endless play has seldom been realized in serial storytelling to date. Its precedents are soap operas and comic book superheroes. What happens when the promise of forever is explicitly enshrined within a serial storytelling franchise? How do the fandom's relationships with these long-running franchises change?

These are the questions that my co-author, Evan Thomas, and I consider in our essay, "Star Wars Episode Eternity." Here's the abstract:

"You may not live to see the end of Star Wars. The Walt Disney Company has launched a 'Forever Franchise' based on Star Wars that propels us all into an 'anterior future,' as described by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. Just as the photograph sets a represented moment in tension with time and mortality, so too the Forever Franchise sets the represented time of serial narrative in tension with lived time, as the Forever Franchise forecasts the series outliving any one generation of fans. This essay considers generations of fan engagement with Star Wars as a phenomenon of seriality. In 1997, after George Lucas’s release of a 'Special Edition' of Episodes IV-VI, communities of fans took drastic efforts to restore and synthesize a Despecialized Edition of Star Wars true to their vision of a 1977 cinematic print. The Despecialized Edition conceives of the serial installment as a fixed moment, resistant to George Lucas’ Special Edition as well as the forward momentum of serialization. Lucas’ revisions were both authorially motivated and explicitly directed toward a new generation of viewers. Fans’ efforts to resist Lucas have been lately usurped by Disney, which offers on the one hand a narrative structure that gratifies fandom, and on the other hand a serial structure that seeks to replace fans. This situation uniquely reveals several tendencies incipient in all serial forms: most importantly, seriality’s ambivalent stance toward anticipation, gratification, certainty, and futurity."