You don't need to be a Star Wars obsessive to have noticed the noise online lately. The claim doing the rounds is that Lucasfilm is "erasing" part of its own story: the three films made between 2015 and 2019, aka the sequel trilogy.
Let me be clear: it isn't. But the fact that so many fans want this to be true, and are willing to believe it on the flimsiest evidence, says more about how some of us relate to unresolved creative work than anything specific to Star Wars.
The story so far
In case you're not an obsessive fan yourself, first here's some background. The original Star Wars trilogy from the late 1970s and early 1980s is the one most people know: Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Darth Vader. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, George Lucas made three prequels telling the story of how that world came to be, introducing a young Anakin Skywalker and a widely mocked comic-relief character called Jar-Jar Binks.
Decades later, Disney bought the franchise and made three new films to continue that story: The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). These introduced new lead characters – a scavenger called Rey, a former stormtrooper called Finn, and a pilot called Poe – while bringing back the original stars in supporting roles.
Those three films constitute the sequel trilogy. It made a huge amount of money (over $4 billion at the cinema alone), but a large and vocal chunk of the fanbase felt it was poorly planned, inconsistent between films, and ended unsatisfyingly.
That dissatisfaction has simmered for years, and it's the reason people keep hoping Disney will quietly make it all "disappear" from the official record. Indeed, you may have read certain headlines and social media comments that suggest this is actually happening.
As I've mentioned, though, it's not. Here's what's actually happening instead.
Three new projects
Firstly, Disney+ is launching an animated series called Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi, set roughly a thousand years after the sequel trilogy ends. The Visions strand has always existed outside official Star Wars continuity, giving its directors freedom to tell standalone stories without worrying about fitting the main timeline. Because this new series doesn't mention Rey, Finn or anything from the sequels, some fans have convinced themselves that its silence is really a secret "wipe". But really, that's just wishful thinking.
Secondly, a new novel called Star Wars: Legacy by Madeleine Roux, fills in gaps between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, expanding Rey's Jedi training and Leia's role to make the trilogy's ending feel more earned. Thirdly, a brand new movie, Shawn Levy's Starfighter, will arrive in cinemas in 2027. That film will be set just five years after the sequels finish, continuing the story forward rather than ditching it.
So you've got three projects, made at the same time, taking three completely different approaches to the same source material. One ignores it, one repairs it, one builds directly on it. That contradiction, not any secret "reset button", is the real story. And it's a useful thing to explore, because it explains why "is it canon?" is the wrong question to be asking in the first place.
What "canon" actually means
In case you were wondering, canon is fan shorthand for the official, agreed version of a fictional world: the events, characters and rules that all "count" as really having happened within that story.
It sounds like a fixed legal document. In practice, it never has been. Marvel's films now use the idea of a multiverse specifically so writers can introduce new versions of characters without having to apologise for contradicting old ones.
Doctor Who has spent 60 years cheerfully ignoring its (many) inconsistencies rather than resolving them. Sherlock Holmes has been reinterpreted in countless authorised and unofficial adaptations for more than a century, with nobody seriously asking which version is the "true" one. Every long-running franchise eventually has to decide how strict to be about its own history, and every one of them ends up fudging it.
What I find interesting here is the intensity of the demand for a single, official, correct version of events. It was always a shaky concept given that we're talking about stuff that's, you know, not real and made up. But in 2026, that approach feels shakier than ever.
We live, let's remember, in a culture that generally loves remixing, sampling and reinterpreting existing work. Yet a vocal part of any fandom still wants stories to behave like case law: consistent, ranked, settled by an authority above.
To me, that points to something bigger than a single film franchise. It suggests a discomfort with the idea that art can simply be unresolved; a wish for someone, somewhere, to confirm which version of a story is the "real" one, at a time when almost everything else in culture feels endlessly editable and up for grabs.
Key takeaway for creatives
For anyone working in a creative role, the useful takeaway here has nothing to do with wacky aliens and beeping robots. It's about how Lucasfilm is handling a chapter of its own history that a bunch of people didn't like. It isn't disowning it, and it isn't pretending it was flawless. It's building on it, patiently, book by book and film by film, so the whole thing makes more sense in hindsight.
Star Wars: Legacy doesn't try to rewrite The Rise of Skywalker; it tries to justify it. That's a far more useful response to a wobbly piece of work than any fantasy of deleting it. Moreover, I think the latter speaks to an unhelpful instinct we all have in our creative work: the belief that our weaker projects don't deserve to exist, and that only the polished, finished version of us is fit to be seen.
This instinct is why even talented, experienced professionals sit on out-of-date portfolios for years, waiting until they've "got it right" before they'll let anyone look at a revised version. But nobody's back catalogue is a clean, unbroken run of successes, and pretending otherwise isn't ambition; it's avoidance.
The healthier habit, the one Lucasfilm is modelling here, isn't to hide the weak chapter or wait for permission to move past it. It's to keep working, learn what the weak chapter was missing, and let your next piece of work make the case for you. And you don't have to like or approve of any particular flavour of Star Wars to get on board with that.
