Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for The Ninth Jedi.Seven years after the sequel trilogy ended, Disney has finally given fans a Star Wars story that’s even better. The sequel trilogy of Star Wars movies was famously divisive. After the major success of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi divided critics and audiences severely, with some fans loving it and others hating it, and The Rise of Skywalker is now viewed almost unanimously as the worst film in the franchise.
Since 2019, when The Rise of Skywalker premiered, Disney and Lucasfilm have been trying to avoid the sequel trilogy. All the live-action Star Wars shows take place decades earlier in the Star Wars timeline than the sequels do, the franchise’s only film in that time, The Mandalorian and Grogu, avoids Rey and the First Order entirely, and the next Star Wars movie, Starfighter, is also shifting the focus onto new characters.
Now, however, Disney and Lucasfilm have released a new show that doesn’t avoid the sequel trilogy at all, and it actually told the same kind of story in a much more compelling way. That show, Star Wars: Visions Presents – The Ninth Jedi, isn’t considered canon. It does, however, fulfill one of the promises that the sequels never did, and it tells a much more engaging and consistent story than the sequels did.
The Ninth Jedi Fulfilled The Sequels’ Promise Better Than The Movies Did
The main way The Ninth Jedi surpasses the sequel trilogy is by doing what the sequels promised to but never accomplished. Before and even during the sequel trilogy, many viewers thought Rey was going to build a new Jedi Order. Luke Skywalker’s Order failed, producing Kylo Ren, and The Last Jedi‘s entire message was about how Rey would learn from the past to not be the last Jedi. Despite that buildup, and despite fans having wanted to see a new Jedi Order for years at that point, Disney and Lucasfilm left the task of rebuilding the Jedi to the upcoming movie New Jedi Order; the sequels never got around to it.
The sequel trilogy as a whole, and certainly The Rise of Skywalker, would have been a lot better if Rey had gotten her chance to rebuild the Jedi Order. The trilogy didn’t get around to it, though, and Star Wars fans have been left wanting to see something the sequels teased seven years ago. As previously mentioned, since they’ve been avoiding the sequel era, no other Star Wars story has had a chance to show fans what they want and create a new Jedi Order.
No other Star Wars story besides The Ninth Jedi, that is. The Ninth Jedi is very explicitly about Lah Kara and her friends trying to find and recruit noble and virtuous people from across the galaxy to join them and reform the Jedi Order to battle Nawaam and his armies. It is part of the Legends continuity, but The Ninth Jedi finally gave fans a story about a new generation of Jedi building off the ruins of the past to create a better Jedi Order, and it did it with a fraction of the buildup the sequels had.
The Ninth Jedi Is One Of The Best Star Wars Stories Disney Has Told
The other reason The Ninth Jedi is better than the sequel trilogy is because it’s one of the best Star Wars stories Disney has ever told. Reviews for The Ninth Jedi show that it was an acclaimed masterpiece, and it’s inarguably better than shows like The Book of Boba Fett and The Acolyte. Disney has had its fair share of hits, like Andor, Rogue One, Maul – Shadow Lord, and more, but The Ninth Jedi is still up there as one of the company’s best projects.
The Ninth Jedi is, from start to finish, a great show. It has some gorgeous animation that is very fresh and unique for Star Wars, it has great voice acting, action setpieces, lightsaber duels, and more. It does interesting things with the franchise’s lore and established canon and has quite a few engaging twists along the way. Most importantly, it tells one of the most coherent and nuanced stories in the franchise’s history. The overarching narrative and philosophical debate of being empty-hearted versus letting emotions in and learning to control them is tailor-made for Star Wars, and The Ninth Jedi executes it perfectly.
- Release Date
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2026 – 2026-00-00
- Network
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Hulu, Disney+
- Directors
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Shunsuke Tada
Cast
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Chinatsu Akasaki
Lah Kara (voice)
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Tetsuo Kanao
Juro (voice)
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
