The year 2025 marked the sixth without a new Star Wars movie in theaters since The Rise of Skywalker concluded the Sequel Trilogy. In the past few years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC superhero films have struggled with consistency at reaching their prior levels of box-office earnings and fan satisfaction. We found it interesting, then, that two 2025 superhero movies – the MCU's rebooted The Fantastic Four: First Steps and DC's new iteration of Superman – showcased several prominent storytelling elements that we wish Lucasfilm had been able to incorporate into the Sequel Trilogy, as we talked about on the blog and podcast when the Sequel Trilogy was in development and production. On this episode of Hyperspace Theories, Tricia Barr and B.J. Priester discuss how these two movies show the path that Star Wars missed in advancing new and important ideas for today's heroic tales.

These two superhero movies have three big ideas in common that would have worked well for the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, too. First, neither First Steps nor Superman is an origin story. The titular characters, the Fantastic Four quartet and the Metropolis icon, are already established celebrity superheroes on their worlds when the movies begin. Rather than learn how to use their powers, they instead face the challenges of how to use their powers – and what to do when their powers can't solve the problem they're facing. Second, both movies are focused on themes of family and teamwork, rather than the lone-hero formula so familiar from Joseph Campbell's monomyth. The Fantastic Four has two siblings, a husband, and a best friend, and each of them has a character arc. James Gunn's Superman finds support from several superhero allies while Clark Kent relies on his colleagues at The Daily Planet to help carry the day, and his emotional journey in the films is inseparable from his connections to his birth parents on Krypton and the adoptive Kents on Earth. Third, both The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Superman are works of aspirational heroic fiction, fitting audience expectations for the characters as well as finding human truths in their themes and characterizations that urge the audience to want to be better people, too.

In tandem with these analyses of the two superhero movies, we examine how the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy would have benefitted from similar storytelling elements. Star Wars contained plenty of examples for telling stories about Jedi apprentices who are already trained in the Force, rather than necessitating Rey's first movie to mirror Luke's in discovering her connection to the Force in the first instance. Similarly, the Sequel Trilogy mostly abandoned the Skywalker family saga and failed to form a consistent and coherent heroic trio like the Original and Prequel Trilogies did. The Sequel Trilogy also failed to successfully tell aspirational stories with its legacy characters or its new characters. Perhaps most importantly, the storytellers developing the Sequel Trilogy had access to plenty of precedent, both within Star Wars and in contemporary genre stories, to have been able to identify areas in which the Star Wars franchise could help to push forward new ideas and themes in today's storytelling, rather than simply repeating the old tropes and beats from the Lucas films.

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