Disney Might Have a Rogue One Problem on Its Hands

Can Disney manage to tell fans that Rogue One isn’t Star Wars: Episode VIII?

For those of you who didn’t watch the Rio Olympics earlier this year, Disney dropped the newest Rogue One: A Star Wars Story trailer.

It was cool! It had the back of Darth Vader’s head!

You can watch it below:

It also did not apparently do enough to establish that Rogue One isn’t actually Episode VIII. Want some proof? Check out these tweets from Tricia Barr, otherwise known as one of the writers of Ultimate Star Wars.

The first tweet reads, “Did a library event last week to talk about writing Ultimate Star Wars. In a room full of Star Wars fans these questions were asked:”

The questions in the second tweet are: “When is the next #StarWars movie? What is it about? Why isn’t [sic] Rey and Finn in ad?”

Replies to the tweets make it clear that this problem isn’t isolated. In fact, one of our own writers at Culturess also thought that Rogue One was Episode VIII.

To answer the questions:

1. Rogue One hits theaters on December 16, 2016.
2. Rebels led by Jyn Erso will attempt to steal the plans to the Death Star. (No word on where the many Bothans who died to bring them this information went. Perhaps that movie will be made under the title Star Wars: Band of Bothans. Also, yes, we know, the line is from Return of the Jedi. Jokes aside, the point is that the timeline is easy to mix up — even for longtime fans.)
3. Rey and Finn haven’t been born at this point in the timeline.

In other words, Disney and Lucasfilm will release a film that does not follow the last one in terms of the in-universe timeline. Instead, Rogue One goes back to the period of time between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Hence having a still-living and breathing Darth Vader in that Olympics trailer.

However, the marketing push for Rogue One hasn’t been as strong as The Force Awakens‘ was at this point in time. Perhaps another issue might center around the fact that The Force Awakens didn’t get emphasized as Episode VII. Now, Rogue One‘s marketing follows that path, so it’s easy to see where the confusion comes from.

Next: Star Wars vs. Star Trek: The Saga Continues

We’ll see if Disney and Lucasfilm can fix this issue. Considering that the film has just had its composer switched, the odds may not be good.

Perhaps it would have been best to finish the sequel trilogy, and accepting that there would be gap years in between each installment, then attempting to slot the prequel spinoff movies in between Episode installment releases. Time jumping back and forth in two different releases too close can be hard to get across to fans, no matter how large the marketing push, as J.K. Rowling learned earlier this year when fans had trouble keeping Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (a prequel trilogy of movies) straight from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (a two part stage play sequel.)

But this is what Disney is choosing to do, so we’ll have to settle for Rogue One and the Han Solo standalone this year and in 2018, respectively; Episode VIII is slated for 2017 and Episode IX, 2019.