Every Star Wars Film, Ranked

Nobody expected anything from it, least of all Fox, which watched an eight-million-dollar budget drift to eleven. Two and a half weeks in Tunisia went badly enough that production retreated to Elstree for another fourteen and a half. The Death Star explosion was a high-speed camera pointed up at black powder, gasoline, titanium chips and napalm. Everything else here is downstream of this.

Tony Gilroy came aboard in May 2016 for five weeks of reshoots, took a screenplay credit and five million dollars for it, and Michael Giacchino wrote the score in four and a half weeks straight after Doctor Strange. Edwards assumed Disney would never permit the ending he wanted. They did, and Jyn and Cassian on the beach at Scarif is the only Star Wars ending nobody can argue their way out of.

Consensus number one, parked at three deliberately, and yes that will annoy you. Lucas financed it himself and had to refinance to thirty-one million through Bank of Boston mid-production. Norway handed the crew its worst snowstorm in half a century, with winds at forty miles an hour. Hamill hung thirty-five feet above mattresses for the revelation on Cloud City, and Prowse was given false dialogue so it would not leak.

Blue Harvest was the ruse title, sold with the tagline Horror Beyond Imagination to keep location prices down. Marquand only got the job after Spielberg was blocked by Guild disputes, Lynch declined and Cronenberg refused. The throne room duel is the trilogy paying its debt: a son refusing the fight, a father choosing at the last possible second, and an Emperor who miscalculated both.

Rian Johnson wrote and directed it alone, which is rare here and shows. It is dedicated to Carrie Fisher, who died in December 2016. Critics were broadly positive while user scores ran far lower, and analysts have argued that coordinated brigading pushed those down. The Holdo manoeuvre is the single best shot in the whole franchise, and the silence over it is the point.

Mustafar alone consumed 910 artists and 70,441 man-hours to produce forty-nine seconds of finished footage, part of a record 2,151 effects shots. This was also the first film in the franchise rated PG-13, for sci-fi violence and intense images. The Mustafar duel earns that rating and the prequels earn their existence here, whatever the two below suggest.

Kodak 5219 stock and custom Panavision anamorphics were chosen to match the look of the originals, which tells you the assignment. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan rewrote Michael Arndt's script and delivered a draft in six weeks. The forest duel between Rey and Kylo Ren works, and so does most of it, and none of it is surprising. Competence was the whole brief.

Ron Howard reshot roughly seventy percent of it after Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired in June 2017 over creative differences, finishing three and a half weeks of principal photography plus five weeks of reshoots. It should be a disaster. Instead the Kessel Run sequence is a genuinely good heist, and L3-37's ending is darker than anything the sequels attempted.

Lucasfilm cancelled a fourth television season to make this instead, with Jon Favreau directing. It opened over Memorial Day weekend 2026 to roughly ninety-eight million domestic across four days, the softest franchise opening in years, then dropped sharply. Families turned up and fans largely did not. The Dragonsnake pit swallowing the Twins is the most memorable thing in it, which is faint praise.

Sixteen years of waiting produced roughly 1,950 effects shots, principal photography at Leavesden, Tozeur standing in for Tatooine and the Caserta Palace for Naboo. Voice actors blocked scenes on set and were then removed from the frame. Duel of the Fates is the sequence everyone kept, and Williams's choir is doing most of the lifting.

Colin Trevorrow left over creative differences in September 2017 and Abrams was back within a week, which is how you get a finale that argues with the film before it. Unused Fisher footage from The Force Awakens was cut in to complete Leia. Rey on Exegol, hearing the voices of dead Jedi, should land and does not, because nothing preceding it was allowed to stay decided.

Digital cameras arrived here first: Rick McCallum called it virtual filmmaking, shot on the Sony and Panavision HDW-F900. Lucas and Jonathan Hales finished the script three days before photography began in June 2000, and it reads that way. The Dooku and Yoda duel is the reason anyone remembers it, with Christopher Lee's face composited onto a stunt double for most of the acrobatics.

Originally a television pilot, promoted to cinemas after Lucas watched early footage and said this is so beautiful, why don't we just go and make a feature. Early episodes were stitched together and released two months ahead of the series. Ahsoka Tano's introduction is genuinely important to everything that followed, and none of that rescues ninety-eight minutes that were never built for a big screen.