Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025 Was A Mixed Bag
A report on my trip to the convention and Lucasfilm's rather negligible announcements.
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Where does Star Wars go from here? That was the question constantly on my mind when I was in Tokyo for Star Wars Celebration earlier this month. Well, I was actually more occupied with April 20 being the one-year anniversary of me getting married, but that also happened to coincide with the convention. Thanks to me, my wife has become a huge Star Wars fan over the five years we’ve known each other, so it was the perfect excuse to spend a weekend in Japan’s capital.
We were only able to manage tickets for the last day of the event, but I doubt that we would have been able to make much of Friday and Saturday. This was easily the most packed convention I’ve ever attended to the point where I kept asking if Japan was even the right country to hold such a massive gathering of people. The train lines to and from Tokyo were even busier than the usual. While I personally didn’t witness anything particularly egregious, there were also apparently quite a few stories of foreign tourists showed complete disregard for Japanese customs and decorum.
It’s not every day that Star Wars Celebration comes to this country. The last one here was in 2008 and it attracted about 17,000 visitors at the Makuhari Messe convention center in Chiba outside of Tokyo. They held it at the exact same venue once again, but this time over 105,000 people attended. I think you can see the problem already. This Star Wars Celebration was the most attended year in the event’s history, with previous ones typically only accommodating around half that number. For Japan, it surpassed even Osaka Comic Con 2024 and Tokyo Comic Con 2023 which had nearly 62,000 and 85,000 visitors, respectively.
The planners behind the convention were evidently unprepared to deal with such huge crowds. Fans waited in line for hours to get Hayden Christensen’s autograph, only to be informed that the event was canceled midway due to scheduling changes. Refunds are currently being issued, but this means that people wasted all that time for nothing. Information getting lost in translation and Japanese staff being unable to communicate with foreign visitors only contributed to the general chaos of the weekend.
If you wanted official Star Wars Celebration merchandise, the wait for the main shop was over four hours on Sunday. Items for sale at other venues quickly sold out while the few stalls selling vintage goods were charging absolutely absurd prices. Our purchases were minimal as a result with me only getting an artbook and a couple of LEGO keychains for myself and an R2-D2 room light for my wife. Most of our time was spent simply walking around and seeing what was being sold at each booth. We were able to attend one panel featuring LEGO set designers, but everything else was completely full.
Being at Star Wars Celebration was mostly for the experience of going rather than actually getting much done. I knew perfectly well that it was unlikely we would meet anybody famous. The cost to acquire autographs and photos was out of the question considering what we had already sunk into our hotel, transportation, and other plans in Tokyo for the weekend. At a separate venue we watched a screening of A New Hope with the music performed by a live orchestra, which was probably more fun than anything we did at Celebration. If you’ve never had the experiencing viewing classic films this way, you definitely should.
If it sounds like I’m only complaining, rest assured it wasn’t all bad at Celebration. Some of the cosplay was genuinely impressive as were the displays of droids like R2-D2 and Chopper. Seeing the passion people across the world still have for Star Wars was moving, especially considering how much the franchise has declined in the public eye over the last decade. I should note that it was mostly millennials and older people who attended though, which only added more credence to my long-held belief that late Gen Z and the current Gen Alpha has little interest in the franchise.
That ties in to what was Celebration’s sole new film announcement, Star Wars: Starfighter. Planned for release on May 28, 2027, the same year as the franchise’s 50th anniversary, this standalone movie is supposed to take place five years after The Rise of Skywalker and will star Ryan Gosling. Details are still very scarce, but I’m of several minds about this project. First, it’s pretty obvious that Gosling was chosen to appeal to a young generation of moviegoers who are apathetic about Star Wars. I like Gosling and think he’s a good actor, but it has historically been rare for the series to rely on star power to attract audiences. Will it work? Who knows.
Shawn Levy is in the director’s chair. Given how successful Deadpool & Wolverine was, it’s also not surprising that Lucasfilm hired him. He’s no auteur, but his track record shows a respectable chain of successes. I’m less enthused about Starfighter taking place after the sequel trilogy. I suppose that Lucasfilm wants to finally start exploring a post-Rise of Skywalker era since they haven’t touched it since 2019, but given how poorly received that entry was, Starfighter is really going to have to distance itself from it. Let’s hope that Gosling is given a good script and Levy is able to deliver an enjoyable film free of bloat and half-baked characters.
A few more details were revealed for The Mandalorian & Grogu, but whatever footage was shown has yet to be officially posted online. It’s slated for release on May 22, 2026, which is something we’ve already known for quite some time. My wife is a huge fan of The Mandalorian and I certainly enjoyed the first two seasons, but like many I thought it fell off with The Book of Boba Fett spin-off and season three. Disney is definitely hoping their next film will bring in $1 billion. Whether it actually can pull in those box office returns is very much an open question. Dave Filoni and others also announced further details for Season 2 of Ahsoka, but given how filming has yet to begin, I wouldn’t expect to see it until late 2026 or early 2027 at the earliest.
Other than those updates, the future output of Star Wars live-action films and television shows is very slim pickings indeed. Lucasfilm claims that “films by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, James Mangold, Taika Waititi, and a new trilogy by Simon Kinberg” are “still in development,” but all of them were MIA at Celebration. These are movies that were announced years ago with hardly any updates on their progress since. This has become a terrible habit with Lucasfilm and new Star Wars movies, which suggests that things are a mess behind the scenes. Hell will probably freeze over before we see most of these. There wasn’t even any mention of Rian Johnson’s trilogy or Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian film.
Season 2 of Andor is currently streaming on Disney+ as of this writing, but once that’s over it seems we won’t see a new Star Wars live-action show for a long time. Maul - Shadow Lord and a few other animated shows were revealed, but these too are slated for 2026 or have no release date. Darth Maul has always been one of my favorite characters, so I’m interested in seeing what stories his series will explore between Clone Wars and Rebels. Yet a part of me can’t help but wish it was a big-budget live-action series instead. Ray Park is still in good shape and getting Sam Witwer to do his voice would have worked well. Alas, I doubt it’ll happen.
Perhaps it’s for the best that Star Wars seems to be going on semi-hiatus for the time being. The Mandalorian & Grogu and Starfighter will determine the franchise’s box office future on the big screen, while I hope that Ahsoka Season 2 fixes issues with pacing and shows better writing. Most of this is probably a lot of naive cautious optimism on my part though. Similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars in recent years has suffered from too much lackluster content which, to quote Liam Neeson, has “diluted” everything. I would rather see an Andor or Skeleton Crew-tier show once a year instead expensive vanity projects like The Acolyte. The sequel trilogy, which is why most audiences jumped ship, needed much more planning than the rushed deadlines it was given.
Star Wars Celebration Japan 2025 was ironically the perfect encapsulation of where the IP currently is. The high attendance showed that there are still some people who care deeply for George Lucas’ beloved creation and that demand for new stuff exists. The lack of substantial announcements, however, demonstrates that Lucasfilm finds itself in an awkward position of where to go next. The company needs to use this period of soul-searching to bring Star Wars back to its basics and regain the trust of audiences. While I’m no fan of The Last Jedi, Yoda did provide one legitimate pearl of wisdom in that film: “The greatest teacher, failure is.”
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