Liam Neeson hates all Star Wars spin-offs and thinks the franchise has watered down and lost much of the magic of the original trilogy as a result.
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Liam Neeson joined the star wars universe in 1999 Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace as Obi Wan‘s Jedi Master, Qui-Gon Jinn. play area reports that in a recent interview on Bravo’s Watch what’s happening live, when asked about the second-best sci-fi franchise, Neeson decided to explain what he doesn’t like about modern Star Wars. Given his response, it’s hard to blame the Taken star for his reasoning:
There are so many Star Wars spin-offs. It dilutes it for me, and it took the mystery and the magic away from me in a weird way
Liam Neeson on what he hates about Star Wars
For decades, Star Wars only included three feature films, a Holiday Special that should never have been made, and a few TV movies featuring the worst aliens in the galaxy. This relatively small scale allowed the franchise to be accessible to everyone, because with a good afternoon, a family could watch all the movies in order and know everything. Now, as Liam Neeson mentioned, with so many spinoffs ranging from animated series to Disney+ streaming shows, and even side films, it would take weeks of uninterrupted viewing to fully understand every part of Star Wars.
“Too much of a good thing” is a phrase that might apply in this case, or it might not depend on your view of Disney’s direction. For now, watching anything Star Wars will involve viewing the following: The Clone Wars, star wars rebels, Resistance, The bad lot, Tales of the Jedi, The Mandalorian, Boba Fett’s Book, Obi Wan, Andor, Ahsoka, The Skeleton CrewAnd The Acolyte. To prove Liam Neeson’s point, that’s just all of the TV shows, and doesn’t include all 11 feature films.
When it was announced that Marvel would start making TV shows, there was a joke that the Great Lakes Avengers would end up starring in their own series. A prank team that is never taken seriously, one of their members, Mr. Immortal, was actually featured in an episode of She-Hulk. The mystery and magic of Star Wars will also begin to fade as Liam Neeson mentioned when there is a separate show for all the bounty hunters of The Empire Strikes Back.
Disney is almost at this point considering Boba-Fett, the galaxy’s worst bounty hunter, has his own show and The Mandalorian brought back IG-88. Dengar was voiced by Simon Pegg in The Clone Wars, Bossk is also in the animated spin-off, leaving just Zuckus as the only one who never appeared again. The loss of mystery certainly sounds like a valid complaint when four out of five supporting characters in an ensemble scene have appeared multiple times in the franchise more than 30 years after they first appeared.
Getting started with the Star Wars franchise today is similar to getting started with the MCU, just “catching up” is a massive time commitment, 147 hours to be exact, and that only counts anything aired from February 2023. Adding to the confusion, which Liam Neeson doesn’t mention, is that some parts of the shows are considered canon and some are just ignored, for example the whole The Resurrection of Darth Maul and its connection to The Mandalorian.
While it might be fun to poke fun at Liam Neeson’s opinion of the spinoff when there was no need to Taken to become a trilogy, all of these movies can be watched in one evening and not nearly a full week.