Memorial Day marks the official start to summer blockbuster season, and while a $100 million opening weekend would be a success for just about any franchise, Star Wars is saddled with Death Star-sized expectations. The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars theatrical release since 2019, grossed $81 million domestically over the weekend — $100 million through Memorial Day — making it the lowest-grossing live-action debut of the Disney era at Lucasfilm.

While the film reportedly carried a lower production budget, reducing its break-even threshold, much of the conversation has focused on its perceived creative shortcomings, with some reviews likening it to an overlong episode of the Disney+ series. These are fair critiques, but they overlook the deeper structural problem: Disney acquired Star Wars with a strategy built around saturation when the franchise has historically thrived on scarcity.

Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars films, which included George Lucas taking a 16-year hiatus between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. As frustrating as these long gaps might have been for fans, they turned out to be an economic asset for the franchise. Every time a Star Wars film arrived, it was a genuine cultural event that would inspire moviegoers to camp outside theatres on opening night. The closest modern analogues are James Cameron’s Avatar films and James Bond. Those are franchises defined not by volume, but by the expectation that every instalment would be worth the wait.

Disney’s approach inverted that logic entirely. After acquiring Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in 2012 and releasing its first movie, 2015’s The Force Awakens, Disney has produced six theatrical films as well as seven live-action series on Disney+. That’s more Star Wars content in a decade than Lucas delivered in nearly 30 years. The intent was to run the franchise like Marvel, creating another sprawling universe of interconnected stories designed to keep audiences constantly engaged. The Force Awakens initially seemed to validate Disney’s strategy, becoming the first Star Wars film to gross more than $2 billion at the box office. However, the sequel trilogy shed moviegoers with each instalment, culminating in The Rise of Skywalker earning nearly $1 billion less than The Force Awakens. In addition, the second spin-off film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, was the franchise’s first commercial flop. The erosion wasn't purely a storytelling problem. Disney didn’t give viewers enough time to miss Star Wars in the first place.

What those early returns obscured was how Disney’s streaming strategy complicated its theatrical output. With The Mandalorian as the flagship series of Disney+’s launch, it was celebrated as an early win for the streamer. But as Disney kept pumping out live-action series, audiences became conditioned to treat a franchise synonymous with the theatrical experience as television. The Mandalorian and Grogu compounds that problem by making a Disney+ subscription feel necessary to follow a feature film’s plot and enjoy a trip to the theatre.

The solution isn’t for Disney to stop making Star Wars movies altogether, but to restore the feeling that every theatrical release is an unmissable event in its own right. In 2019, Disney’s then-CEO, Bob Iger, acknowledged that the company had mishandled the brand.

“There’s something so special about a Star Wars film, and less is more,” he said in an interview with the BBC.

While the company did slow down theatrically after The Rise of Skywalker, Disney+ continued releasing shows that kept Star Wars omnipresent. Only now does Disney appear to be retreating from that strategy, with most of its streaming slate concluded and no live-action series announced beyond a second season of Ahsoka. Time will tell if the company’s restraint lasts. There is already one Star Wars film on the 2027 release calendar — Star Wars: Starfighter — and Lucasfilm has an exhaustive list of projects at various stages of development.

Elsewhere in the Magic Kingdom, Disney has proven that moderation isn’t exactly its strong suit. Hello, Marvel Cinematic Universe. The post-Endgame box office — combined with Marvel shows on Disney+ — suggests that franchise fatigue isn’t about declining quality so much as sheer quantity turning fandom into homework. Star Wars has even less margin for error. It has fewer films to fall back on, a fanbase that has spent the better part of a decade in conflict about its larger identity, and a theatrical track record that is trending in the wrong direction.

Disney spent $4 billion for one of Hollywood’s most valuable IPs. The question it now faces is whether Star Wars is experiencing a temporary setback or whether the brand has been meaningfully diminished. In Disney’s hands, a galaxy far, far away has never felt so small.

• Miles Surrey is a Brooklyn-based culture writer. His work has also appeared in The Ringer, Men’s Health and Vox