The Rise of Skywalker retrospective: The kids are alright

It’s been two full years since “The Rise of Skywalker” hit theaters on Dec. 20, 2019, and boy howdy have a few things changed since then.

COVID-19 made its smashing debut a few weeks after that (well, not technically, but we became conscious of its impact at that point), and we continue to work our way through dealing (or not dealing) with that.

One of those impacts has been a decided lack of blockbusters making a gagillion dollars in theatrical runs. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” got a ton of butts back in seats in recent weeks (to the tune of $627 million domestic), but if you look at a list of the biggest money makers in the U.S. from December of 2019 until now, the list looks like this:

No Way Home
Rise of Skywalker
[end]

Rise made $515 million during its theatrical release, an objectively huge number. That figure ranks it fourth among Star Wars movies, about $100 million behind “The Last Jedi” and $17 million or so behind “Rogue One.”

Those numbers are meant to offer some context. A movie that was highly polarizing, much like its immediate predecessor, nevertheless made significant bank.

So, the natural follow-up question to that might be this: What made the movie appealing to such a large number of people? And why might it be worth revisiting today?

Let’s dive into that!

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WhoDatJedi podcast: The Book of Boba Fett, Chapter 1: How to be a leader

“The Book of Boba Fett” has debuted on Disney+, so that means it’s time to talk about it!

This also marks the 100th episode of the podcast, which is just sort of wild to think about. We received a surprise on that and offered some reflections on a fun ride.

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My games of 2021

I once again kept a running thread of video games I’ve beaten on Twitter this year, which was something I’d done in 2020 as well. Here’s the thread if you’re interested:

Anyway, last year I also did an end-of-year roundup & ranking with one-sentence reviews of each, so here you go. This is hopefully a handy resource for some about which games on your own personal backlog might be worth the effort and which ones you can continue to kick down the road.

The same rules as last year apply: only games I’ve completed were eligible for this list. I played plenty of other games, and many of them I have strong opinions on. But I wanted to be fair and only evaluate a game in its “complete” form (or at least as close to that as possible).

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WhoDatJedi podcast: Rey, Finn and Poe: Can we (really) expect them to make a return?

It’s honestly been a question since the sequel trilogy (Episodes 7-10) ended: Are we going to see these characters again?

It’s reasonable to wonder. But do we have any clues as to if it actually will happen or not?

Dive into this episode to find out.

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