Why Disney and Lucasfilm Need Rey More Than Daisy Ridley Needs 'Star Wars'

If Rey is a "popular even if you don't care as much about the IP" marquee character, that solves a big problem for selling Star Wars movies that aren't about the Skywalkers.

A long time ago, the notion of a new Star Wars trilogy would have been greeted with global excitement and feverish speculation. Yet, news that Simon Kinberg (who has more on his resume than just a few Fox-distributed Marvel movies we didn’t like) would shepherd a new trilogy was greeted with yawns and jokes about how soon he’d leave the project. That was what I feared when Disney first bought Lucasfilm in October 2012 and announced new Star Wars movies: That the franchise would eventually be just another piece of Disney IP.  

However, I am intrigued by the notion that (so says reports and articles) Lucasfilm and Disney are implicitly treating Daisy Ridley’s Rey “Skywalker” (shudder) as the backbone of the franchise’s big-screen future. Whether this meshes with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “Rey teaches the next generation of Jedi” flick, it’s the correct notion. The actor+character combo is as valuable to Star Wars as the Star Wars brand.  

Has Rey become a marquee character — especially with audiences young enough to have “grown up” on the 2010s trilogy — on par with, relatively speaking, Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi? If so, then Disney and friends have less reason to be concerned about the future of Star Wars sans explicit connections to the “Skywalker Saga.”