Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012 gave way to an ambitious expansion. The streaming side of the Star Wars business delivered, as The Mandalorian launched Disney+ as a platform and led to the development of multiple live-action and animated series that built some of the most devoted fan communities in the franchise’s history. The theatrical side was more complicated. The sequel trilogy concluded with The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 to a divided reception, and the anthology spinoff model that produced the acclaimed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in 2016 effectively collapsed after Solo: A Star Wars Story underperformed at $393 million the following year. Meanwhile, projects from Rian Johnson, Patty Jenkins, Kevin Feige, Taika Waititi, and the Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were announced, with most entering a development limbo that kept the franchise off theater screens entirely for seven years.
The theatrical drought ends with The Mandalorian & Grogu, whose central characters come directly from the streaming era that sustained the Star Wars franchise’s relevance in the interim. That transition means a generation of characters built across Disney+ series, video games, comics, and novels are finally positioned to make the jump from a home screen to a cinema. Yet, dozens of compelling Star Wars figures with massive fan bases are still waiting for their chance to appear on the silver screen.
Long before the Skywalker Saga, the Sith were nearly extinguished by their own greed and infighting. Enter Darth Bane, the architect of the “Rule of Two.” Bane first emerged in the comics before finding his definitive voice in a trilogy of novels by Drew Karpyshyn, where he was depicted as a disenfranchised miner named Dessel who rose through the ranks of a crumbling Sith army. Bane eventually realized that the Dark Side was spread too thin among thousands of mediocre followers and decided to orchestrate the destruction of his own order to ensure its survival through a single master and an apprentice. This purge is one of the most brutal and fascinating chapters in Star Wars lore, a side of the canon that no theatrical release has explored. Mark Hamill provided the voice for a spectral version of Darth Bane in the animated series The Clone Wars, but a proper theatrical adaptation would allow for a deep dive into the brutal origins of the Sith.
The video game Star Wars: Battlefront II arrived in 2017 with a campaign that made audiences care about an Imperial soldier. Iden Versio (Janina Gavankar) is the commander of Inferno Squad, an elite Imperial special forces unit deployed in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Endor. Her story begins with total loyalty to an Empire she watched define her life and ends with defection, loss, and moral reckoning, structured across a timeline that bridges Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens more cohesively than the sequel films themselves managed. Gavankar’s performance gave the character a dignity that the medium rarely afforded its protagonists at the time, and the emotional core of the campaign, which asks how a person disentangles identity from ideology, remains one of the strongest character studies Lucasfilm has ever crafted.
Beilert Valance is a bounty hunter whose body is more machine than man, rebuilt after surviving a near-fatal encounter with the Empire. He originated in the original Marvel Star Wars comics run from the 1970s before being revived and substantially deepened in the modern canon through Charles Soule’s Bounty Hunters series. The Bounty Hunters run built him into one of the most morally complicated characters in Star Wars publishing, placing him in situations where every available option carries a real cost. He is precisely the kind of mid-tier comics figure whose depth gets overlooked simply because the format lacks the reach of a Disney+ series, and theatrical releases have yet to acknowledge his existence at all.
Quinlan Vos occupies a unique position in the Jedi Order because he operates in the shadows and the underworld, where most of his peers fear to tread. While he has technically had a brief background appearance on Tatooine in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, the character’s development occurred through years of comic books and an eventual starring role in the novel Dark Disciple. That story was adapted from unproduced scripts for the animated series and paired Vos with the former Sith assassin Asajj Ventress for a mission to assassinate Count Dooku. The resulting narrative explored the psychological toll of deep cover work and the thin line between justice and vengeance in ways that the mainline films rarely have the runtime to address properly. Vos struggles to maintain his Jedi identity while engaging in the moral compromises required to fight a war from the inside, providing a welcome departure from the more traditional space fantasy elements of the franchise.
Doctor Aphra debuted in Kieron Gillen’s Darth Vader comic series in 2015 as an amoral archaeologist hired by Vader to run black-market operations the Empire prefers not to document. She proved overwhelmingly popular, earning her own ongoing series that has now run for years and spawned multiple crossover events within the broader Marvel Star Wars publishing line. Aphra occupies the same rogue’s gallery space as Han Solo, but without the redemptive arc that the franchise typically demands of morally gray characters. She lies, betrays, and survives through a combination of genuine expertise and an almost supernatural talent for positioning herself on the right side of every catastrophe. Her companions, the murderous droids Triple-Zero and BT-1, function as darkly comic counterpoints to C-3PO and R2-D2, inverting the franchise’s most recognizable relationship.
Grand Admiral Thrawn was created by Timothy Zahn for the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire, and his reintroduction into Disney canon through Star Wars Rebels restored one of the franchise’s most dangerous antagonists. Lars Mikkelsen voiced and later portrayed the character in live-action in the Ahsoka series, delivering a Thrawn who wins through analytical patience rather than aggression, studying his enemies’ cultures to predict their behavior before the first shot is fired. The Ahsoka series set up Thrawn’s return to the galaxy’s core as its central threat, leaving his next confrontation with the Rebellion’s successors unresolved at the end of the season. While the second season of Ahsoka will dig deeper into this conflict, there have also been persistent rumors about an upcoming movie that will finally allow Thrawn to shine in theaters.
Ezra Bridger is the protagonist of Star Wars Rebels, a street orphan from Lothal who grows across four seasons from a self-interested petty thief into a Jedi Knight willing to sacrifice his own future to save his homeworld. Taylor Gray voiced the character throughout the animated run, and Eman Esfandi took over the role for his live-action debut in Ahsoka, where Ezra returned from years of exile in a distant galaxy with Thrawn as his only company. That isolation produces a character who is genuinely different from the teenager audiences first met: calmer, more resourceful, and shaped by a kind of loneliness that the series has not yet fully unpacked. The Ahsoka storyline left his relationship with his original crew unresolved, and that tension is an ideal starting point for a theatrical character study of his years in exile.
Timothy Zahn created Mara Jade for the 1991 novel Heir to the Empire, introducing her as one of Emperor Palpatine’s most trusted assassins whose final mission, to kill Luke Skywalker, drives her into an increasingly complicated moral position. Zahn’s three-book Thrawn Trilogy gave her an arc that many readers still regard as the definitive continuation of the original films, and her eventual relationship with Luke became one of the most followed storylines in Star Wars publishing history. Disney’s 2012 canon reset rendered that entire story non-canonical, and Lucasfilm has actively blocked attempts to reintroduce her. For instance, at MegaCon 2026, both Zahn and Bloodline author Claudia Gray confirmed they were refused when they proposed including Mara in new projects. Despite that institutional resistance, Mara Jade is one of the best Star Wars characters ever, and she should be reincluded in canon somehow.
Cal Kestis is one of the biggest Star Wars characters never to appear in a theatrical film. Across Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Cameron Monaghan built a Jedi survivor of Order 66 whose psychological damage is as defining as his Force abilities, navigating an Empire actively hunting the last remnants of a culture he barely had time to absorb. EA reported that over 40 million players have played with the Jedi games, a reach that rivals the viewership numbers of the most successful Disney+ series. Lucasfilm confirmed in January 2025 that the studio had developed firm plans for Cal’s live-action debut, with reports pointing toward a Disney+ appearance rather than a theatrical release. Monaghan has expressed willingness to reprise the role under the condition that it continues Cal’s story meaningfully. The character’s timeline, set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, can also allow Lucasfilm to explore a period that has yet to be shown in theaters.
Darth Revan is arguably the most compelling villain Star Wars has ever produced outside of a theatrical film, and the 4,000-year gap between his era and the Skywalker Saga makes him the most flexible and the most cinematic option in Lucasfilm’s archive. The 2003 game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic revealed him as the masked commander of the Sith Empire who was captured, brainwashed by the Jedi, and sent back into the galaxy with no memory of who he used to be, only to discover his own history through the player’s choices. That structural premise, a war hero who became the enemy his own side turned him into, carries far more moral complexity than anything the franchise’s theatrical canon has produced in decades. Revan’s visual design, a combination of Mandalorian armor and Sith iconography, has remained one of the franchise’s most recognizable images for over twenty years, and a theatrical adaptation of the Old Republic era could give Lucasfilm a fresh slate to build relevant stories beyond the Skywalker Saga.
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