Disney’s Star Wars is 2023’s top film franchise without a new movie

The Force remains strong with the Star Wars franchise.

Despite not releasing a theatrical film since 2019, Star Wars has been named the top film franchise of 2023 by Fandom, the world’s largest platform for entertainment fans.

The top title for Star Wars comes as Disney has been strategically rebuilding the franchise, stalling its cinema presence in favor of long-form television content on its streaming platform Disney+ as well as alternative storytelling through video games, comic books, novels, virtual reality and even a short-lived hotel experience in Florida.

“The Star Wars brand has no peer when it comes to the unprecedented goodwill, cultural ubiquity, character mythology and sheer revenue-generating power achieved across most every vertical in the entertainment ecosystem,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

Fandom’s scoring is based on five metrics: how many content pages the franchise has on Fandom’s site; ratings from critics and fans; how often the franchise is represented in the real world through conventions and fan events; cultural relevance to those who are not core to the fan base; and the amount of new content from the franchise to sustain interest.

Star Wars’ No.1 ranking suggests that Disney’s revitalization of the brand, which took a hit in the wake of a sequel trilogy for the films, is working. Disney appears at No. 2 on the list, representing its animated films, and its Marvel and Avatar franchises also make the cut.

Disney’s success with Star Wars can also offer a blueprint to other film franchises that are in the process or restarting or evolving — namely Marvel and Warner Bros. Discovery’s Harry Potter and DC Studios.

After buying Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney went straight to work, cooking up new theatrical content from the Star Wars brand. “The Force Awakens” arrived in theaters in 2015 and instantly recaptured fan interest worldwide. The film snapped up more than $2 billion globally and became the basis for billion-dollar theme park expansions at both Disneyland and Disney World.

However, it quickly became clear that Disney didn’t have a singular plan when it set out to make its new trilogy of Star Wars films. The narrative thread that was supposed to link the trilogy together was improvised and resulted in three films that aren’t cohesive and riddled with plot holes.

Each movie seems to be a total departure from the previous one. If 2015’s “The Force Awakens” was criticized for being too much of a mirror of the…