The video game movie boom is here. The Star Wars galaxy’s greatest untold story, Knights of the Old Republic, is waiting. So what exactly is Disney waiting for?
The numbers don’t lie, and right now they’re screaming something Disney seems determined to ignore.
In April 2025, A Minecraft Movie opened to $162 million domestically in a single weekend — the biggest opening of the year — and went on to earn nearly $955 million globally, making it the second-highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time. The Super Mario Bros. Movie still sits atop the all-time list with $1.36 billion worldwide. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 cracked $490 million. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie recently debuted with the biggest box office opening since Avatar: Fire and Ash, becoming the second-biggest video game movie opening ever. Video game adaptations, once Hollywood’s most reliable punchline, are now among its most bankable assets.
The genre has earned its redemption arc. Audiences have proven, repeatedly, that they will show up in massive numbers for the right video game IP — as long as the story is there, and the love for the source material is evident. Sentiment, nostalgia, and the promise of seeing a beloved world rendered in cinematic scale: that’s the formula. It works.
This makes Disney’s inaction on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic one of the most baffling decisions in modern Hollywood.
The Game That Felt Like a Movie
Released in 2003 by BioWare, Knights of the Old Republic — KOTOR to the faithful — is not merely a beloved video game. It is, by the consensus of two decades of fans and critics, one of the greatest narrative experiences in the history of the medium. Set 4,000 years before the events of A New Hope, KOTOR dropped players into an era when the Jedi and Sith clashed openly across the galaxy, and tasked them with uncovering a conspiracy that ended in one of the most stunning plot reversals in gaming history.
The game is fully voiced, deeply written, and populated with characters — Bastila Shan, HK-47, Canderous Ordo, Mission Vao — who have lived rent-free in the imaginations of fans for over twenty years. The villain, Darth Revan, has become arguably the most iconic figure in all of Star Wars lore outside the Skywalker saga itself. Darth Revan merchandise still sells. KOTOR still pulls new players in 2025, earning glowing community posts from first-timers who can’t believe a 2003 RPG holds up this well.
KOTOR 2, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, deepened the mythology further with a story so philosophically complex it read more like Camus than George Lucas. Together, the two games constitute a complete, emotionally resonant trilogy’s worth of material — essentially pre-written screenplays sitting in a vault.
Disney owns that vault.
Their Own Lord of the Rings
Here’s what’s easy to forget: when Peter Jackson sat down to adapt Tolkien, he wasn’t working with a property that contemporary audiences widely knew. He was betting on nostalgia, world-building, and the sheer cinematic weight of an epic story spanning multiple films. The result was a three-film, $2.9 billion franchise that redefined what fantasy cinema could be and earned itself a permanent place in pop culture history.
KOTOR offers Disney the same opportunity — already pre-packaged.
The story has an ideal three-act film structure. The Old Republic era is visually and tonally distinct from everything Star Wars has done in live action, meaning it would feel genuinely fresh rather than like another Skywalker-adjacent adventure. It features a morality system baked into its DNA — light side, dark side, the gray spaces in between — that maps perfectly onto the kind of complex, character-driven narratives audiences now expect. And crucially, the fanbase is enormous, passionate, and has been begging for this for years.
The Knights of the Old Republic era, as Space.com noted in its retrospective on KOTOR 2’s 20th anniversary, “inexplicably hasn’t been explored in live-action yet” — and remains “one of the Star Wars fandom’s favorite bits of galactic history.” James Gunn, no stranger to transforming cult properties into blockbusters, has publicly expressed his love for KOTOR. The appetite is there at every level of the industry.
So What Is Disney Waiting For?
The Star Wars brand has had a complicated few years. Sequel trilogy fatigue is real. Disney+ series have ranged from revelatory (Andor) to deeply troubled. The studio has been cautious, perhaps understandably so, about where to plant its flags.
But caution and opportunity are not mutually exclusive. The video game movie renaissance has demonstrated that IP with pre-existing emotional investment, a strong story, and a distinct visual identity is precisely what audiences want right now. KOTOR checks every single box.
The remake of the original game has been trapped in development hell for years, passed between studios, its release date a moving target. But a film trilogy doesn’t require the remake to exist first. It requires someone at Disney to look at what they own and recognize what they’re holding.
A Knights of the Old Republic trilogy, done right — with the craft and ambition of Andor, with the cinematic scale of a Peter Jackson production — would not simply be a successful franchise. It would be the thing that reminds the world why Star Wars matters.
The video game movie era is here. The story is already written. The galaxy is waiting.
Disney, it’s time to make the call.
