How Star Wars went from space opera to soap opera Disney turned its flagship film franchise into TV fodder. Can it go back to the big screen? May 21st 2026 SIX YEARS after the twin suns last set on Tatooine, one of Hollywood’s most valuable movie franchises is returning to cinemas. Star Wars has not had a theatrical outing since “The Rise of Skywalker”, which grossed $1.1bn in 2019. With the release of “The Mandalorian and Grogu” on May 22nd, Disney will discover whether the brand has survived its long absence from the big screen. After acquiring Lucasfilm and the Star Wars brand from George Lucas for $4.1bn in 2012, Disney cranked out five new movies in the five years to 2019, grossing nearly $6bn at the worldwide box office. But then it abruptly
put the cinema franchise in the deep freeze, like Darth Vader suspending Han Solo in carbonite. The long pause is partly the result of creative mistakes. “The Rise of Skywalker” had a plot that both irritated purists (the evil Emperor Palpatine, last seen plunging to his doom on board the Death Star in 1983, made a miraculous recovery for a final battle) and failed to tee up a sequel. Follow- ups were mooted, but directors and writers found Disney overprotective of its priceless intellectual property. Yet the lack of movies also reflected a deliberate strategic choice by Disney. Star Wars may have been absent from theatres, but its production has gone into hyperspace on television. Starting with “The Mandalorian” in 2019, Disney has made seven live-action Star Wars series as well as various animated ones. The shows have recruited millions of subscribers to Disney+, helping the legacy entertainment giant survive the streaming wars. Nielsen, a data company, estimates that Americans watched 33bn minutes of Star Wars content on TV last year (though for all Disney’s recent efforts, the most viewed was the original film first released in 1977). With “Grogu”, Disney now faces the inverse challenge of turning a TV franchise into a spin-off movie. This presents several difficulties. Casual fans are struggling to keep up with the expanded Star Wars universe’s many interwoven plotlines. A plethora of series has diluted the magic of the brand. And whereas America, where nearly half of households have Disney+, has fallen for the Mandalorian and his little green sidekick, other markets are less familiar with the material. “Grogu” is on track to make less in its opening weekend than “Solo: a Star Wars Story”, another spin-off released in 2018 that was seen at the time as a bomb. The new film’s reported budget of $165m, modest by Star Wars standards, at least lowers the bar for financial success. But Disney’s new boss, Josh D’Amaro, who took over from Bob Iger in March, will be watching its performance anxiously. A bigger-budget Star Wars movie, “Starfighter”, featuring A-lister Ryan Gosling, is due out next year. “Grogu” is an indicator of how it may fare.
What is more, for Disney, movies are not just about selling tickets at the box office. Success for “Grogu” would lead to more sales of $40 Yoda dolls, more fans queuing for Star Wars rides at Disney’s theme parks and more converts to a religion whose followers have kept the faith for 49 years. If Star Wars’ long-awaited return to the movies fails, Disney will feel a great disturbance in the Force. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/05/21/how-star-wars-went-from-space-opera- to-soap-opera
A new mega-deal shows how AI has turned utilities into hot property NextEra and Dominion must now win over regulators May 21st 2026 American utilities are enjoying a “golden age of power demand” thanks to artificial intelligence, declared John Ketchum, boss of NextEra Energy, last year. That is why on May 18th his company, already the world’s largest listed utility, announced that it would acquire Dominion Energy, a smaller power provider based in Virginia whose territory covers the largest data- centre cluster in the world. The mega-deal, which values Dominion at $124bn and the combined company at $420bn, including debt, is the latest in the spate of supersize transactions that have been announced since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January last year. It demonstrates how AI has put the dull
utilities sector at the heart of the world’s hottest technology—and brought a political firestorm. Perhaps no company has navigated America’s power politics better than NextEra. Founded in 1925 as a local energy supplier in Florida, in the 21st century it reinvented itself as America’s leading developer of wind and solar farms. More recently, with Mr Trump railing against “windmills”, the company has rebalanced its efforts towards natural gas, nuclear power and battery storage. NextEra’s all-of-the-above approach has helped it win business from AI companies desperate for energy. In October it agreed to reopen a 615- megawatt (MW) nuclear plant in Iowa to power Google’s data centres there. Soon after it announced 2,500mW-worth of generation and storage contracts with Meta. Now it wants to go further. Since 2021 NextEra has increased its annual capital expenditure by more than half, spending $25bn last year. The merger will allow it to make investments in Virginia that Dominion, which is weighed down by $50bn in debt, has lacked the cash to fund. The combined firm could shell out more than $220bn in capital expenditure between 2027
and 2030, reckons Fitch, a credit-rating agency, a significant increase on their current spending (see chart). A tie-up with Dominion would be helpful for other reasons. Rating agencies want at least 70% of a utility’s business to be in regulated electricity markets, which provide stable cashflows. But NextEra’s unregulated business—under which most of its AI projects fall—has been growing at roughly double the rate of its regulated arm, and the company is now getting close to the 70% floor. If its credit rating were to be downgraded, the cost of its planned investment binge would soar. Nearly all of Dominion’s business is regulated. The merger with Dominion is but the latest mega-deal NextEra has pursued this century. It sought to combine with Entergy in 2000, Constellation Energy in 2005, Hawaiian Electric in 2014 and Duke Energy in 2020. Each time it was rebuffed by the company or scuppered by regulators. This time its target is amenable. But how regulators will respond is not yet clear. Although the Trump administration has blessed big mergers, NextEra and Dominion must also win over state regulators in Virginia and the Carolinas. Voters already blame the AI boom for raising their energy bills— nowhere more so than in Dominion’s home territory of Virginia. The state’s Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, harped on about making data- centre operators “pay their own way” during her campaign last year. Since the merger was announced, Democrats in Washington have begun talking about whether it will raise electricity prices. NextEra has been labouring to persuade them otherwise. In its press release, it promised that the deal would “drive affordability” thanks to economies of scale, and said that Dominion’s customers would receive $2.25bn-worth of bill credits over the two years following the completion of the transaction. NextEra’s renewable energy bona fides, which might help Dominion bring a beleaguered offshore wind development to completion, could also please climate-friendly Democrats. All that will probably be enough to win over regulators, according to Andy DeVries of CreditSights, a research firm, though perhaps not within the 18-month timeline the firms have promised.
If it can get its deal over the line, NextEra will set itself up as the leading power company of the AI boom. First it must convince Americans that the golden age of utilities will be equally golden for them. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/05/21/a-new-mega-deal-shows-how-ai-has- turned-utilities-into-hot-property
Can an Italian company disrupt Germany’s broken railway industry? Deutsche Bahn could soon have a rival May 21st 2026 Luca Cordero di Montezemolo does not shy away from a challenge. The turbocharged Italian was Ferrari’s chairman for more than two decades (and led its racing-car division to victory in 19 Formula One championships). He was also chairman of Fiat, Italy’s biggest carmaker, headed Confindustria, the Italian business lobby, and orchestrated Rome’s bid for the 2024 Olympics. But his latest ambition might be the boldest yet of his career: he wants to overhaul Germany’s crisis-ridden railway industry by bringing Italo, the Italian high-speed rail operator he co-founded, into the market. By 2028 Italo wants its new service to link 18 cities in Germany along two main routes: Munich-Cologne-Dortmund and Munich-Berlin-Hamburg. It