When George Lucas set out to make the original Star Wars movie, he made a surprising deal with 20th Century Fox. The studio, which was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time, agreed to give Lucas the full rights to all Star Wars merchandise in exchange for passing up a $500,000 director’s fee headed his way. In hindsight, it’s clear that Fox made a mistake. Back in 2012 (right before Disney bought the franchise for $4 billion), the total merchandising profits from Star Wars were valued at a whopping $20 billion.

The point is, Star Wars has never been exclusively a movie franchise, and George Lucas knew it right from the very beginning. But in the last five years, that’s become increasingly clear. Since the release of Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, Disney has yet to release a new movie set in that galaxy far, far away. Instead, the focus has shifted to Disney+ and a parade of live-action shows featuring new fan favorites like The Mandalorian along with classic characters such as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka.

On Monday, August 19, a flurry of reports revealed that Disney’s latest streaming Star Wars show, The Acolyte, was canceled. This came as a bit of a surprise, not because the show was a hit (by most metrics, it was a flop) but because it was the first time that Disney had officially come out and canceled any of these live-action series. However, a closer look reveals that while things may seem fine on the surface, the truth is that the current state of live-action Star Wars TV is incredibly bleak.

Leo A lacks galactic glamor. NASA’s newly-published image of this dwarf galaxy is missing the Milky Way’s pizzazz, and Andromeda’s visual riches. But that’s what makes Leo A special.

Astronomers found Leo A beyond our galaxy, and past a few more, at the edge of our cosmic neighborhood. To see it, the Hubble Space Telescope peered 2.6 million light-years away. That’s a relatively close cosmic distance for galaxies. But it’s still extraordinary that Hubble saw Leo A, because this galaxy is small and dim.

This “speckling of stars,” the European Space Agency wrote in 2016, forms a single entity. “The relatively open distribution of stars in this diminutive galaxy allows light from distant background galaxies to shine through,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center officials wrote in Thursday’s image description.