Poster for Star Wars VIII — The Last Jedi

The first Star Wars 8 trailer came with a few surprises that drove the Star Wars fandom crazy. Red logo! AT-ATs! Kylo Ren unmasked! Balance! And above all: Luke wants the Jedi to end?! What does it all mean?

You can actually tell what it all means by looking at the first 7 Star Wars movies through the right lens. In fact, you can even predict with a lot of detail the storyline of Episode 8— and even 9.

The key to unlock the future episodes is an ancient storytelling tool called Ring Theory.

Star Wars follows a Ring structure

When SW7 — The Force Awakens was released in 2015 after over a decade of waiting, fans loved it. Yet they complained that it was extremely similar to SW4 — A New Hope. Why was it so similar? Why did people like it so much if it wasn’t that novel? They loved it for the same reason why they love Star Wars: it has the best storytelling we’ve ever seen.

A planet-sized machine that can destroy planets is itself destroyed by a single pilot reaching the only weak point. Sounds familiar.

All stories follows the same rules: a situation, a complication, and the hero starts his journey. There’s not a lot of variations in the journeys. In fact, it seems like there’s just 6 types of journeys in stories, and the 6 are just variants of the same one: the hero goes up, then down, before resolving the conflict, back to a new reality.

The Ring of Anakin and Luke

For example, Luke Skywalker in SW4 is a poor boy in a desert. He becomes a Jedi (up), but gets captured by Darkness (Death Star) and Obi Wan gets killed (down) before Luke finally destroys the Death Star (up, new reality).

What Ring Theory says is that this structure is followed not only across a single movie, but across many levels: across scenes, across movies and across trilogies.

For example, let’s take Anakin’s ark. He also starts a poor boy in a desert. He also becomes a Jedi in SW1. He then becomes more and more powerful through SW2 and SW3, before the mid-point of his arc at the end of SW3, when he falls for the Dark Side.

Anakin’s arc in Episodes 1 through 3

In SW 4 he is deep in the Dark Side. He starts to have doubts in SW5. Finally, he turns to the Light Side at the end of SW6. If this was a poem, rhymes would be ABC CBA.