Will Star Wars Celebration Be Moved To 2023? D23 Taking Place Just Weeks After Celebration 2022!

Disney’s D23 Expo is one of the major conventions that lots of people look forward to attending. A biennial event, it was originally scheduled to take place again at the Anaheim Convention Center in the summer of 2021. However, the originally scheduled dates for certain things have been sketchy in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this year, we saw the announcement that Star Wars Celebration, which was supposed to return to the Aneheim Convention Center at the end of August this year, was pushed back to August 2022. It was a move that needed to be made for the safety of everyone’s health. Some were surprised that it was pushed back that far, with some expecting an announcement that it would be delayed for only one year. However, once the 2022 announcement was made, some fans reasoned that perhaps Celebration was pushed back that far so that it would not be too close to D23, which, at the time, seemed like it would still take place in summer 2021.

However, on September 28, Disney announced that D23 was being delayed as well. As per the tweet below, it is now scheduled for September 9-11, 2022. According to the tweet, the expo will use this as a chance to celebrate the 100th anniversary of The Walt Disney Company, which seems odd given that the company was founded in 1923. Indeed, the name of the expo is derived from the year that Disney was founded. Given that the convention takes place every other year, it feels odd that it may not even take place in 2023. For now, we do know that it is scheduled for 2022.

Star Wars Celebration is currently scheduled for August 18-21 of that year, meaning that D23 would be only three weeks after that convention. In a way, it would feel almost as if Disney is competing with itself. It feels like there is not that big of a buffer between the two conventions. The conventions have never been this close to each other in time or proximity, so it would be a bit strange to have them this close. Past D23 Expos have included updates on Star Wars in addition to Marvel and other Disney properties. Perhaps one could witness smaller scale announcements for Star Wars at the next D23 and then get all the big announcements at Star Wars Celebration, assuming that both conventions happen in 2022. Then again, Star Wars announcements could be omitted from D23 altogether and simply saved for Celebration.

These recent developments have, of course, prompted the question of whether or not Star Wars Celebration could be delayed once again. The next Star Wars film was originally scheduled to be released in December 2022, but then it got delayed to December 2023 earlier this year. From 2015 to 2017, Celebration was annual, with each one happening months before the releases of the films The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi. Then 2018, the year in which Solo was released in May, there was no Celebration. The convention happened again in 2019 to hype up The Rise of Skywalker. So for a period of time, it seemed as though Celebration would become biennial, but then came the announcement that it would happen 2020, before the delay happened.

If Celebration is still annual, perhaps it could happen in both 2022 and 2023. But if it has to happen in only one of those years, it would make sense for it to take place in 2023, the year when we are getting the next Star Wars film. The convention would build up hype for the film after fans have spent a few years without a new Star Wars film. For now, all we can do is speculate and wait to see if any such announcement is made.

Written By Steven Shinder

Syndicated From Culture Slate