If you wanted to consume all Star Wars content, could you do that? How much of your life would be dedicated to this project?
You may be surprised to learn that the answer is “yes” and “less than a decade.” I’m assuming that this is a primary hobby but not a job, so you can dump about an hour a day on workdays and two and a half on the weekends for 10 hours a week and 500 hours a year. You can get way higher than this if your life exists to facilitate consumption of Star Wars content, even if you have to work a normal day job to feed that, and even so, while this will be a massive part of your life for several years, it’s surprisingly doable.
I am making a few assumptions about what counts as “all Star Wars content,” however. First, I’m assuming you have streaming access to all content already, so the question of “how do you watch every episode of Ewoks” is presumed to be “in sequential order” without bothering with how easy it is to actually get access to a show from the 80s that got ignored by canon even before Disney took over. Second, I’m assuming you don’t really care about special editions, HD rereleases, ports and adaptations, and so on. Once you’ve watched A New Hope, you’re good, you don’t need to read the novelization and play Super Star Wars, too. You’re in it for the complete story of Star Wars, but you don’t feel the need to watch the theatrical cut, special edition, and HD remaster of the Original Trilogy, any more than you feel the need to acquire every DVD copy of Return of the Jedi and watch the contents of each disc separately just in case there are minute differences.
I also assume you don’t care about action figures or other collectibles where acquiring them is the experience. At that point, it’s not a matter of scheduling, it’s a matter of your means.
Movies
Dead simple. Fifteen movies (three trilogies, Clone Wars, Rogue One, Solo, two Ewok movies from the 80s, and the Holiday Special, although even someone who is asking for all of the Star Wars might draw the line at that last one), so that’s going to be fifteen weekend viewings, or a little under two months’ worth without touching the weekdays or doing a single weekend marathon for something like an entire trilogy.
TV Shows
This isn’t just doable for someone who sets out to consume all Star Wars content as a significant life goal. This is a thing anyone who really likes Star Wars will get 80% of the way towards on accident. Almost every Star Wars TV show and movie is something you’ve actually heard of and you might have already seen over half of them. You know about Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, the Bad Batch, the Mandalorian, Andor, etc. etc., and depending on when you grew up, odds are decent you’ve already seen large chunks of at least one or two of those series’. The only Star Wars shows that you might not have heard of are Droids, Ewoks, Visions, and Tales, and maybe some of the live action ones have slipped past you like The Acolyte, since Disney really is starting to machine gun them out so fast that you might need an actual list in front of you to keep track of them all.
And since these shows gravitate towards being either 22 minute episodes for a half-hour TV bloc (with commercials) or 44 minutes for an hour long bloc (with commercials), that means you can watch one or two per weekday with space left over for other small content like comics. There’s a total of 260-ish weekdays per year and less than 520 episodes of Star Wars content across all series’ (even counting shorts), so after two years you will run out even without ever touching your weekends, let alone doing a six-hour weekend marathon for something like Andor or the first season of the Mandalorian.
Comics
There are over a thousand Star Wars comics, but believe it or not, provided you don’t have to worry about collecting physical issues, this is one of the easiest mediums to get caught up on for Star Wars. A single comic only takes about 15-20 minutes to read, which means the entire 1200-ish comics in all of Star Wars, Legends and Canon, can fit into a single year. Realistically, you probably want to read one issue a day over the course of about 5 years, combining it with 40-45 minutes of other content on weekdays and slipping some into the margins on weekends when the movie (or whatever) only takes up 130 of the 150 minutes you have.
Books
There are something like 400 Star Wars books across both Legends and Canon. A few dozen of these are novelizations of movies or TV shows, but most of the books released under the brand of a TV show are original stories with the same characters, era, and tone as the TV show. A lot of them are young adult or middle grade novels that can be read in a single weekend (the average adult reads about 30,000 words in two and a half hours, for 60,000 words across two days of the weekend), but the X-Wing novels tend to be two weekends’ worth of reading individually and there’s ten of them. If we try to leave these to the weekends, then even granting that half of them will take only one weekend, that’s still 600 weekends or over ten years’ worth.
But we do have spare time on the weekdays in years 3-5 when TV shows give out but the comic a day is still only taking up 20 minutes of the hour of time set aside, and novels are going to be read in multiple sessions anyway, so we can treat them as a bit more of a liquid to be poured into glasses than we do the comics, movies, or TV shows where we want each film/episode to be finished in a single day.
Doing some quick calculations on 400-ish books each taking an average of 4-ish hours (averaging between young adult and adult novels), there’s 1600 hours of content here, and 40 minutes of spare time in each weekday in which we are reading a comic issue but have no more Star Wars TV to watch. That comes out to 10 hours of reading time for every 3 weeks, across the three remaining years we’re reading comics for, that is 520 hours, plus 780 hours from the weekends of those years and we have 1300 hours, but we also have the weekends from after we ran out of movies but before we ran out of TV shows, which give us another 480 hours for 1780 hours total.
This means that if you start reading books on the weekends once you run out of movies, and then start reading books on the weekdays in addition to your one issue of a comic book once you run out of TV shows, you will run out all existing Star Wars books about five months before you’ve run out of comic books. The only reason the comics have lasted so long is because we’re so lackadaisical about them – one issue per weekday, usually only twenty minutes, as opposed to books, which are 40 minutes a weekday plus 150 minutes each on Saturday and Sunday. But we will finally run out of them once we get into our last category.
Video Games
There’s about 50 video games, with wildly varying play times. Some of these fit within 10 hours (Republic Commando) and others represent hundreds of hours by themselves (the Old Republic). Discounting the MMORPGs, 20 hours is a fairly reasonable average, which means the 180 hours of time left over from the books isn’t even getting us a fifth of the way through, but it will take less than 2 years to get through the remaining 80%+.
You’d probably want to intermix novels and video games on the weekends rather than doing several years of intermixed comics, novels, and TV shows followed by several years of pure comics and novels followed by a few months of video games and comics followed by a year and a half of pure video games, but in terms of “how long does this take” the answer is 7 years. Rounding up to a decade should comfortably account for any slop in the calculations.
Achilles and the Franchise
What about the additional content released during that decade, though? Will you ever catch up?
Well, they release about one Star Wars movie, 2-3 seasons of Star Wars TV, and less than one Star Wars video game per year (seriously, Jedi Survivor was the only 2023 game, Squadrons was 2020, Fallen Order was 2019, the release pace is glacial). All those put together represent less than a month’s worth of content. Estimating comics and novels is slightly harder because there’s more of them, but it seems like there’s a few dozen comics per year which accounts for 1-2 weeks’ worth of content and roughly 5-10 novels per year, which represents about 2 months’ worth of content. Totaled up, Star Wars content comes out about 25% as fast as it can be consumed, which means at the end of the seven year project there will be an additional 1.75 years of content, and at the end of that there will be another four-ish months’ of content, and at the end of that another month-ish of content, and then a week, and then two weekdays’, and then a single twenty minute comic issue, and then we round down to zero, and you total that all up and you will need about two years on top of the initial seven years to consume all the content that came out during those seven years.
If we take the ten year estimate, it takes about three and a half years before you catch up on what came out during that decade, so the total time to catch up is about thirteen and a half years.
There is a lot of Star Wars, but it is surprisingly doable to become “the Star Wars guy” who knows all of the Star Wars. It requires sustained effort over a very long period of time, but not at an intensity that would be impractical to sustain for such a long time.
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