How to Watch Every Star Wars Movie and TV Show in Chronological Order for May the 4th

The Star Wars franchise has expanded dramatically in the decade since Disney took over Lucasfilm, getting a new trilogy of movies, two side movies, and a rather large pile of TV shows for good measure. But the franchise hasn't been great about helping fans keep track of it all — it's fairly rare for any on-screen Star Wars story to make sure you know exactly when it takes place in relation to the other stories, so it often feels daunting to make any sense of the Star Wars timeline.

But we can and will help you with that — putting this huge mess of content in chronological order is what this article is about, after all. We'll use the original film, Star Wars: A New Hope, as an anchorpoint of this timeline for the sake of simplicity. Let's dig in. Here's how to watch the Star Wars movies and shows in order.

Note: Most Star Wars movies and shows are available to stream on Disney+. We've only included Star Wars movies and shows that are part of the overall canon, therefore something like Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which is amazing but not considered canon, isn't on this list.

Star Wars: Visions (2021)

Outside the timeline

This anime and anime-inspired anthology series takes us all over the Star Wars timeline, but none of it is part of the franchise continuity because these are really only fascinating re-imaginings of Star Wars ideas. For example: The first episode, "The Duel," presents a Kurasawa-style story of a wandering samurai, using only the visual trappings of Star Wars. Season 1 features stories from Japanese animation studios, and Season 2 shook things up by giving international studios from around the globe the chance to take their shot. 

The Acolyte (2024)

Set ~100 years before A New Hope

We haven't seen this one yet since it's not out until this summer, but The Acolyte, starring Amandla Stenberg in the title role, will dive into an era that we haven't seen at all on screen so far: the period before all the previous movies and shows that Disney has dubbed the "High Republic" era. So that should be interesting, since it can't possibly have many direct ties to other stories beyond possible appearances by Yoda or Yaddle. The Acolyte comes to Disney+ on June 4. [Everything we know about The Acolyte]

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Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)

Set 32 years before A New Hope

While it's not "the movie that started it all" since it came out a couple decades after the original movie in 1999, this first prequel film kicks off the Skywalker Saga by showing us Obi-Wan Kenobi's (Ewan McGregor) adventure that caused him to first cross paths with a young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) on the remote desert planet of Tatooine. Despite the constant presence of Jar Jar Binks, this one has aged pretty decently compared with the other two parts of the prequel trilogy just because it was shot on film and in real locations.

Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (2002)

22 Years Before A New Hope

Ten years after The Phantom Menace, this conspiracy-filled story about Palpatine's labyrinthine false-flag plan to start the Clone Wars hit theaters, and started the beginning of Anakin's (Hayden Christensen) fall toward the Dark Side of the Force and [spoiler] his transformation into Darth Vader. In terms of filmmaking craft it's the worst Star Wars movie by a mile, but it's also a camp classic — a definite "so bad it's good" sort of situation.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-2014, 2020)

19-22 years before A New Hope

This CGI-animated Cartoon Network series, which was the origin of Dave Filoni's subset of the franchise (which is most of the TV stuff, basically), tells the complete stories of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka Tano between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith over seven seasons. The final stretch of episodes, produced years after the show ended originally, actually take us a little bit past Revenge of the Sith and into the period of time between the trilogies. As the title indicates, this is the story of the Clone Wars from beginning to end, and it's a lot weirder than you'd probably expect.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

19 years before A New Hope

After three years of galactic war, everything came to a head in Revenge of the Sith: Palpatine had nearly all the Jedi massacred, he turned the Republic into a dictatorship, and he pulled Anakin to the dark side to be his new enforcer in the process. It's a bit too well-made to be quite the camp classic that Attack of the Clones was, but it certainly still has some all-time meme moments — Obi-Wan's declaration that he won his climactic duel with Anakin simply because "I have the high ground" is hilariously iconic nearly two decades later.

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Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021-2024)

19 years before A New Hope

The Clone Wars introduced a group of clone troopers who weren't quite wired the same as all the others, and when Palpatine issued his Order 66 to murder all the Jedi, it didn't work on this crew. This animated series, which is geared toward a younger audience, shows us what happens with these troopers when they resist Order 66 and have to navigate a universe that no longer has any place for them.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

10 years before A New Hope

This standalone prequel was probably doomed from the start — Harrison Ford simply is Han Solo and re-casting the character (Alden Ehrenreich had some big shoes to fill) was never going to work for most folks no matter who they chose for it. Then the franchise's corporate masters made matters even more difficult by firing the very popular directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, during production, and the movie just couldn't recover. Despite all that, Solo has some incredible sets and production design — the best in the whole franchise, maybe.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)

9 years before A New Hope

After the Jedi Order was destroyed, Obi-Wan moved to Tatooine to keep an eye on baby Luke Skywalker, but it turns out he didn't just sit there for 20 years doing nothing and this Disney+ miniseries is proof. Instead, Imperial Inquisitors came to Tatooine looking for a fugitive Jedi, and far away on Alderaan, young Leia was kidnapped, forcing Obi-Wan to get involved with a fledgling Rebellion against the Empire and face off against Darth Vader once again. While it was nice to see Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan again, it was even better to see Joel Edgerton, who broke out after playing Uncle Owen in brief scenes in the prequel movies, actually have some room to flex with an expanded role for Owen.

Star Wars Rebels (2014-2018)

Starts 5 years before A New Hope

Rebels was showrunner Dave Filoni's second animated Star Wars series, and the Disney XD show picked up a lot of the big-picture plot threads that were left over from The Clone Wars — there's a particular focus on the Mandalorians, for one, and so it functions as a sequel to The Clone Wars in a lot of ways. And, like The Clone Wars, this series is detailing something that's really important for the franchise as a whole: The formation of the Rebel Alliance.

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Andor (2022)

5 years before A New Hope

In my mind I tend to divide the Star Wars franchise between the stuff that came before I was born (the original trilogy) and the stuff that came after (everything else). And the Disney+ series Andor — the low-key-for-this-franchise story of how a random dude, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), managed to get roped into a crucial role for a galactic rebellion, with a parallel story about the lives of the fascists on the other side of the conflict, is the only on-screen Star Wars thing made during my lifetime that's on the level of the original trilogy, and it's the only on-screen Star Wars thing ever that really captures the impossible scale of a galactic civilization.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Immediately before A New Hope

Like Solo, Rogue One suffers from an identity crisis after the movie was extensively reshot during post-production, which left nearly all the cool footage from the trailers out of the movie itself — seriously, the ads for Rogue One relied heavily on deleted scenes, like the one pictured above. But its cast, with Diego Luna, Forest Whitaker, Ben Mendelsohn, Felicity Jones, Riz Ahmed, Donnie Yen, and Mads Mikkelson, is beyond incredible and makes this story – which ends just as Leia heads to Tatooine for the beginning of A New Hope — worth watching.

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)

The movie that started it all (and the second-best Star Wars movie overall) set the stage for [waves hands at random] all this with a small story about a farm boy going on his hero's journey en route to blowing up a planet-killing space station. A New Hope admittedly feels a little bit quaint today now that the franchise has been so dramatically fleshed out — it's full of vague concepts that have all been explored in depth by this point. But watching a new Star Wars story that actually doesn't carry tons of weird emotional baggage is actually pretty pleasant these days, and the only baggage this flick has is whatever you bring to it.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

1 year after A New Hope

The Empire pushes back at the Rebels and sends them running all over the galaxy in possibly the greatest sequel ever made. In terms of simply being a movie, The Empire Strikes Back is the franchise's peak, taking all the good stuff from the original movie and making it better — better direction from Irving Kirshner, better production values, and a deliberate pace that defined the structure of blockbuster films for decades. Along with Spielberg's Jaws and A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back set so many standards for modern big-budget movies.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983)

4 years after A New Hope

The third movie in the original trilogy gets a bad rap thanks to the overuse of the cuddly Ewoks during the climactic battle, but the heist at Jabba's palace at the beginning is a delight, and the space battle and final duel between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are both awesome — and, frankly, all the attempts that the prequel and sequel movies made at being cute are much more obnoxious than Ewoks were.

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The Mandalorian (2019-present)

9 years after A New Hope

The galaxy-spanning adventures of the Mandalorian Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his pal Baby Yoda (aka Grogu) start about five years after the deaths of the Emperor and Darth Vader, during the period of transition from the Empire back to a galactic Republic. In the process, this series would spawn a new little sub-franchise in between the trilogies that would serve as a live-action outgrowth of the previous Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons by bringing in Ahsoka Tano and the prequel-era Mandalorian Bo-Katan Kryze and continuing their stories in Ahsoka and The Book of Boba Fett.

The Book of Boba Fett (2021-2022)

9 years after A New Hope. Between Seasons 2 and 3 of The Mandalorian

Season 2 of The Mandalorian brought Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) — arguably Star Wars' most popular character — out of retirement, and then he got his own little limited Disney+ series about his attempt to become a new crime boss on Tatooine, with a random episode in the middle about Din Djarin reuniting with Baby Yoda that places this show before Season 3 of The Mandalorian. While most critics and fans didn't care for The Book of Boba Fett, the episode with Baby Yoda was pretty good!

Ahsoka (2023-present)

9 years after A New Hope, during Season 3 of The Mandalorian

While Season 3 of The Mandalorian followed up on some major Clone Wars plot threads, the first season of Disney+'s Ahsoka was a direct continuation from the finale of Rebels, which saw Grand Admiral Thrawn and protagonist Ezra Bridger disappear into deep space, headed toward an unknown destination that his friends couldn't follow him to. We can infer that this story is happening in parallel, or nearly in parallel, with The Mandalorian Season 3, though neither season of TV directly referenced the events of the other at any time. 

Star Wars Resistance (2018-2020)

34 years after A New Hope

This animated series, which is more explicitly kid-focused than most of the other Star Wars cartoons, is set immediately before and during the sequel trilogy and focuses on a pilot named Kaz Xiono who spies for the Resistance against the First Order. You might have thought this little series had already been lost to time, but Kaz's father made a brief appearance on Ahsoka, so there may be more connections to this one on the way.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

34 years after A New Hope

This soft reboot of the franchise is a strange remix of the original movie, with a desert planet that isn't Tatooine, a space station that destroys planets but isn't a Death Star, a new helmeted Dark Force user who dresses in all black but isn't Darth Vader, etc. So despite being very decent as spectacle, The Force Awakens has ended up being kinda forgettable. Which is par for the course for JJ Abrams movies.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

34 years after A New Hope

In the second movie of the new trilogy, writer/director Rian Johnson took over from Abrams, and pivoted the story in random new directions that contradict The Force Awakens in the name of subverting expectations. But The Last Jedi does have the decency to deliver the best-looking action sequences in the franchise.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

35 years after A New Hope

Disney and Lucasfilm decided to triple down on the sequel trilogy's incoherence by re-hiring JJ Abrams to write and direct the capper, and the result is two hours of completely random stuff happening, none of it lining up with anything that happened previously. Or, for that matter, being as fun or looking as good as the action from the previous two movies.