After Game of Thrones’ final season, I’m glad Benioff and Weiss have left Star Wars alone

If there was one thing that became clear at the end of HBO’s high-fantasy epic, it was that everything about the show – from its actors, to the special effects and direction – was firing on all cylinders. Everything, in fact, except for arguably the most important thing – the writing and construction of the show itself.

I won’t turn this into a massive Game of Thrones rant, but it is important to note that the show’s eighth season demonstrated a complete failure in terms of coherent plotting and character development – problems that the show had tried to shake off ever since it had overtaken its source material.

That didn’t seem to bode well for Star Wars either. Much like the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, this new trilogy would not have the crutch of previous movies to lean on; it’s supposed to be an entirely new story, an entirely new cinematic universe to explore.

The one thing Weiss and Benioff proved with Thrones is that, when left to their own devices, their writing can leave a lot to be desired – and their creations as a whole suffer because of it.

Their exit from the new trilogy, then, may prove to be a smart move for Star Wars. The franchise hasn’t been struggling per se, but it’s certainly had a tough few years.

Solo: A Star Wars Story was the first veritable box office bomb in the franchise’s history and the franchise is still licking its wounds from the fan backlash against director Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, something that Disney seemed determined to remedy by placing the last film in the sequel trilogy in the safe hands of JJ Abrams.

The two showrunners may have also seemed like a similar pair of safe hands, before everything fell apart this year. All of a sudden, they weren’t the most popular writers in the world, they were the two men who almost brought down the legacy of one of TV’s most popular shows.

That’s not to say, however, that Thrones killed Weiss and Benioff’s careers, because it hasn’t. The two recently signed a massive $250million deal to produce original content with Netflix, their commitments to which have been blamed for their Star Wars exit.

But what it does mean is that their names, and work, now carry a legacy that some may find hard to move past. Would you want to watch the newest TV series or movie by the two guys who ruined Game of Thrones?

That’s not to say, however, that Benioff and Weiss can’t be great again. The first six seasons of Game of Thrones are pretty much perfect television, and their writing – whether hugely supported by the source novels or not – is a massive part of that.

Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei Lannister and Margaery Tyrell are some of the most vivid, complex and brilliant characters of the past decade for a reason, and again their writing is a massive part of that.

Maybe their Star Wars trilogy would have actually been brilliant, maybe it would have proved all of us wrong and had us eating our words after the comprehensive Thrones backlash.