How to get into…
How to get into Star Wars
Thirteen films, seventeen series, nearly five hundred episodes. Most of it needs nothing before it, and a few things really do. Pick a door.
StreamPickr editorial · Updated 17 August 2026 · 12 min read
- 17 series — On the shelf
- 13 films — Nine numbered, four not
- 482 eps — Mostly animation
- 49 years — 1977 → now
Everybody knows roughly what Star Wars is, and almost nobody knows where it currently begins. There are nine numbered films that are no longer the whole story, four more that are not numbered, and seventeen television series across live action and animation, most of which arrived in the last six years. The old advice was to argue about whether to watch in release order or numbered order. That argument is now about a third of the material and it is not the useful question.
The useful question is which one you should start with, and the answer depends on what you actually want out of an evening. Below are five ways in. Pick one and we will give you three specific things to watch, in order, and what to do next if they land. Two of the doors hand over episodes and take about two hours. Two hand over films and take rather longer. Each one prints its own total, so you can see what you are agreeing to before you start.
One thing that makes this different from most franchises: a few entries here genuinely do require something else first, and the shelf below says which. Ahsoka is a sequel to two animated series. Rogue One ends where the 1977 film begins. Everything that carries a real prerequisite says so in its own entry, and everything that does not is safe to start cold, whatever the numbering on the poster suggests.
Five ways in
Five ways in. Pick the one that sounds like you, and change it whenever you want.
The default answer
I want the one everyone means
The original trilogy
Three films from 1977, 1980 and 1983, watched in that order. This is still the right answer for most people and it is worth saying why, rather than just deferring to tradition: they are the only part of Star Wars that assumes you know nothing, they are each about two hours, and they finish. Everything else on this shelf was made by people who had already seen them.
Your three films
- 1977 A New Hope (2h 1m) — Farm boy, robots, rescue, trench run. It invents its whole universe in the first ten minutes and then gets out of the way. Sixty per cent of what you already know about Star Wars comes from this one film.
- 1980 The Empire Strikes Back (2h 4m) — Darker, slower, better. Splits the cast up, takes the training seriously, and ends badly on purpose. This is the best film in the franchise and most of the argument about that is a formality.
- 1983 Return of the Jedi (2h 12m) — Finishes the story properly. The first half is a heist on a gangster’s palace and the last half hour is genuinely moving. The teddy bears are less of a problem than you have been led to believe.
6h 17m for all three.
If they land: Watch Rogue One, which is a prequel to the film you started with and ends about twenty minutes before it begins. After that go to television rather than to the prequels: The Mandalorian is the closest thing here to the tone of the original three.
- Start here: A New Hope
- Then: Rogue One
- After that: The Mandalorian
The best-made thing in it
I want the one critics loved
Andor
Andor is a serious drama about how an occupation actually functions, made by people who were clearly allowed to do what they wanted. It has no lightsabers to speak of and it requires nothing before it. It is also, by a distance, the best-written thing on this shelf, and the only entry here that people who dislike Star Wars tend to finish.
Your three episodes
- S1 E1 Kassa (42m) — A man kills two security guards in a rainy corporate town and has to leave. Almost nothing is explained, which after fifty years of exposition is the point.
- S1 E6 The Eye (54m) — A heist executed under an astronomical event, with a crew who do not like each other. The hour where the show proves it can do tension as well as texture.
- S1 E10 One Way Out (46m) — A prison break, and a speech near the end that is the best writing anyone has produced in this universe. If this does nothing for you, nothing here will.
2h 22m for all three.
If they land: Finish both seasons of Andor, which is a complete and closed story, then watch Rogue One, which the final scene runs directly into. A New Hope after that, and you will have watched the whole rebellion in the order it happens.
- Start here: Andor
- Then: Rogue One
- After that: A New Hope
The easiest thing to put on
I want a television show
The Mandalorian
The Mandalorian is a western with a bounty hunter and a small green child, in half-hour-ish episodes that mostly stand alone. It is the friendliest thing here by some margin: no numbered films required, low commitment, and a first season that works as a complete story if you stop there. It gets more tangled later, and we will tell you when.
Your three episodes
- S1 E1 Chapter 1: The Mandalorian (41m) — A bounty hunter takes a job with no questions asked, and finds out what the cargo is in the last minute. A pilot that does its job with almost no dialogue.
- S1 E3 Chapter 3: The Sin (39m) — He delivers the cargo, and then has to decide what kind of person he is. The episode where the show commits to being about something.
- S1 E8 Chapter 8: Redemption (50m) — The finale, and yes, we are sending you to it. These three are a legitimate short version of season one: a job, a change of heart, and a consequence.
2h 10m for all three.
If they land: Watch the rest of season one, all eight episodes of it, then season two. Skip The Book of Boba Fett even though it contains two episodes of The Mandalorian, and come back for season three. Rogue One and then Andor are where to go when you want the grown-up version.
- Start here: The Mandalorian
- Then: Rogue One
- After that: Andor
For people who like enormous stories
I want one huge long story
The Clone Wars and Rebels
Two hundred and two episodes of animation that run from the middle of the prequel films to just before the 1977 one, and add up to the longest and most rewarding thing Star Wars has ever done. The Clone Wars starts as a children’s show and does not stay one. Its early seasons are patchy and its last is extraordinary, and the three episodes below are chosen to prove that without asking you to take it on faith.
Your three episodes
- S1 E5 Rookies (23m) — A handful of new clone troopers hold an isolated listening post against a raid. Twenty-three minutes, no main characters, and the episode people cite when they tell you this show is better than it looks.
- S4 E7 Darkness on Umbara (22m) — The opening of a four-part arc about a commander who spends soldiers carelessly. Genuinely bleak, and the point at which the show stops being about the war and starts being about who fights it.
- S7 E10 The Phantom Apprentice (29m) — From the final season, made twelve years after the first. Two characters with a long history talk, and then do not talk. This is the ceiling of the whole franchise, and it is a cartoon.
1h 14m for all three.
If they land: Watch The Clone Wars properly, with a skip list for the first two seasons, and then Rebels, which picks up fourteen years later with a new and much smaller cast. Ahsoka is the live-action continuation of both, and it is the one entry on this shelf that is close to incomprehensible without them.
- Start here: The Clone Wars
- Then: Rebels
- After that: Ahsoka
You have already done the trilogy
I want to know which of the rest are worth it
Three of the other ten
Thirteen Star Wars films exist and the original three are not in question. That leaves ten, of which most people have opinions about four and have not seen the rest. These are the three worth an evening, in the order that makes them easiest to enjoy, and none of them needs the numbered film that precedes it explained first.
Your three films
- 2016 Rogue One (2h 13m) — A war film about the people who stole the plans, and the only Star Wars film with no interest in being fun. It ends about twenty minutes before the 1977 film starts, which makes it the best possible thing to watch next after the original three.
- 2005 Revenge of the Sith (2h 20m) — The prequel that works, because it is the one where the plot finally arrives. It is also the only one of the three that people who grew up hating the prequels will defend. You do not need the previous two, only the sentence “the republic is at war and this man is going to turn”.
- 2015 The Force Awakens (2h 16m) — A confident, very likeable restart that reuses the shape of the 1977 film on purpose. It is the best of the three sequels and the only one that does not spend most of its time arguing with the others.
6h 49m for all three.
If they land: The Last Jedi is the fourth to try, and the most interesting of the sequels even if it is the one people fought about. After that you have reached the part of the shelf where television is better than film, so pick another door.
- Start here: Rogue One
- Then: Revenge of the Sith
- After that: The Force Awakens
The whole shelf, in five groups
Everything there is, in five groups. Nothing here is a prerequisite for anything else unless the entry says so, and a few of them say so.
01. The three that started it
1977–1983 · 3 entries
Three films, made by people with no idea whether the first one would work. They still explain themselves faster and better than anything that came after, and nothing on this shelf requires anything else to be watched first. If you have never seen a Star Wars film, the whole question is really just whether to begin here, and the answer is usually yes.
A New Hope (1977)
2h 1m · start here
The front door, and it still opens
Listed on TMDB simply as Star Wars, because in 1977 there was nothing to distinguish it from. A farm boy, two robots, a rescue and a trench run, told at a pace nothing since has matched. It assumes you know nothing, which after fifty years of sequels is a genuinely rare quality, and it is the one film here that literally everything else was made in response to.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2h 4m · good next
The best one, and it needs the first
Splits the cast, slows down, gets darker, and ends with the heroes losing. It is the film that turned a hit into a mythology, and the only one where the famous twist is not the best thing in it. Watch it directly after A New Hope. It is the one entry on this shelf where the order genuinely is not negotiable.
Return of the Jedi (1983)
2h 12m · good next
Finishes the story, and then the story was finished for sixteen years
A palace heist, a forest battle and a last half hour that earns its ending. Its reputation suffers for the small furry creatures in the second act and for being the third-best of three, both of which are true and neither of which is much of a criticism. This is where the original story ends, and stopping here is a completely respectable way to have watched Star Wars.
02. The prequels
1999–2005 · 3 entries
Three films about how the republic in the background of the first three fell over. Two of them are widely disliked and the third is the one people came back around on. They matter far more than their reputation suggests, because the entire animated spine below grows out of them, and a lot of the best television here is set during the war they describe.
The Phantom Menace (1999)
2h 16m · for later
Famous for being a disappointment, and mostly about a trade dispute
Sixteen years of anticipation met with a plot about tariffs, a small boy and a computer-generated comic relief character the film has never lived down. There is a magnificent three-way lightsaber duel at the end and a genuinely good score. Watch it if you are going to watch all of them, and not before anything else.
Attack of the Clones (2002)
2h 22m · skippable
The weakest of the thirteen
A detective story wrapped around a romance that neither the script nor the two leads can rescue. It exists to move pieces into place for the third film, and the third film explains everything you need from it in its first five minutes. This is the one film on the shelf we would tell almost anyone to skip outright.
Revenge of the Sith (2005)
2h 20m · good next
The prequel that works, and it works cold
The one where the plot finally arrives and the tragedy the previous two films kept promising actually happens. Grim, operatic, occasionally clumsy in the dialogue and completely committed. You need one sentence of setup rather than two films, and it is the single most-referenced entry in all the animation below.
03. The animated spine
2008–2026 · 11 entries
The largest and least-known part of Star Wars: roughly four hundred episodes of animation, mostly excellent, mostly made while nobody outside the fandom was looking. The Clone Wars and Rebels together are the longest continuous story the franchise has told, and they are the reason several live-action series make sense. Ignore the fact that some of it was aimed at children. So was the 1977 film.
The Clone Wars pilot film (2008)
1h 38m · skippable
Three television episodes released in cinemas, and it shows
The animated series was launched with its opening episodes cut together and put on a big screen, where the seams were extremely visible and the reviews were brutal. The series it introduces is superb and this is not a fair sample of it. Start the show at its first episode instead and lose nothing at all.
The Clone Wars (2008–2020)
7 seasons · 133 eps · start here
The biggest thing here, and better than it has any right to be
Seven seasons across twelve years, set between the second and third prequel films. It begins as a serviceable children’s show with twenty-minute battles and ends as the most emotionally serious work in the franchise. The first two seasons are uneven and best taken with a skip list; from season three it is consistently good, and the final season is extraordinary. Watching it makes the prequel films retroactively better, which is a strange thing for a cartoon to manage.
Rebels (2014–18)
4 seasons · 69 eps · good next
The sequel to the above, and the bridge to the 1977 film
A smaller show about one stolen ship and its crew, set five years before A New Hope. Lighter and more approachable than The Clone Wars, and it grows into something considerably heavier by its third season. It pays off several Clone Wars characters, so it lands harder afterwards, though it does introduce itself properly to a newcomer. TMDB counts its double-length entries once, so it reads 69 episodes here rather than the 75 you may see elsewhere.
Resistance (2018–20)
2 seasons · 38 eps · skippable
The one nobody talks about
An anime-styled series about a pilot on a refuelling platform in the sequel-trilogy era. Pleasant, aimed young, and disconnected from everything else worth watching here. Nothing depends on it and it depends on nothing.
The Bad Batch (2021–24)
3 seasons · 47 eps · for later
Starts on the last hour of Revenge of the Sith
A squad of clone troopers goes on the run as the republic becomes the empire, in the days immediately after the third prequel film. It is a direct continuation of a Clone Wars arc and opens on the assumption that you have watched both, which makes it a poor first choice and a good fourth one. Three seasons, an ending it plans for, and much sadder than the premise suggests.
Tales of the Jedi (2022)
1 season · 6 eps · optional
Six shorts, and two of them are excellent
Fifteen-minute animated pieces filling in the backstory of two characters from The Clone Wars. Beautiful to look at and almost weightless if you do not already know who these people are. A very good hour once you do.
Tales of the Empire (2024)
1 season · 6 eps · optional
The same idea, pointed at two villains
Six more shorts, this time following two characters into and out of the empire’s service. Slighter than the first set and still worth the ninety minutes if the animation above has already won you over. Not a starting point under any circumstances.
Tales of the Underworld (2025)
1 season · 6 eps · optional
The third set, and the most self-contained
Six shorts about criminals rather than knights, which gives this one a texture the other two anthologies do not have. Still a footnote to the animated spine, still ninety minutes, still not where anyone should begin.
Maul: Shadow Lord (2026)
1 season · 10 eps · optional
The newest animation, and it assumes a great deal
Ten episodes that landed in spring 2026, following the horned villain from the first prequel film through his criminal empire years. Handsome and violent, and written for an audience that has already done The Clone Wars and Rebels. Tempting as a door because there is no backlog, and a bad one for exactly the reason its own premise depends on two hundred episodes of setup.
Young Jedi Adventures (2023–25)
3 seasons · 55 eps · optional
Made for very small children, and good at it
Short, gentle, brightly coloured episodes about trainee knights, aimed squarely at preschoolers. It is not a compromise version of Star Wars for adults and it is not trying to be. If you are bringing a four-year-old along, this is the right thing to put on, and Skeleton Crew is the right thing when they are ten.
Visions (2021–25)
3 seasons · 27 eps · optional
Outside the story entirely, and the most beautiful thing on the shelf
Three volumes of short films by different animation studios, none of which are canon and none of which connect to anything. Because they answer to nobody they are free to be strange, and several are the best-looking Star Wars ever made. Watchable in any order, at any point, including before you have seen a single film.
04. The sequels and the standalone films
2015–2026 · 6 entries
Disney restarted the film series in 2015 with a trilogy that was made up as it went along, and slipped four unrelated films in around it. The trilogy needs the original three and nothing else. The standalone films need almost nothing, and two of them are better than the trilogy they were made alongside.
The Force Awakens (2015)
2h 16m · good next
Needs the original three, and only those
The restart, and a very likeable one: new cast, old shape, enormous confidence. It reuses the structure of the 1977 film so closely that the resemblance is the main criticism levelled at it, which rather understates how well it works. The best of the three sequels and the only one that is not busy responding to the others.
Rogue One (2016)
2h 13m · start here
Runs straight into the opening of A New Hope
A war film about the people who stole the plans to the space station, with no interest in being charming and a last act that commits completely. It works on its own and it works even better as the film you watch immediately before or after the 1977 one, because it ends roughly twenty minutes before that film starts. The best non-trilogy film here by a comfortable margin.
The Last Jedi (2017)
2h 32m · for later
The argument, and the most interesting of the three
The sequel that decided to interrogate the franchise rather than extend it, which produced the loudest fight in Star Wars fandom and also its most ambitious blockbuster. It is too long and one subplot goes nowhere. It is also the only sequel with an idea in it. Watch it second of the three and make up your own mind, because everyone else already has.
Solo (2018)
2h 15m · optional
Nobody asked for it, and it is fine
A heist film about how the smuggler from the original trilogy got his name, his ship and his co-pilot. It had a famously difficult production and flopped, and what survives is an enjoyable and completely unnecessary two hours. Requires nothing, adds nothing, pleasant company on a Sunday.
The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
2h 22m · skippable
The one that had to end it, and could not
Spends its running time undoing the previous film and rushing through three films’ worth of plot, and resurrects a villain in its opening text because it needed one. There are good scenes and two of the leads are excellent in it. As an ending to nine films it does not work, and knowing that in advance is the most useful thing we can tell you about it.
The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
2h 12m · for later
A television sequel that went to cinemas
The first Star Wars film in seven years, released in May 2026, continuing the story of the bounty hunter and the child. It is built for people who watched three seasons of the series and it does not pretend otherwise. Fun, large, and genuinely not a starting point despite being a standalone film on paper.
05. The streaming era
2019– · 7 entries
Since 2019 Star Wars has mostly been television, and it has swung wildly between the two best things the franchise has ever produced and some of the thinnest. Short seasons, film budgets, no set order. This is where a new viewer is most likely to start today, and also where they are most likely to pick the wrong one first.
The Mandalorian (2019–23)
3 seasons · 24 eps · start here
The friendliest door in live action
A bounty hunter, a small green child and a string of mostly self-contained jobs, set five years after Return of the Jedi. Season one is close to perfect television comfort food and works as a complete story on its own. Season two is better and starts leaning on the animated series; season three assumes you watched a spin-off you were not told about. Start here anyway, and read the entry below before you get confused.
The Book of Boba Fett (2021–22)
1 season · 7 eps · skippable
Sits inside the gap between Mandalorian seasons two and three
A crime story about a bounty hunter taking over a gangster’s territory, which stops halfway through to deliver two episodes of The Mandalorian that season three then treats as required viewing. That is the whole problem with it: it is weak, and it is not quite skippable, because the main character of another show changes course inside it. Watch episodes five and six and skip the rest with a clear conscience.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022)
1 season · 6 eps · optional
Needs the prequels and the original trilogy both
Six episodes set ten years after the third prequel film, reuniting two actors from it. The reunion is the point, and it only works if those films mean something to you already. Two very good episodes, four ordinary ones, and no reason at all to watch it early.
Andor (2022–25)
2 seasons · 24 eps · start here
The best thing here, and it needs nothing
A prequel to Rogue One, which sounds like the narrowest possible pitch and is instead a serious drama about how ordinary people are pushed into a rebellion and what it costs them. No lightsabers, adult writing, and two closed seasons that end exactly where they should. It is the one entry we would recommend to somebody who has told us they do not like Star Wars.
Ahsoka (2023–)
1 season · 8 eps · for later
A sequel to two animated series, and only that
Live action, set after Return of the Jedi, continuing plots and characters from The Clone Wars and Rebels with almost no accommodation for anyone who has not seen them. Watched in the right place it is a satisfying reunion; watched cold it is two hundred episodes of missing context. Season two does not arrive until January 2027, so the eight episodes here are all there is for now.
The Acolyte (2024)
1 season · 8 eps · optional
Set a century before everything else, and cancelled after one season
A murder mystery in an era the films never touch, which makes it the most genuinely standalone live-action entry on the shelf. It was received badly, cancelled, and is rather more interesting than that suggests, particularly one mid-season episode. It ends unresolved, so go in knowing that.
Skeleton Crew (2024–25)
1 season · 8 eps · optional
Four children, a lost ship, and no homework
Suburban kids find a buried starship and cannot find their way home, in a series that is openly an eighties children’s adventure film in Star Wars costume. Charming, complete in eight episodes, and requires nothing whatsoever. The best thing here to watch with a ten-year-old, and better than an adult would expect.
What we left out, and why
We have left out the LEGO specials and shorts, the 1978 Holiday Special, the two 1980s Ewok television films, the Droids and Ewoks cartoons that ran alongside them, Forces of Destiny, and the games and books. None of them changes what you should watch first. The nine numbered films are listed one by one rather than folded into a single row, unlike the way we group the Star Trek films, because here each one is a question people actually ask and burying thirteen verdicts behind an expander would defeat the point. Visions is on the shelf despite being outside the story on purpose: it is too good to omit and it requires nothing, which makes it the one entry you can watch before you have seen anything else.