Star Wars is now officially a franchise that loses money.

The numbers are in for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and they don’t look good. The movie is projected to lose fifty million dollars for Disney. The company won’t, of course, suffer terribly; its Marvel and Pixar divisions are still running strong and are as popular as ever. But LucasFilm is in trouble. To give you an idea of how bad things are, here’s a chart laying it all out:

https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js

The numbers cited in the graph above are not adjusted for inflation, but I found an online inflation calculator and plugged in the box office gross for the very first Star Wars film from 1977. Adjusted for inflation, A New Hope grossed $2,480,653,465.35, more than Episode VII made just three years ago. Even adjusting Episode VII’s box office gross for inflation since 2015, it still doesn’t quite match the gross take for the original film. Remember: These are global, not domestic, figures.

The much-anticipated Episode VII: The Force Awakens, was at best a mediocre retread of George Lucas’ original 1977 film, directed by an uninspired hack whose biggest claim to infamy was dumbing down Star Trek to fit his shallow imbecile’s intellect. I suspect that most of the box office success of The Force Awakens comes primarily from advance ticket sales. Audiences left theaters feeling disappointed, yet hopeful that the next installment would answer the questions set up in the movie.

Those hopes were dashed by the utterly dismal Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, which was nothing more than an exercise in deliberately insulting anyone and everyone who is a Star Wars fan. Idiot Ruin Johnson, whose only major studio credits prior to coming on board the Star Wars franchise include the awful Brick and Looper, was tasked with continuing the story plan set up by Jar Jar Abrams. Instead, he tossed it in the trash and proceeded to use The Last Jedi as a platform to express his hatred for franchise and fans alike. As a result, the movie made only about half what its predecessor took in, and caused all manner of controversy as audiences were divided into people who don’t like having their intelligence insulted, and those who don’t care if they are insulted. LucasFilm head Kathleen Kennedy, with Abrams and Johnson ever playing the part of craven suck-ups, wasted no opportunity to try and shield the movies behind a wall of accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other condescending insults, rather than acknowledge the bad decisions being made.

The troubled production of Solo: A Star Wars Story has been well documented. Co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were removed from the project over creative differences, and veteran director Ron Howard was brought in to complete it. The production budget was roughly doubled as he effectively had to start over from scratch—the scenes shot previously were considered that unusable. Further, lead performer Alden Ehrenreich was reportedly so incapable of acting that a coach had to be brought in to get anything usable out of him. Why he wasn’t recast is a mystery; Anthony Ingruber, who played a young version of Harrison Ford’s character in Age of Adeline, made a demo video nailing the older actor’s lines from A New Hope’s famous cantina scene that quickly went viral. If the movie had to be almost totally reshot, the logical thing to do would have been to do it completely, replace Ehrenreich with Ingruber, and work from a new script. But this did not come to pass.

Instead, LucasFilm doubled down on the script and, unwilling to rethink its annual movie release model, held to its planned May 2018 release date. In order to try and salvage it at the box office, Avengers: Infinity War’s release was moved up so as to offer less competition. That backfired as the Marvel movie remains in cinemas and is still taking in healthy ticket sales. The release of Deadpool 2 also factors in. There is a parallel here to 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which Paramount released against Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Ghostbusters II, all of which were hits the popularity of which took away from Trek and combined with word of mouth to effectively end William Shatner’s directing career.

Compounding the problems for LucasFilm is that merchandise based on the Disney productions is not moving. The toys gather dust on shelves—action figures can’t be sold even at bargain bin prices. This is unprecedented, and may be a significant contributing factor in the closing of Toy ‘R’ Us.

What this means going forward is that now Disney’s plans to open up Star Wars theme parks and hotels are in jeopardy. If merchandise and box office ticket sales are meant to pay for these projects, and those sales are going down with each release in the franchise, that is a major problem for Disney. No sane investor will fund a movie on the pitch that he or she will probably be flushing money down the proverbial toilet, or that even if it comes back, there likely won’t be any interest on the investment.

It would be a different matter if the failure of Solo were a fluke, a one-time thing in an otherwise successful franchise. But it’s not. It’s part of a larger trend of diminishing returns, and this is borne out by the numbers as indicated in the graph above. This cannot be spun as “franchise fatigue”, as Disney is trying to do. If it were that, then the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be suffering a similar crisis, yet it’s not.

Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger has got to be making preparations to replace Kathleen Kennedy as head of LucasFilm as soon as someone suitable—and willing—is identified. Disney bought LucasFilm with the intention of churning out movies every year like on a factory conveyor belt. In order to do that, there must be a new movie released every year, new trilogies and spin-offs going on for as long as Disney can squeeze money out of them. That can’t happen, nor can related projects such as theme parks, hotels, casinos, and so on, as long as Kennedy remains at the helm. Her lack of direction and alienation of fans, without whom there is no Star Wars, has brought things to where they are now. The writing is clearly on the wall that Disney can’t wait to see how Episode IX will fare in theaters—its release date for December 2019 is not that far off, and if the corporation won’t push it back, then this means that Kennedy will have to go soon, so that someone who actually has a vision and a workable plan can salvage what remains of the franchise. Jar Jar Abrams cannot be counted on to fix the mess Ruin Johnson made of the present trilogy. The idea that Johnson will get to keep his announced “outer rim” trilogy is, at this point, laughable. These three have done what was unthinkable even during George Lucas’ prequel saga: they’ve made Star Wars a property that is no longer profitable.