'The Last Jedi' is the third best Star Wars sequel

If you've been on the internet since December 2017, you may have noticed that people have opinions about The Last Jedi.

Also known as Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson's follow-up to J.J. Abrams's smash hit The Force Awakens was subject to attacks from a loud subset of fans right from its release. The vitriol continued even after the debut of the final saga movie, The Rise of Skywalker, in 2019. "No matter who wins," conservative commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted on Election Day 2020, "let's all remember the most important thing: The Last Jedi is a terrible movie."

But a new objective ranking of Star Wars saga movies suggests otherwise. Compiled by USwitch, a broadband provider that examined the most successful film franchises of all time, the ranking puts Last Jedi ahead of all other sequels to the original Star Wars, save Force Awakens and The Empire Strikes Back. That's based on box office revenue (minus the film's budget) plus reviews on Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and viewer ratings on IMDb.

Converted into a score out of 10, here's what the ranking gives each Star Wars episode, from best to worst:

1. A New Hope (1977): 8.48

2. The Empire Strikes Back (1980): 8.05

3. The Force Awakens (2015): 8.03

4. The Last Jedi (2017): 6.80

5. Revenge of the Sith (2005): 6.22

6. Return of the Jedi (1983): 5.99

7. The Phantom Menace (1999): 4.06

8. Attack of the Clones (2002): 3.40

9. The Rise of Skywalker (2019): 3.28

Without those IMDb user ratings (which are notorious for attracting internet mobs), The Last Jedi would rank higher than Force Awakens on the critical front. It also suffers by comparison to its predecessor at the box office (Force Awakens, the first Star Wars movie in 10 years, is the highest grossing film of all time in the U.S.).

Still, it's an impressive showing — especially given the raspberries for the other J.J. Abrams Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker. Few fans imagined a film in the sequel trilogy could rank lower than the widely reviled Attack of the Clones, which even prequel trilogy lovers have a hard time defending. But Abrams's confused muddle of an ending to the saga, which attempted to be all things to all people including the anti-Last Jedi fans, ended up pleasing approximately no one.

So where did all that long-remembered fury over Last Jedi come from? There were plenty of legitimate story-based critiques. Some fans disliked its side quest on the planet of Canto Bight. Others hated the image the movie presented of Luke Skywalker, whom the young would-be Jedi Rey finds as a bitter old hermit — even though that was George Lucas' original intention for the sequel saga.

But a larger reason, as suggested by Shapiro's 2020 tweet, was political. Johnson's movie presented the Force, previously wielded by Skywalkers, Kenobis and other mostly male Jedi elite, as a democratic entity that could alight upon anyone — even a "nobody" like Rey, as she then was. The Jedi were presented as fatally out of touch (a fair summary of the prequels), and Canto Bight was a Monaco-like paradise for the rich that deserved its desecration.

Soon enough, the pro- and anti-Last Jedi debate became a proxy for liberal and conservative viewpoints. So divisive was the debate that Russian trolls joined in. According to a 2018 study, some 50 percent of the accounts tweeting at Johnson in the seven months after the movie's release were "bots, trolls/sock puppets or political activists using the debate to propagate messages supporting extreme right-wing causes."

Nevertheless, there was always a silent majority of viewers who enjoyed the film and its highly visual attempt to take the Star Wars franchise in risky new directions. ComScore and CinemaScore, two companies that measure audience approval, asked theater-goers for their ratings, and The Last Jedi came out with 89% and an A grade, respectively.

This approval didn't fade the following year, either. The Last Jedi was the second bestselling Blu-Ray of 2018 — ahead of the universally beloved Black Panther and just a hair behind Avengers: Infinity War. No wonder, perhaps, that Star Wars fans so disliked Rise of Skywalker, which walked back Last Jedi's boldest reveal (Rey's lineage).

After the wildly uneven ride of the sequel trilogy, Lucasfilm has put Skywalker saga films firmly in its past. The company is concentrating on its current and forthcoming Disney+ shows (The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka, Andor). The one movie on its slate is Rogue Squadron, allegedly arriving in December 2023.

Of a planned Rian Johnson trilogy, supposedly set in a new time and place in the galaxy far, far away, there has been no word. Insiders suggest it is dead in the water, and that Last Jedi may end up being Johnson's only work for Lucasfilm. The more time that passes, however, the more the much-maligned movie is seen as a stone-cold classic.