Between the sentient rocks and the flying butt plugs, it felt like we'd probably covered most of the universes it was worth visiting in Everything Everywhere All At Once. But Oscar-winning directors the Daniels are hitting the big hyperspace button and heading somewhere new: the Star Wars universe.

Daniel Kwan announced yesterday and he and Daniel Scheinart are on board to direct part of the upcoming Skeleton Crew spin-off series on Disney+, starring Jude Law and following a bunch of kids lost in the cosmos trying to find their way home.

Now: I love the Daniels. They are brilliant. Everything Everywhere All At Once is a massive laugh and a touching family portrait. Swiss Army Man was a lot of fun. They know what they're doing.

We've been here before though, haven't we? Garlanded indie darlings are suddenly snapped up by the empires of Disney or DC or Sony, given loads of money and a very small amount of wiggle room in what they put on screen. Then everybody gets excited about what might happen, and consequently is fairly bitterly disappointed when it all looks basically exactly the same as the other ones, but with some obviously unfinished plot threads which got chopped for time or after some disappointing test screenings.

Clearly, doing an episode of one of the several hundred Star Wars TV spin-offs is a very different kettle of fish to giving the Daniels the next instalment in the ongoing saga. Though, given that nobody seems to know exactly what that should entail anyway, that might not be a bad idea.

And anyway, I thought we'd had this discussion already two years ago, when Oscar winner Chloe Zhao's Eternals turned out to be a bit of a snooze-fest. The thought then was that the mega-studios had almost everything they wanted – billions of dollars at the box office, fans across the world, enough merch tie-ins to keep the Western world in Ant-Man duvet covers for the next few centuries. What they didn't have was awards-winning, critic-charming movies.

In fact, they'd become a punchbag for cinema's grandees to take lumps out of. For six months it felt like Martin Scorsese was on a round-the-world tour devoted entirely to slagging off Marvel and its ilk.

"I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri," Scorsese wrote in the New York Times. Ken Loach and Francis Ford Coppola lined up for a swing too.

So you can kind of see where the urge to get an award came from. That'd stick the Sight & Sound brigade back in their box. But as Marvel crested, their hopes evaporated. Black Panther got a Best Picture nom and wins for production design, costumes and soundtrack in 2019; Avengers: Endgame got a nom for its VFX in 2020. But that, clearly, was not close enough to a cigar for Marvel and Disney.

So it changed tack. In came directors like Zhao – then on the back of her Oscar wins for Nomadland – following indie darlings Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, whose billion-dollar hit Captain Marvel was one of the few real successes of the indie-to-mega-franchise pipeline (see also Cloverfield's Matt Reeves making a hit of emo Batman for DC).

Still no big awards. And, you know, it was kind of always going to go that way. Zhao didn't feel like a terrific fit. There are vast oceans of time and space between what made Nomadland good (textural character stuff, gently absorbing drama, Frances McDormand) and what made Endgame good (time travel, quipping, every Funko Pop you've ever seen turning up at the end). It was a brave change of tack, but little of Zhao's skill and empathy made it to screen, while the gently absorbing drama congealed into .

It took Joaquin Phoenix to break that particular duck with the Best Actor gong for Joker, and that was kind of cheating anyway – he'd already been nominated three times and is about as heavyweight a presence as there is.

All this hovering around awards-anointed filmmakers feels like a bit of a beg. These studios seem to have forgotten that the Oscars are fundamentally quite silly. Let's not forget that in the rush to create an award which a big box office smash could actually win the Academy created the Fan Favourite category for the 2022 ceremony. That one was won by that modern classic, Zak Snyder's Army of the Dead. The category did not return for the 2023 ceremony.

And anyway, you've got billions of dollars, Disney. Maybe you could just buy one? Officially, winners aren't meant to sell their statuettes without offering it to the Academy for $1 – and even then the Academy takes quite a dim view. Orson Welles' Best Screenplay Oscar for Citizen Kane from 1942 went for $862,000 a decade or so ago. You could definitely pick one up and just change the name on it.

On the surface of it the Daniels way look like a far more instinctively sound fit. They have, at least, made films about space and time and all that. That said, what they do best is no-holds-barred silliness and strangeness encasing something of real emotional depth, and the one dramatic galaxy Star Wars has yet to colonise is that of the light hearted bants. There are funny bits in Star Wars; they are not funny films. They tried doing something wacky once, and it turned into the Star Wars Holiday Special.

So this may well turn out brilliantly. It might just be a one-off, a single episode of daftness in a Stranger Things-y adventure about some interesting kids lost in space. But I wouldn't hold your breath to see those kids getting home by riding Palpatine's farting corpse like a jetski.