Star Wars fans baffled by Tatooine's official population: 'that seems wrong'

Star Wars fans are just finding out exactly how many people live on Tatooine, the homeworld of both Luke and Anakin Skywalker, and, well… yeah, that does seem a little bit unbelievable.

Considering how important Tatooine is, as it quite literally shaped the entire history of the Star Wars galaxy, it’s kind of easy to forget that it is just some backwater desert planet.

That’s probably why several people haven’t reacted particularly well to a recent post by the Star Wars Holocron Twitter account, which stated that “The population of Tatooine is 200,000. That’s about 2.4% the population of New York City.”

Ok, well, that does seem wrong. For comparison, that means the entire planet of Tatooine has fewer people than Newcastle does.

The commenters find this statistic to be borderline impossible.

“Somebody tell Lucasfilm and Disney and them how to accurately describe a whole planets population because that’s straight up an incorrect number for a whole planet with multiple cities”, commented user @BrotherNature75.

“I feel like this number can only work if you don’t count the Jawas and Sand People and even then it feels like a stretch”, replied user @macol025.

So, the real question is… what’s the official source of this information?

According to the Star Wars Fandom wiki page for Tatooine, the source for this is the 2015 Disney published book Star Wars: Journey Through Space.

Now I can’t find the exact quote from the book that specifies this source, but I’m inclined to trust that the folks over on the Star Wars Fandom wiki have done their homework.

I am, however, not inclined to believe that the folks who actually Star Wars: Journey Through Space didn’t just pull this figure out of thin air.

Alternatively, whoever gave them that info may have accidentally omitted a zero or two somewhere, because we’re talking about an entire planet here.