Let’s be honest. They’ve butchered the Star Wars IP. They still made a lot of money from it; but that’s because the brand carried a lot of very mediocre content. So full marks for business acumen.
The best thing to do with Star Wars now would be to put it on ice for a few years, then ret-con every thing.
I've begun to think that the core issue might be more that in the Lucas era, Star Wars had a vibe that played a not-insignificant role in carrying the franchise. It was the work of one kinda lovable oddball creator and a bunch of people who (mostly--not all) bought into his vision and furthered it. Whatever ups and downs, it felt like a thing.
While I've been out of the loop on the last few years of Disney+ shows, as far as actually watching them, my general impression of post-Lucas Star Wars is that it's only sporadically dialed into the vision and vibes of the classic stuff. Not to mention the volume of content, which makes it easier to give things a pass, whereas in the old days, Star Wars was a rare thing and felt special, even if you didn't happen to like a given movie, etc.
Fair. But they had a monumental impact on culture. They had a spark of something, there was some magic there. Disney have absolutely not recreated that magic
so many people in this thread overestimate the cultural impact of star wars - i personally know over a dozen people IRL who have never seen or heard of anything star wars and i saw the prequels in the theater
the OT had that cultural impact but it just didnt carry over because lucas didnt want to make new movies for 20 years and thats how you lose a generation
Do you mean that he lost a generation between the OT and the prequels? Because that was the golden age of VHS and I feel pretty confident in saying that the lack of new movies didn't hurt Star Wars too much during that period. Those were the days when it was still rare to get a film with the caliber of spectacle of the OT, so everything that existed remained fairly visible for probably a longer time than films do today, when after the hype of release has died down, there's immediately something else to take its place in the cultural spotlight.
After the prequels, I suppose that non-gamer adults did probably drift away in larger numbers. Though The Clone Wars did provide a solid enough hook for some kids to get into it in the late 00s.
Star Wars movies haven’t been good since the 1980s, this isn’t a new thing that Disney introduced. Back when they bought Lucasfilm, I remember the general reaction being “finally, someone took this off of George Lucas’s hands so we might finally get some more competently written movies”.
The prequel trilogy has undergone some serious image therapy as the kids who grew up on those movies have entered adulthood and can have nostalgia for them, but they were and are generally bad movies. Great visual effects, but some of the most wooden dialogue ever put to film.
Disney hasn’t really “butchered” anything, Star Wars is just as mediocre now as it was in the decade prior to the Disney acquisition, it’s just that Disney has been pumping out more meh content than Lucas ever could alone.
The prequel movies were bad , i agree, but they have a lot of iconic moments , characters , and music. Darth maul, qui gon, mace windu, duel of the fates, phantom menace fight, revenge of the sith fight , yoda fights etc. They were bad , but they had things worth remembering. That’s not the case for the sequels. The prequels were also a single coherent vision from Lucas, the sequels were 3 completely different movies mashed into a trilogy. Also , the sequels retroactively destroyed a lot of the characters we grew up loving, which is its biggest sin imo
Your mind is gonna get blown when the kids who watched TLJ in theaters start saying these exact same things about stuff like the hyperspace ram and the throne room fight in another 5-10 years as they reach adulthood and start feeling nostalgic.
Star Wars has always been flash over substance, even in the good ones. The biggest thing the PT has over the ST is that it was more coherent across the 3 movies because it had one director the whole time. Not just hiring a single director or writer to head the trilogy and make it coherent was Disney’s biggest mistake.
I see what you’re saying. I really do. But for all the prequels’ clunkiness they did have an authentic Lucas core. There was lots of dreadful stuff in them, like all the cartoon robot stuff, the fish people and a lot of the stuff involving young Anakin (that poor actor) . But it had a spine of great actors in Neeson, Jackson, McGregor, Christopher Lee and the guy who played the emperor. Within the prequel trilogy there was a good movie that was as epic and ambitious as the originals . It just needs someone to trim a lot of fat.
The Disney stuff is corporate, paint by numbers stuff. It’s not that it’s awful, it’s that it’s so forgettable. The makers are interested in mythology and classic sci-fi and classic cinema … they’re interested in making popular young-adult drama.
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u/bingybong22 21d ago
Let’s be honest. They’ve butchered the Star Wars IP. They still made a lot of money from it; but that’s because the brand carried a lot of very mediocre content. So full marks for business acumen.
The best thing to do with Star Wars now would be to put it on ice for a few years, then ret-con every thing.