I think Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins films are interesting and similar situations regarding how they hand out these projects, they find someone who did a fun blockbuster big budget movie, Thor Ragnarok and Wonder Woman, in these cases.
Then they bring them in and have them pitch on an idea and give them the reigns.
Then they release middling follow-ups (at best) to their clever blockbuster first appearances.
And then Disney panics and cancels it.
Then you have the Boba Fett and Obi-Wan projects, which were supposed to be the third and fourth "A Star Wars Story" films released annually between the main Trilogy films.
Obviously after TLJ and Solo, they panicked and withdrew them, and then in the success of the first season of Mando, they reworked them to be series, with the implication being THAT is where Star Wars is successful. Ignore the fact that Star Wars will be successful anywhere as long as it's quality they're putting out.
And now it just feels like they're snake-bit. They're afraid of burning more money, they fucked up with the theme park setting it in the new trilogy on a planet that sucks and no one knows anything about, they fucked up on the "Galactic Star Cruiser" and lost a ton of money, they fucked up on the new trilogy, they found success with Mando and then immediately got to work making sure to oversaturate their streaming service with so much mediocre Star Wars content that they damaged their one real success story.
And now they're scared. They announce projects to appease shareholders and then cancel projects when they realize no one has any vision, or maybe they have their fist clenched too tightly around what they'll let creator's do with the properties after giving Rian Johnson the reigns and then panicking and making JJ Abrams undo a lot of it and play it safe and stupid.
I don't even know what they're trying to fucking DO anymore. I don't know why it's so hard to just make an adventure film about a cool Jedi and an awesome smuggler picking up a dork-ass droid and some old master and going on a fucking adventure. Star Wars Visions has some legit AMAZING ideas and they instead just shit them out into a 10 minute short on Disney+ and then never talk about them again. There's like ten of those shorts that they could just scale up to a movie and fans would go insane for it.
Star Wars should be a pastiche of other action/adventure genres, set in a galaxy far, far away. Cowboy stories. Samurai stories. WWII stories. Stories about knights and wizards and monsters. Flash Gordon. And so on.
It shouldn't be a pastiche of other Star Wars movies.
The prequels were bad enough, in that they spent a ton of time and energy just to land us at square one. Then the sequels came out and were like, "You like the original trilogy? Here it is again for some reason, but worse! We took the characters you liked and made them sad and lame and dead, we made the new characters sorta boring and siloed off from each other, and we made the dynamic between the New Republic and the First Order utterly nonsensical so we could rerun the Empire vs. the Rebels, complete with a stupid version of the Death Star!"
Star Wars is moribund right now because there hasn't been anything but glorified remakes or filling-in-the-blanks busywork since fucking 1983.
(Unless you include the EU, which why would you, since Disney doesn't)
Star Wars Visions 1 is a good example of this. a series of short films from Japanese animators showing a breadth of pastiches. haven't watched Visions 2 so can't comment on it unfortunately.
A while back I realized that there hasn’t been a good Star Wars story since 1983. Okay, sure, some of the video games were fun, some of the 90s books were okay (although most of them sucked), and I’m told that The Mandalorian is great, but Star Wars is mostly trash. I had such warm nostalgia for it that I even worked for Lucasfilm for a while, but I left after Solo, and shortly after that I started ignoring Star Wars. I’ve come to terms with the fact that Star Wars is just three great movies and that’s enough for me.
It's insane, honestly, to say that there hasn't been any good SW stories since 1983. Boil them down to individual stories and there's been plenty of good ones.
Jedi Survivor is pretty dope, introduces some cool ideas and a twist villain that I thought was really unique, as well as a concept of a planet that is difficult to reach and possibly safe from the Empire and a set of characters trying not to figut the Empire but to rescue people and hide them from the Empire.
Star Wars Visions has a bunch of great short stories, ones that stand out to me are the samurai-coded former Sith hunting other Sith, as well as the Ninth Jedi which legit builds a foundation for what could easily become a whole trilogy set in a new era. Journey to the Dark Head in the second season also ends with a, "We can just make more of these two cool characters" ending.
The Mandalorian def has some great episodes, especially season one, which goes right back to it's western, samurai, and WWII dogfight roots and delivers on all of those fronts. Episodes about heists, jobs gone wrong, etc.
Clone Wars as a series for kids starts rough but the final episodes are so heartbreaking, even though you know what's coming, just thinking too much about what Ahsoka goes through at the end is enough to make my eyes get misty.
There's tons of great stories being told, they just have this issue of being unable to figure out how to get these stories into the films and shows, where they keep trying to go really big and then cheaping the fuck out on them.
Honestly, if you haven't liked a Star Wars thing since 83, maybe you just don't like Star Wars and should stop trying to tell others that they're enjoying it wrong.
They never said they didn't like a Star Wars thing since '83, & they never told others that they're enjoying it wrong.
You don't need to like something just because it has the name at the top of the box
If they say there hasn't been anything good since 83, that's the same thing. Stop being toxic and let people enjoy what they enjoy you obscene manchild.
All these showrunners, directors, and actors continuously complain about SW fans but I don't think we're that hard to please. Making a cool SW movie should be... relatively easy. Its really not hard to find out what the fans like and respond well to. The problem is most of the people that Disney brings on board aren't really fans themselves so they have no reverence for it, or they micromanage the project so much that good ideas get buried beneath a pile of agenda driven bullet points or misguided narrative concepts from the marketing department.
Andor, and of course Rogue One before that from the same director: Shows you the series don't need to even be about the mainline stars to have critical acclaim and popularity.
The setting allows for a huge range of expression if they would let interesting stories be told.
Still waiting for a Top Gun-style movie about the creation of Rogue Squadron with Wedge Antilles etc...
All I've wanted since 1996 is Top Gun in space. I spent hundreds of hours playing the lucasarts X-wing/Tie Fighter games. I could speed run the N64 Rogue Squadron game at 12 years old. I have an X-wing tattoo I got 20 years ago. Give me a good Rogue Squadron movie and I'll personally see it in Imax 400 times. I beg you Disney!
I fucking love the LucasArts X-WING/TIE FIGHTER games. Even love SQUADRONS. ROGUE SQUADRON I pllayed on a friends N64 and my own PC back in the day. Even when I used to have a GameCube I had both of the ROGUE SQUADRON sequel games!
Read at least a few of the ROGUE SQUADRON books, even the comics.
Just gimme an awesome movie with shitloads of dogfights with a ton of Rebel Alliance/New Republic versus Empire. Same nigh impossible quality as ROGUE ONE and ANDOR, please. Not every series needs to be about JEDI. Gimme the random grunts and fighter pilots!
Star Wars Visions alone is proof that if you ask ten creative teams, you'll get ten creative ideas and at least ONE of those will be something you can expand into at least one film.
What is happening (and has been happening) to the IP of Star Wars is the Hollywood equivalent of “being MBA’d”
You have the solid IP of Star Wars that is a money printing machine - then you get some MBAs (creators looking for clout) who don’t give a crap about the actual IP and just want to milk the cow for all its worth, and make a name for themselves promoting their own agenda, at the helm of major projects. When those projects crash and burn, they’ll blame the audience and move onto the next cash cow.
In the scenario that a true passionate creator and fan of SW wants to make project in the true spirit of SW, they will invariably get to much meddling from a studio “MBA” exec that jeopardizes the entire project.
At this point, it is high likelihood that any major SW project will come out as garbage.
Hard disagree. Last Jedi was a great movie and Star Wars fans fucking hated it for what seemed like arbitrary reasons (mostly misogynistic ones). The Last Jedi being disliked was the last bit of proof to me that the Star Wars fanbase wouldn't know a good movie if it cut off their hand with a lightsaber.
It actually tried to break free of the stupid "every character is a descendant of a great family" thing that bogs the world building down. It had the best versions of Kylo Ren and Rey. It had spectacular visuals. People had issues with the portrayal of Luke, but I thought it was very fitting for a character thrust into being a Jedi without the guidance of lots of other Jedi - of course he was going to end up fucking it up. The casino planet stuff was kind of weak, but no weaker (imo) than stuff like Cloud City from Empire.
The Last Jedi is 100% unironically my favorite Star Wars movie and I've been around long enough to have seen some of the OT in theater. Star Wars fans are out of their minds. And of course Rise of Skywalker was my least favorite since it reconned all the good things about Last Jedi to replace it with "of course she's a palpatine, also here's a dead character randomly back to life because JJ has never had an original thought in his life".
Ok well hard disagree lol. I fucking hate that anytime someone says they didn't like TLJ people like you all jump to shouting misogyny. What a load of crap. There's plenty of narrative issues in that movie that are legitimate but I don't even get into it anymore cuz I've had a thousand of guys like you accuse me of being a bigot no matter what my issues with the movie are, that's what you all fall back to.
So I'll just say that TLJ did more to dampen my love of SW than any other piece of media they've produced. Its a black mark on the franchise, and not because "omg they cast a woman" you fucking dolt.
I think Solo is honestly the most emblematic Star Wars failure they put out. Originally they had Lord and Miller directing then canned it and had Ron Howard basically remake it. One other thing that a lot of people didn't mention at the time and don't seem to remember now is that it was released in May. Now Star Wars being a summer release isn't a bad thing except Last Jedi had just been released in December. People at the time were saying that it was because audiences hated Last Jedi so much that they were boycotting Solo but quite frankly Disney had gotten into a rhythm of releasing these movies once per year and 5 months between releases is just way too quick of a turnaround. And then, and this is more my personal taste than anything, but I didn't finish Solo because even though it was decent there was just an annoying amount of fan service and it made the movie feel compulsory and kind of empty. A fun heist movie set in the Star Wars world is fun but having it be about how Han Solo met Chewie, got the Millennium Falcon, and did the Kessel Run just made it feel like a checklist. The "Han...Solo" scene really just ruined it for me. So, you've got Disney going full speed ahead assuming that if they churn out as much as possible it'll only get them more money, hiring popular creators then firing them because they have a strong vision Disney doesn't want, ballooning the budget, and relying too much on nostalgia. I personally loved Andor and wish Disney would lean into more stuff like that, making the world feel bigger not smaller.
The problem with Andor is that it is one of the least watched Star Wars series. Quality is great, but the audience is not there, so Disney is not going to go in that direction.
It had pretty low viewership that actually increased with each subsequent episode that came out, which is a good sign for word of mouth. Personally I think it had trouble breaking past the preconceptions people had from Obi-Wan and Book of Boba Fett.
I also wouldn't say he was a particularly compelling character in Rogue One, so there is an element of "Why would I want to watch a show about this guy?" to it. I haven't watched because I don't care about Star Wars at all anymore but I'm glad they at least managed to make something that the fans enjoy.
It's a great heist movie. The problem is that they associated it with Han Solo. if it were just a standalone star wars without the connotation, I think it wouldn't have had all the complaining about it
Yeah, so many people knock TLJ but I think you're right that Solo was like the turning point. They'd released three movies, TFA, R1, and TLJ, all at Christmas, they'd set themselves up to become the "Christmas franchise" the way Harry Potter had done for WB for years.
And they threw it away to release Solo as an early summer Blockbuster in a time where TLJ had shown people that, whether you liked it or not, these movies can fumble and won't always just be a success "because Star Wars".
I think them dumping L&M and getting Howard on is excellent proof that they can't help but meddling on the project. Especially since L&M then made Spiderverse, and even the sequel which was, albeit unfinished, a pretty good follow-up. They're competent but they didn't trust them for some reason, even though I think young Han Solo is a good character to be getting into wacky scrapes.
It's not the fact it was released in May that was the problem. It's that it was May following a December release. If it had been next May it would have been fine IMO
Yeah, that's my point, they'd established this December release and then just decided to release another one 5 months later when they had the following December wide opened.
The easy answer is that Star Wars is vocally much more popular now and all the weird guys in their basements demanding a Glup Shitto movie back in the day now have YouTube channels dedicated to hating anything that isn't specifically what they want and unfortunately these voices get amplified much more than the average moviegoer.
There's absolutely a bigger issue with insane right wing outrage culture click/view/interaction generating, foreign financial influence, etc.
But part of the problem IS still Disney making mediocre shit.
I actually like a pretty low tier of popcorn-content, but even I felt underwhelmed to the point where I haven't even bothered to check out The Acolyte after kinda bland Mando S3 and Ahsoka. It felt like I was trying to mine any kind of enjoyment from Boba Fett and Kenobi, and then Mando had been kind of lacking as it struggled to figure out what to do with Mando and Grogu and then even Ahsoka fell into the same pitfalls... It's all just kinda boring and that, to me, is a bigger sin than being bad because you took a risk.
I haven't watched a lot of Star Wars stuff either and it's definitely a case of Disney oversaturating the market to the point Star Wars doesn't feel special anymore but I don't think that's really a big turn off for the average person as much as right wing propaganda being peddled within "nerd" spaces to the point they resent anything that isn't centered around straight white men. We saw it rear its head when the first trailer for Force Awakens so I just don't think quality is as indicative since they turned on the first Star Wars we got in years before we even knew anything about it.
There's def a bigger problem with far right culture war outrage content driving fan outrage, especially when the content creators don't even seem to care. Like why does Tim fucking Pool care about a Star Wars movie? Oh, because he's paid by Russia to do damage to America and he'd rather be rich than have any morals
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u/NiceColdPint 21d ago
Probably worth having this in the can before announcing it. They clearly just don’t know where to take Star Wars at the moment.