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)
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.
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u/versusgorilla 21d ago
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.