> At the heart of this mess is Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy

Took too long for the article to mention this. How can she possibly still have a job? It was her call to hire 3 different directors for the sequels (initially, I know Abrams came back) with no agreed upon direction of the plot. Complain about Rian Johnson’s (awful) episode 8, but ultimately it was Kennedy that gave him free reins to do what he wanted.

It’s just mind boggling that the very same company that’s done an amazing job building a unified “universe” with Marvel by Kevin Feige has done such an awful job with Star Wars by Kennedy.

I am going to lose some karma over that comment:

As someone who has not watched star wars before being adult but is pretty fond of fantasy and sci-fi, I am wondering if the simplest explanation for the constant disappointments is that the universe and source material are not that great in the first place. Is it possible that in 2023, a good chunk of the love for star war movies is due to fond childhood/90's memories that are impossible to recapture? I am hard pressed to find people that became passionated about star wars by discovering them late in their life.

If I am right, then what to do? People are going to be unhappy if the franchise tries to modernize itself and make drastic changes, but they will also be unhappy if they get more of the same because it won't have the madeleine effect.

At the end of the day, nobody's left who understands what Star Wars is about. It's a ship adrift.

Marvel works because of the endless nerd wrangling in the comics world imposing narrative discipline and critical standards. Plus the crappy stories don't make it to the big screen. Star Wars just doesn't have that: it's a cathedral and there's no bishop, vs. the much more bazaar and bizarre comic book processes.

Needs a genius at the helm or it flounders. Where's Marcia Lucas these days?

>The third Skywalker trilogy started off with a bang in late 2015 with The Force Awakens, only to end with a whimper four years later as fans deserted the franchise.

The Rise of Skywalker grossed over a billion dollars at the box office. The current crop of TV shows are some of the most popular things on TV. That isn't what I'd call "desertion". Disney can milk Star Wars for years to come.

It wouldn't surprise me if they've already made back their investment. The five Disney Star Wars movies have made over $4 billion gross. That's not accounting for the parks or merchandising.

I don't see any doom and gloom here for Disney. Things are bad for the moviegoing public, sure, but Disney is doing fine.

Commenters seem upset that the reason the movies suck is that they are somehow ideological, probably "woke".

This puts the cart before the horse. What do you expect to get when the whole context of the article is about how Disney could milk more money using some acquired intellectual property? The endless sequels are meant to make money, not be good movies with creative new ideas - those are risky. Whatever wokeness you find in the movies is just a calculated attempt at mass appeal.

> “The problem isn’t Kathleen Kennedy.”

I am not entirely sure that matters. Pissed-off fans undoubtedly want to see metaphorical blood for what, to their eyes, was a forced, ideologically-driven tarnishing of their childhood memories. At the end of the day, the buck stops at the top. Chapman was already punted as a general scapegoat, but is it enough?

The new trilogy killed my interest in the franchise and I was a lifelong fan.

The movies have been quite profitable even after Hollywood accounting. Without even talking about licensing and merchandising, how much more money were the movies supposed to make?

Among other issues at Lucasfilm before the acquisition was they just didn’t make much anymore. Star Wars, one of the biggest series ever created, sat from 1984 to 1999 without any features (outside of Ewoks made for TV entries). The universe was left to novelists and game creators. Indiana Jones was similar.

Both of these were created in the spirit of serials, but then the series stopped unceremoniously.

Other entries like Willow weren’t main stream hits and Lucasfilm just stopped making movies for about 10 years. By the time George Lucas directed again it had been 22 years since he had directed a movie.

A lot of wonderful things have come out of Lucasfilm, but it was pretty much abandoned by the 90s.

Both the Star Wars and Indy universes are great, but let new creators make new things. I’d much rather see a mediocre original concept than yet another mediocre franchise movie.

> “To get the Force back, Lucasfilm needs to reconnect with its Joseph Campbell roots—the inner set of mythologies we’re all hardwired to that motivated Lucas to create Star Wars in the first place,” said Schiffer.

Oh, lord. I really hope they don't follow this playbook. The hero's journey is SO played out. I honestly think there is a huge market for stories that do NOT revolve around saving the world/galaxy/universe.

The force awakens grossed above $2B, and the next two grossed around $1B each. Their budgets were around $250-300M. They'll be fine.

The mandelorian is pretty fun in fairness.

Loss leader for Disney+

They are purposely taking a hit on box office sales, to drive Disney+ subscriptions.

Turning Red, Soul, and Luca were all movies that dropped on Disney+ the same day they hit theaters.

How can you gauge the "success" based solely on box office sales, when Disney's strategy is using this content as a loss leader strategy to drive subscriptions to Disney+?

The casting of Phoebe Waller-Bridge in the new Indiana Jones was a terrible mistake. She doesn't have the looks to pull off the role. What a weird choice. Makes the movie unwatchable tbh

Harvard Business Review will do a case study on Disney on how to best avoid tackling a new customer segment and piss off/insult your core users at the same time

> Now that growth has faltered, with 4 million customers canceling their membership in the three months through March

I had read that most of that cancellation was due to Disney+ losing the rights to Cricket matches in India. Was that not the case? I think I only saw it in threads here and Twitter, so I don't know if it is true or not.

Edit: Hmm, that seems to be true: https://qz.com/disney-is-losing-subscribers-with-the-loss-of... claims that the loss from Cricket is 4.6 million.

Even the parks are getting sucked down into the mire.. They stupidly made Ride of the Resistance based on the new trilogy.. teaming up with the worst characters in Star Wars is not a winning ride..

Whatever the process was for Andor, do that for everything else.

Not everything is lost yet.

Rogue One was not that bad. And Andor was actually good, much better than I expected.

I knew the Disney trilogy was bad, when fans started saying the prequel trilogy was like Shakespeare compared to the Disney Star wars.

It's crystal clear progressive propaganda over took good decision making. The 'force is female' marketing was incredibly dumb and alienating to my young sons, who would have been the perfect target for Star Wars type stuff. The 'force is for everyone' would have been so much better.

Then ruining the legacy of Luke, Han, and Leia was the final touches on destroying the brand. Even Mark Hamill was so surprised by the direction Luke Skywalker took that he had to justify the performance to himself by claiming he played another character named "Jake Skywalker." https://comicbook.com/starwars/news/star-wars-the-last-jedi-...

The Mandalorian is another example of suddenly pushing progressive politics by switching main characters in the later seasons, where it's clear the audience just wanted a cowboy in space series. (I didn't watch it, but my Husband did)

I'll take the other side of the popular opinion about Disney and Star Wars: I think Disney is doing a fine job with Star Wars. Great? No. Fine? Yes.

* The Mandalorian is some of the best Star Wars content ever produced, period. They really need to get Jon Favreau at the helm of all things Star Wars. By the way, if you've watched Friends, look up his face. You'll recognize him as the late 90s software entrepreneur that dated Monica.

* They need to step away from the cliche hero's journey stuff (as I mention in another comment on this thread). The Mandalorian is great and refreshing precisely because Mando is not really trying to save the world and it's not following that super boring and predictable narrative arc. The Rey saga sucked because they stuck to the playbook too much.

* Visions is pretty cool. Of course it's kind of jarring to see so many different intrepretations of the Star Wars universe, but I respect what they're doing there.

So yeah, I could keep going, but you get the gist: they're doing fine. It hasn't crashed into the ground.

The Force left Lucasfilm with RotJ. It all sucked decades before Kennedy came in. The only decent movie was Rogue One, and she produced that.

"Somehow, Lucasfilm is struggling."

How about a Grim Fandango movie? Or a Sam & Max or Monkey Island movie?

I think it’s the exact opposite. The universe is one of the most compelling around. There is so much fiction (cannon and non-canon), and there was even a pen&paper RPG back in the day that was great fun. There is an enduring love for the universe because it’s a great tapestry for many types of story.

I do agree there is a lot of rose-tinted fondness for the movies; they don’t hold up well IMO. The problem for new blockbuster movies is that the Campbell “hero’s journey” story style is incredibly cliche these days. In many ways the original Star Wars defined the tropes but you can’t just go back and revisit and do another “it’s your destiny to save the galaxy” arc after the Skywalker saga.

My prescription would be to really lean into the richness of the universe, and tell some truly new stories. Mandolorian was trying to do this but they chickened out and added baby Yoda as a callback to the original storyline, plus there were no Jedi at the point I got bored and stopped watching in S2 - there is a tension here as I think there are interesting non-Jedi stories to tell, but after a while you really want to see the magic. I also think a lead with an inexpressive mask was a tactical error that compounds after a while.

There is a bunch of interesting stuff you could explore in the Old Republic timeline, or you could forge new canon in the post-Skywalker era (maybe go forwards a millennium or so and construct some new power dynamics, perhaps tell some fall of empire / decadence / rise of dark side stories).

I think the new anime series (Visions) is some of the best content to come out of the universe, and it’s certainly fresh. It really showcases how much potential there is to tell interesting stories in the universe, and the shift to anime allows the Jedi to be more over-the-top in a way I find very entertaining. But I acknowledge that it’s just shorts, and so it suggests they really haven’t figured out how to tell a fresh movie/series-length story in that universe.

It pains me to say this, especially since I saw Star Wars in the theater over 10 times when it first came out, but you have a point.

When I was a kid, I saw Star Wars over 10 times in the theater, and I LOVED it. For the time, it was revolutionary science fiction film. But I remember after the first time I saw it with my dad and I excitedly asked him "what did you think?" He said it was over rated. I remember being crushed by that comment, but now.. I dunno. The plot is pretty weak and predictable.

But I think that's why a lot of fans are so disappointed by the new Disney star wars material. Rogue One seemed like such an elevation of Star Wars - Star Wars for grown ups. And the hope, at least of me, was that Disney+ would run with that. But after Boba Fett, I just walked. It was atrocious.

I think Star Wars is great today for what it accomplished at the time. I enjoy it to a large extent because it is legendary. If you view it in isolation, without the background, knowledge of the era and what impact it had on society, you lose a lot of the feeling watching it. It is like a time machine. Just a fact like that Reagan's strategic defense initiative was called the Star Wars program in the press says tons about the impact the movie had on its audience at the time. This cannot be repeated 40 years later.

This is absolutely part of it. Your favorite Star Wars movies are the ones you saw as a child.

This is my feeling as well, but I find that going up against Star Wars fans is a pointless and unrewarding endeavor.

I also watched star wars as an adult. I find the source material average.

> a forced, ideologically-driven tarnishing of their childhood memories

I'm sure there is a minority that believes this, but the majority know that there is no ideological drive, only a greed one. Alignment with current social issues happens based on calculations of profit, not based on sincere ideological commitment.

Making good movies is hard, making movies following current social issues is easy. Both bring money, one is a lot more consistent - and the negative press keeps the properties in the media far longer than they usually would.

I have no love for the extravagant dumpster fire that is the sequels, but "forced, ideologically-driven tarnishing of their childhood memories" could equally (or even better) describe the bunch of loud online critics who were strangely invested in attacking poorly-envisioned black/Asian/female characters, when the arcs of white male characters were honestly no better. (They were made by the same creators, duh.)

Makes me wonder if they are objecting to something else but don't want to say that part loud.

* I'm (obviously) not saying all online critics are like that: it's really easy to hate these movies, they're a total mess.