Let's hope that this is just what it claims to be: a rumor.

I got turned off by the Britishness of the Kylo Ren and Rey films. The actors had posh British accents; I felt they belonged on a Shakespearean stage. Not on an American popular sci fi film. It was weird. I thought Natalie Portman in the earlier films embraced the American silliness of the films and toned down her British accent and was a fun watch. Even the actor who played Emperor Palpatine understood the campy nature of the films and dove into nerddom lore.

The Kylo Ren and Rey films, to me, was a remake of MacBeth. And I hate MacBeth.

I can understand the business side setting constraints for plot writers to include or exclude certain characters (to tie-in with merchandise and promo campaigns) and maintain reputation, family-friendliness, political orientation, etc. But I always assumed that apart from that stuff, the business side would be mostly uninterested in the storytelling details.

But "cinematic universes" feel like something different. The fictional world and its continuity itself becomes a business asset. Suddenly writers are implementing executive decisions how the world should develop.

On the one hand, it feels a bit like devaluation of the craft. In another context, some space time anomaly that ties different timelines together could make an interesting story, but here it feels functional.

On the other hand, I wonder why they even bother with an in-universe explanation. They could have simply announced that the sequel trilogy is noncanon, or made the next part into a reboot or something like that. Are they so worried that parts of the fandom will drop off if the continuity is ever interrupted? (Ignoring how many times things were already retconned)

I think that's what feels weird about cinematic universes for me. They feel like someone is trying to build a real-world business empire inside a fictional universe.

It's what they probably should have done from day one.

I'm not saying the Thrawn trilogy is like the highest art ever made. It's glorious pop schlock fun, as Star Wars should be. But it reminds me of the way that manga is so often treated as storyboards for the anime adaptations. The books, being books, can't be quite so directly translated, but it's close enough that it shouldn't strain any competent scriptwriter. Assuming Disney still knows how to find such people, a proposition not well supported by recent evidence.

Also, automatic three-movie plan, which could be used to fix up one of Hollywood's biggest problems. I don't know where Hollywood gets its swaggering confidence that they can make multi-movie epics while simultaneously having no plans whatsoever for what the next movie will be, after their repeated, catastrophic, and expensive failures trying to create them. What if, and hear me out here, try not to let your head explode at the audacity of this idea, they didn't try to spend billions of dollars just sort of "winging" it? What if they had an actual plan for how they were going to spend billions of dollars over the course of a decade? I know, I know, it's a crazy idea, but maybe they should give it a try.

“Anything that came out after I was born isn’t that great.”

I could not agree more.

A clever solution is to do the former, in a way that allows for a later consistent adoption of the latter.

While this requires older fans to retcon many years of their own lives, I think we can all agree this will be a small price to pay. Disassociation can be an adaptive response to trauma.

> The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for around an $80 million domestic opening over Memorial Day weekend—a number that would make it the lowest debut in Star Wars theatrical history.

And of course Disney wants to recapture the money bonanza that was generated by the original trilogy, but if they do anything that angers the fans, it get boycotted. If they try to stick with the original patterns, it gets called a remake. They are in a lose/lose situation.

Ultimately the fans need to let the nostalgia go and let the current generation build their own favorite movies instead of being told this or that franchise is the best.

Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.

Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.

The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.

Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].

Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.

Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.

Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.

[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-in...

It should be noted that many writers want to make their own mark and don't care too much about the original work and its popularity… which kind of defeats the purpose of "adapting" it.

I've heard The Witcher suffers/ed from this (≥S02), as some writers hated the original stuff (in which case, why are you here and/or why were you hired?).

Maybe not the highest art ever but both were solid stories memorable enough for us to remember decades later. Thrawn was a respectable villain. We weren't supposed to like him but couldn't deny his competence.

Of memorable blue people, for comparison I've watched Avatar twice and don't remember a thing about it.

They could print money by just having Bob Iger stand silently in front of a camera flipping off the audience for two hours and calling it Star Wars. Every one of those films were profitable. They'll keep doing it, and people will keep paying for it.

I'm reminded of the related Mr. Miyagi meme, LaRusso: "Will you train me?", Miyagi: "I hate everything and want to die." The End.

We have 4k77 and the follow-up projects. I doubt Disney would release anything I’d prefer to those. They would probably find a way to make their version slightly worse.