Franchises have to respect the fans, or why Star Wars sucks now
The Rise of Skywalker, the “final” (for real this time) chapter in the Star Wars saga, just came out. I haven’t seen it yet, but from what I’ve heard, it’s hilariously bad. Pretty much all the leaks reported on by Doomcock (hail) proved to be true. It’s a dumpster fire of a movie that has proven to be the final nail in the coffin for Star Wars as a cinematic brand.
If you’ve been following the mess, it became quite clear early on that there was never any plan in place for the sequel trilogy. They were just winging it. It shows in the disjointed, often nonsensical narrative and video game like plot of the films. It’s something that makes the prequels look good, and that’s saying something. Now, George Lucas had penned a plan for the trilogy, which was promptly rejected by Disney. Which was their first major mistake.
The second was hiring J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson to direct. Arguably two of the worst directors working on big budget pictures in Hollywood today. I’d rather watch a Star Wars film directed by Tommy Wisseau than these two clowns. Yeah, Looper was okay, but Johnson is an experimental filmmaker with an ego the size of Manhattan. A man with no real experience directing blockbuster popcorn films. Which was painfully evident in many of the bizarre choices made for The Last Jedi. A film which starkly divided the Star Wars fandom more so than even the Phantom Menace did nearly two decades earlier.
Which brings us to our third mistake, and perhaps the biggest of all: attacking the fandom. Now, if you’re in business, and put out a product people hate, you go back to the drawing board and give the people something they do want. See New Coke for a good example on this. What you don’t do, though, is let your employees pile on your customers for not liking what they created. Not Lucasfilm, who’s staff jumped on Twitter to slander fans as racists, misogynists, and bigots for disliking the movie. Which seems to be the thing to do these days, because every disagreement has to go directly to the nuclear option.
All this served to do was unify a large chunk of the fandom to fight back under the “Fandom Menace” banner. With its three founders; Geeks + Gamers, World Class Bullshitters, and Ethan van Schiver rapidly gaining a large following on their respective YouTube channels. Then others started to jump on board, causing the movement to grow rapidly and dwarf the pro-sequel pundits. So much so that Disney was eventually forced to acknowledge them, while simultaneously downplaying their influence.
However, it’s clear that pressure from the fandom resulted in many of the design choices in Rise of Skywalker. At the same time, it seemed that Lucasfilm and J.J. Abrams tried to have their cake and eat it too. It’s a movie that tries to appeal to everyone. The original fandom, general audiences, the SJWs, the weird Reylo shippers (who are my new Bronies). Yet they just managed to piss off all these groups. All be it for different reasons. Nobody got what they wanted out of this film. It still broke the universe, was a boring mess, downplayed the “diverse” characters, and Rey and Kylo didn’t get a happy ending. So far it’s tracking to have the lowest opening out of the three sequel trilogy films. While it will be a financial success, no doubt, both mainstream and independent pundits are now predicting that it will not meet investor expectations. It all depends on how much it drops off going into its second week.
Many of the problems with these movies largely stems for taking the fandom for granted. When releasing any new entry into an old and well established brand, you have to focus on appealing to your core customers first and foremost. Those are the early adopters who evangelize your products. If they like it, they will encourage their friends to buy it. However, don’t just assume that they will buy any old crap you can put out. Jilted brand loyalists are a showman’s worst nightmare. Never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing. This is precisely why Solo flopped at the box office.
The problem with working in existing media franchises is that brand loyalists already have set expectations of what a new product should look like. The Star Wars universe already had a rich lore that fans had grown accustom to. There is room for creativity in storytelling, but you also have always bare in mind the history and rules that bind the imaginary universe together. Which will inevitably limit design choices.
Disney, however, chose to toss all of it in the trash to focus on their own creative choices, and avoid paying royalties to Lucas and EU writers. Yet despite all that creative freedom, they came up with nothing of substance, while breaking the fundamental logic that governs the Star Wars universe. Which ultimately serves to break the audience’s suspension of disbelief.
In other words, you can’t have Rey instantly have all the force powers with zero practise, while making Anakin, Luke, and every other Jedi train for years. It’s almost laughable when Rey whips out the lightsabre and defeats the big baddie with her hands tied behind her back, despite being gutter trash only a few hours earlier. You also can’t you have Palpatine survive when Lucas himself had intended him to be definitively dead at the end of Return of the Jedi. Again because it fundamentally breaks the story of the prequel and original trilogies. This is why fans keep reiterating that Rise of Skywalker makes Anakin’s sacrifice irrelevant.
There’s been suggestions that this was done deliberately in order to make a political statement. That the Star Wars mythos and hero’s journey had become like a religion for large groups of people around the world, and that had to be torn down by groups looking to replace it with progressivism. Of course, there’s certainly been no shortage of “woke” films lately that try to push a left wing political agenda. Plus I think it’s hard to deny the political overtones present through the Disney Trilogy. Rey is obviously intended to be a feminist hero, which has been backed by Kathleen Kennedy’s “Force is Female” campaign. Not to mention the heavy use of political talking points by Disney employees to attack the fandom.
However, there’s an old saying that you should never attribute malice for something which can be equally attributed to incompetence. I don’t think anybody working at the company is smart enough to pull off something so subversive. At least on purpose. I think it’s simply a matter of a lack of direction, and misjudging the audience. Which I touched on in an article I penned a while back about SJWs not buying video games. The social media howler monkeys are giving cowardly corporations a skewed view of the social zeitgeist.
I think J.J. wanted to make something that would tickle fans’ nostalgia bone, while “modernizing” the series. Which The Force Awakens certainly did. Most fans seem to agree that, while not a great film, it was okay. Better than the prequels, but just a little too derivative. It’s basically a shot for shot remake of the 1977 original.
Rian Johnson came in though, like a 21st century Ed Wood, and decided “subvert expectations”. Essentially trashing all that was built up in the first film to create… an abomination. From all I’ve read from his manic Twitter postings to interviews with the media, he’s a petty and pompous man who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he is. He also admitted in one interview that he really didn’t understand Star Wars all that much. And that big an ego combined with his ignorance and a desire to irritate the fans resulted in a genuinely bad film. One which ultimately tanked the brand, and forced J.J. Abrams to do some massive backtracking for the third installment. Which is why Rise of Skywalker is such a narrative dog’s breakfast. It essentially crams two films in one.
Johnson was a bad choice to direct, and that decision ultimately falls on Kathleen Kennedy. Someone notorious for hiring and firing directors at a whim. Had they just listened to George Lucas from the start, and settled on a plan for the trilogy, a lot of this grief could have been avoided. But in true Hollywood spirit, egos got in the way. Now we’re at a point where the greatest media franchise of all time has been completely squandered over the course of just four short years.
