A Marvelized star wars, with either the shitty nu-wars characters still being the focus, or a bunch of new characters who will likely be ripoffs of old EU characters focus grouped into utter blandness to ensure "broad appeal to NFL players and soccer moms" in the words of certain hacks...assuming they dont push the inevitable full remake of the prequels/OT forward out of desparation...
A Marvelized star wars, with either the shitty nu-wars characters still being the focus, or a bunch of new characters who will likely be ripoffs of old EU characters focus grouped into utter blandness to ensure "broad appeal to NFL players and soccer moms" in the words of certain hacks...assuming they dont push the inevitable full remake of the prequels/OT forward out of desparation...
A Marvelized star wars, with either the shitty nu-wars characters still being the focus, or a bunch of new characters who will likely be ripoffs of old EU characters focus grouped into utter blandness to ensure "broad appeal to NFL players and soccer moms" in the words of certain hacks...assuming they dont push the inevitable full remake of the prequels/OT forward out of desparation...
Create characters, storyworlds, and story experiences people want to be a part of.
Who are those people?
Lucas wants to bring in the younger generation (Millenials) as their top priority. Millennial respond well to brands associated with Diversity. OG Star Wars fans are a loyal cash stream [but declining] and Omnipop culture consumers ((i.E. Normies)) will buy any brand they deem popular but the young consumers are helpful in bringing in others.
Also People of the "Diverse" tribe who tends to skew higher and more disposable income (thanks gays)
They also want to sell to Chinamen as their third priority (there are over 300 million movie consumers in china)
Next are "Omni" pop culture consumers [who buy in heavily to NERD CULTURE]
And last is the legacy audience. Legacy audience is the foundation.
How does this make Mr. Mouse Money?
Movies, TV shows, Animated shows, Comics [Licensed product], and video games [ also licensed product]
this is the foundation of our Pyramid
The next level of the Pyramid are "Spin off" products [EU books, Nu_EU books, Spin off comics, TTRPG game [liscensed], Toys, other licensed merch [Han Solo solo cups]. These ideas feed back into the foundation to produce new ideas
The capstone of the Pyramid IS Galaxies edge. Which is supposed to feed back into levels 1 and 2.
So why isnt this working out the way Mr Mouse wants?
Also:
Everyone wanted to play with Luke, Han, and Chewie toys
Who wants to play with Rey, Finn, Poe, and Chewie?
if people dont want to immerse themselves more in that world higher levels of monitization wont work.
And as Disney Canon is seperate from Pre-Merger canon the world is a significantly smaller place so people were being shoved out faster then new people were coming in.....
and why would you want to join a team slitting its own throats?
It goes even a bit beyond that, if you think about Lucasfilm's choices they've managed to do one thing or another to drive away almost every base they wanted to attract while assuming the original fanbase would stick around:
-The Chinese don't have the decades of pop culture osmosis for the nostalgia baiting of the JJ approach to compensate for shallow characters and story, and aren't going to like the various choices Lucasfilm made to try and attract woke Millennials, so unless you commit to making multiple cuts of each movie and risk the anger that'll get you from the perpetually unsatisfied harridans on twitter you're screwed there
-The Nerd Culture bandwagoners were 100% on board, until they let some dude use the middle chapter of their "planned trilogy" as a vehicle to act out his frustrations with the post-TFA fandom, killing every plot thread the hack before him was at least professional enough to set up and leaving nothing new for the following movie to build off of (this was easily their biggest mistake and is probably the actual reason episode IX is tracking so low - one thing I've noticed about every Nerd Culture obsessive who wasn't one pre-Big Bang Theory is that they love speculating about what's going to happen in future installments of their favorite franchises. Game of Thrones made a similar mistake as a lot of the fans were super hype for finding out more about the fantasy elements in the later seasons but D&D, in their infinite wisdom, chose instead to strip out or handwave away those elements)
-The kid market is gone because the woke screenwriters and directors they hired to pander to twitter consider themselves above this nerd shit and keep injecting hamfisted political allegories and a super srs tone into Star Wars products and discussion, and their politics also prevents them from creating interesting characters, so every Disney Donut Steel is a rainbow of beige diversity but are either one-note (Finn, Poe), actively annoying (Rose) or just a pair of pants for women in the audience to self-insert as (Rey). Meanwhile there's a MCU right next door that are fun, quippy, action-packed, and filled with at least reasonably written characters for little Johnny and Susie to play with.
-And the legacy audience who didn't reach the level of cult-like brand worship fucked off after TLJ basically told them to do so.
Well done, Kathleen! You should get a side gig working at USC's business school!
It goes even a bit beyond that, if you think about Lucasfilm's choices they've managed to do one thing or another to drive away almost every base they wanted to attract while assuming the original fanbase would stick around:
-The Chinese don't have the decades of pop culture osmosis for the nostalgia baiting of the JJ approach to compensate for shallow characters and story, and aren't going to like the various choices Lucasfilm made to try and attract woke Millennials, so unless you commit to making multiple cuts of each movie and risk the anger that'll get you from the perpetually unsatisfied harridans on twitter you're screwed there
-The Nerd Culture bandwagoners were 100% on board, until they let some dude use the middle chapter of their "planned trilogy" as a vehicle to act out his frustrations with the post-TFA fandom, killing every plot thread the hack before him was at least professional enough to set up and leaving nothing new for the following movie to build off of (this was easily their biggest mistake and is probably the actual reason episode IX is tracking so low - one thing I've noticed about every Nerd Culture obsessive who wasn't one pre-Big Bang Theory is that they love speculating about what's going to happen in future installments of their favorite franchises. Game of Thrones made a similar mistake as a lot of the fans were super hype for finding out more about the fantasy elements in the later seasons but D&D, in their infinite wisdom, chose instead to strip out or handwave away those elements)
-The kid market is gone because the woke screenwriters and directors they hired to pander to twitter consider themselves above this nerd shit and keep injecting hamfisted political allegories and a super srs tone into Star Wars products and discussion, and their politics also prevents them from creating interesting characters, so every Disney Donut Steel is a rainbow of beige diversity but are either one-note (Finn, Poe), actively annoying (Rose) or just a pair of pants for women in the audience to self-insert as (Rey). Meanwhile there's a MCU right next door that are fun, quippy, action-packed, and filled with at least reasonably written characters for little Johnny and Susie to play with.
-And the legacy audience who didn't reach the level of cult-like brand worship fucked off after TLJ basically told them to do so.
Well done, Kathleen! You should get a side gig working at USC's business school!
It goes even a bit beyond that, if you think about Lucasfilm's choices they've managed to do one thing or another to drive away almost every base they wanted to attract while assuming the original fanbase would stick around:
-The Chinese don't have the decades of pop culture osmosis for the nostalgia baiting of the JJ approach to compensate for shallow characters and story, and aren't going to like the various choices Lucasfilm made to try and attract woke Millennials, so unless you commit to making multiple cuts of each movie and risk the anger that'll get you from the perpetually unsatisfied harridans on twitter you're screwed there
-The Nerd Culture bandwagoners were 100% on board, until they let some dude use the middle chapter of their "planned trilogy" as a vehicle to act out his frustrations with the post-TFA fandom, killing every plot thread the hack before him was at least professional enough to set up and leaving nothing new for the following movie to build off of (this was easily their biggest mistake and is probably the actual reason episode IX is tracking so low - one thing I've noticed about every Nerd Culture obsessive who wasn't one pre-Big Bang Theory is that they love speculating about what's going to happen in future installments of their favorite franchises. Game of Thrones made a similar mistake as a lot of the fans were super hype for the fantasy elements in the later seasons but D&D, in their infinite wisdom, chose instead to strip out or handwave away)
-The kid market is gone because the woke screenwriters and directors they hired to pander to twitter consider themselves above this nerd shit and keep injecting hamfisted political allegories and a super srs tone into Star Wars products and discussion, and their politics also prevents them from creating interesting characters, so every Disney Donut Steel is a rainbow of beige diversity but are either one-note (Finn, Poe), actively annoying (Rose) or just a pair of pants for women in the audience to self-insert as (Rey). Meanwhile there's a MCU right next door that are fun, quippy, action-packed, and filled with at least reasonably written characters for little Johnny and Susie to play with.
-And the legacy audience who didn't reach the level of cult-like brand worship fucked off after TLJ basically told them to do so.
Well done, Kathleen! You should get a side gig working at USC's business school!
No argument to any of that. It's possible to go on for thousands of pages about all the bad decisions they've made, not just creatively but strategically. I walked out of TLJ hating it, but I didn't realize the franchise had become a flaming wreck until the media started attacking the fanbase for daring to question the quality of Rian Johnson's worthless turd of a movie. There is simply no coming back from any of it, and the best thing Disney could do would be to leave the franchise alone for at least 5 years before attempting a new story. But they can't afford to do that. They've already sunk too much capital into it.
However, as far as I'm concerned, all this is mere explanation as to why they're producing shit. We can analyze it all day, but the poor quality is what they can't get around. The dogs don't like the food.
Somewhere at Disney, someone -- not Kennedy; she's too self-satisfied and devoted to her agenda to question her decisions -- is the executive at the end of The Boys: morosely staring out a window and moaning, "Bad product."
More like people who dont have imaginations but a shitty diploma from some hack college, all while they mock you for daring to go some other profession that aids society better.
"Im building culture!" No, your ancestors built culture, you are destroying it because you know you can never surpass it so you dont bother.
And of course they have no kids either, no female or male would get close to them given their awful personality and the fact they hate children at the end of the day.
It goes even a bit beyond that, if you think about Lucasfilm's choices they've managed to do one thing or another to drive away almost every base they wanted to attract while assuming the original fanbase would stick around:
-The Chinese don't have the decades of pop culture osmosis for the nostalgia baiting of the JJ approach to compensate for shallow characters and story, and aren't going to like the various choices Lucasfilm made to try and attract woke Millennials, so unless you commit to making multiple cuts of each movie and risk the anger that'll get you from the perpetually unsatisfied harridans on twitter you're screwed there
-The Nerd Culture bandwagoners were 100% on board, until they let some dude use the middle chapter of their "planned trilogy" as a vehicle to act out his frustrations with the post-TFA fandom, killing every plot thread the hack before him was at least professional enough to set up and leaving nothing new for the following movie to build off of (this was easily their biggest mistake and is probably the actual reason episode IX is tracking so low - one thing I've noticed about every Nerd Culture obsessive who wasn't one pre-Big Bang Theory is that they love speculating about what's going to happen in future installments of their favorite franchises. Game of Thrones made a similar mistake as a lot of the fans were super hype for finding out more about the fantasy elements in the later seasons but D&D, in their infinite wisdom, chose instead to strip out or handwave away those elements)
-The kid market is gone because the woke screenwriters and directors they hired to pander to twitter consider themselves above this nerd shit and keep injecting hamfisted political allegories and a super srs tone into Star Wars products and discussion, and their politics also prevents them from creating interesting characters, so every Disney Donut Steel is a rainbow of beige diversity but are either one-note (Finn, Poe), actively annoying (Rose) or just a pair of pants for women in the audience to self-insert as (Rey). Meanwhile there's a MCU right next door that are fun, quippy, action-packed, and filled with at least reasonably written characters for little Johnny and Susie to play with.
-And the legacy audience who didn't reach the level of cult-like brand worship fucked off after TLJ basically told them to do so.
Well done, Kathleen! You should get a side gig working at USC's business school!
I was never a guy that minded merch and the whole "its to sell toys" argument, I think you can do a fair balance of good plots and characters and the buying of merchandise is merely the results of your work. However, the mouse is despered to make bank on Star Wars, putting it everywhere, hoping we buy just because its Star Wars...do they even know WHY we like Star wars? No, it wasnt just the amazing action scenes and the lightsabers, it was the investment on the plot, universe and characters. To them, Han, Leia and Luke are just fiction to be exploited when thats not what they are, they are meant to represent more within ourselves and our culture. They became MORE than characters, they have become parts of the roots of our culture and society, our modern greek mythos. Thats just like saying that they can do whatever with Batman or Superman, they dont exist! Ignoring the fact that these characters represent something much much more meaning and deeper within our minds and souls. So to reduce all that meaning into mindless corporate desperation is "cultural assassination" in my eyes. I shall never forgive Disney for this and it just adds another reason to the pile to why I think that they dont just deserve to burn down but that they NEED to be vanquished to help restore things to normal.
But hope died within me a long fucking go, Luke tossing his lightsaber was just the confirmation it was all over.
Part of me wonders if 2012 was refering to the beginning of the slow death of our society...
I don't think they can afford to sit on the brand for that long. The movies are big moneymakers in and of themselves, but they also are the primary drivers of Star Wars merchandising. Disney investors are not going to let GE (and everything else) die on the vine to give the movies time to breathe.
My theory is that the cancellation of D&D and Johnson's trilogies were intended to make room for a trilogy directed by Ava DuVernay's proxy, Victoria Mahoney. There was too much press over Mahoney being hired as a second unit director for IX. They're definitely building up her bona fides so no one can criticize her lack of experience or talent when they announce her film (even though, like DuVernay, she's not ready to direct her own blockbuster).
Whatever happened it’s clear the “we don’t have the time” is just an excuse. The Star Wars deal was made before their netflix deal and at the time it was agreed upon netflix had factored in the fact that they would be busy until the mid 2020s because of star wars.
So I think there are only a couple of possibilities.
-D&D are taking a look at the negative buzz going on in star wars fandom as well as the GOT backlash and have decided it is probably more creatively interesting and exciting to focus on a new IP with Netflix, rather than have to put up with nerd rage and drama for the next half decade.
-Creative disagreements betweend D&D and Lucasfilm. I think this might be most likely because Star Wars now has a proven track record of people getting fired for creative differences (Rogue One reshoots, Solo, Colin Trevorrow). HBO is very hands off with creatives and with the success of GOT they were probably doubly so with GOT
-Netflix who is now in a streaming war with Disney decided to back up another couple extra dump trucks full of cash in order to snipe D&D from Disney.
Either way this is just confirmation that star wars is far from the hot property it once was or there are at least major problems with management. I used to think Hollywood directors would be knifing each other in the back to get a star wars gig but it seems like it is increasingly more hassle than it is worth to sign on to a star wars project these days.
Why would a fatty non near-human make any kind of rank in the empire, much less be a Jedi Hunter? He/She/It doesn't even have any cool gear or weapons. This is the only inquisitor I need:
Blind guy who wields his own lightsaber and literally eats jedi souls
EXCLUSIVE: Emmy Award-winning Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have found their new home. Nearly three months after Deadline revealed that Benioff & Weiss were being courte…
deadline.com
The second this happened I knew they would only be "In name only" involved in a Star Wars.
They bounced out which [IMO] means they want to be on Disney's good side
Rian doesnt have prospects beyond grinding out Indie films atm. "It sounds like" [Based on the way its described in media] He had a Handshake deal with Kathleen Kennedy. If he hands in a script then Kennedy can drop it in the trash (on orders from iger). Disney isnt spending any money and as long as he has a nebulous promise then Disney can enforce him keeping his mouth shut about the Last Jedi.
If Kennedy doesn't get renewed (IMO she wont be) his trilogy will get taken out Old Yeller style formally but Disney will give him a Indie Release deal. They dont want the round head doing a tell all when he is a washed up director
Kevin Feige Is making a Star Wars movie. He is the fixer. He is going to teach Lucasfilm how to do things the Marvel Studios way
Rian is being cucked out, and the success or failure of Knives Out will see where he goes, as does how big of a cuck he is. Unlike the GoT guys, Rian doesn't have anything lined up to jump to. And Rian almost certainly had more than a handshake deal if it made it to Variety, but that doesn't mean anything if there is no budget attached.
I'll also say that Rian has better prospects at Disney than GoT guys; Rian could be given a small, non-SW film at Disney or an affiliate, and will likely get that if Knives Out does well and he isn't a total cuck (even if he is a total cuck, because they might convince him to take "small project while we get everything lined up for the trilogy")
If Knives Out bombs, he'll be strung along because he's a naive cuck or he has nothing else. Maybe both.
Kevin Feige is likely getting a SW movie. It depends on how badly EPIX does. As I said before, never believe anything about a project happening unless cameras are rolling. But Kevin is a proven money maker.
There will be a sweet spot where Kevin won't do a SW movie. If EPIX does really well, they'll naturally shoot another movie. If EPIX tanks, they'll probably need to shoot another (good) movie to try to salvage the brand. But if EPIX does just sort of Ok, speculating I would say just around TLJ levels or a little under, I have a feeling the movie will never materialize.
At that level it didn't make enough money to make Disney feel certain about future films, but shows SW still will put butts in seats maintaining the value of the property.
When sorting through Hollywood bullshit its hard to tell if something is legit, spin, or 4-D chess. Lots of stuff people really believe is true and going to happen ends up evaporating. Sometimes it was never real and was just smoke and mirrors. Sometimes people will spin smoke and mirrors shit, get it into the right hands or in front of the right eyes, to make it happen.
Yeah, I forgot they had the Netflix deal lined up. As @Mola Ram said, they probably aren't too broken up over it: The carrot for them was a jump from TV to Movies. That's like a jump from Minors to Majors. (Though not quite, as the jump isn't that severe; there is apparently a soccer analogy that explains the difference better, but as I'm not a eurofag I don't remember it).
I'm not sure exactly what made them jump ship; every director is different and has a different agent backing them up. They may have had a dude doing market research, they may have an inside source at Disney - they might go to a Psychic who told them today is day to tell Disney to go fuck themselves
(Industry Relative says a large number of Studio higher ups & talent visit psychics; I could sperg on that a bit, but the tl;dr is the movement of the stars and moons influences a disturbing amount of shit.)
Its also possible, given the impending Netflix/Disney+ war, they were asked by one party or another to pick a side. Netflix was cutting a check, Disney was still waffling, it was not a hard choice.
Everything is indicating Knives Out is going to be a hit. Whether this is the Hollywood press sniffing their own farts or not, hard to say at this point. But if it does well he'll definitely have Hollywood career ahead of himself. Just not as a Star Wars director.
I am holding judgement on Knives Out - not going to watch it as Rian has gone full insocjus for it and says as such - but I honestly can't tell how well it will play. They are shilling hard, its Rian going back to form. But at same time, it wouldn't be the first time going woke has turned a project to shit as Orange Man Bad and Love Wins takes precedence over plot, story, character, or common sense. It could go either way.
Create characters, storyworlds, and story experiences people want to be a part of.
Who are those people?
Lucas wants to bring in the younger generation (Millenials) as their top priority. Millennial respond well to brands associated with Diversity. OG Star Wars fans are a loyal cash stream [but declining] and Omnipop culture consumers ((i.E. Normies)) will buy any brand they deem popular but the young consumers are helpful in bringing in others.
Also People of the "Diverse" tribe who tends to skew higher and more disposable income (thanks gays)
They also want to sell to Chinamen as their third priority (there are over 300 million movie consumers in china)
Next are "Omni" pop culture consumers [who buy in heavily to NERD CULTURE]
And last is the legacy audience. Legacy audience is the foundation.
How does this make Mr. Mouse Money?
Movies, TV shows, Animated shows, Comics [Licensed product], and video games [ also licensed product]
this is the foundation of our Pyramid
The next level of the Pyramid are "Spin off" products [EU books, Nu_EU books, Spin off comics, TTRPG game [liscensed], Toys, other licensed merch [Han Solo solo cups]. These ideas feed back into the foundation to produce new ideas
The capstone of the Pyramid IS Galaxies edge. Which is supposed to feed back into levels 1 and 2.
So why isnt this working out the way Mr Mouse wants?
Decent post, but you're way off on the importance of merch.
Also the problem is Millenials say they want Woke Diversity, but for some reason stuff with trannies shoe-horned in tends to have very little staying power or reach. Twitter seems to have very little berring on reality.
I don't think they can afford to sit on the brand for that long. The movies are big moneymakers in and of themselves, but they also are the primary drivers of Star Wars merchandising. Disney investors are not going to let GE (and everything else) die on the vine to give the movies time to breathe.
It goes even a bit beyond that, if you think about Lucasfilm's choices they've managed to do one thing or another to drive away almost every base they wanted to attract while assuming the original fanbase would stick around:
-The Chinese don't have the decades of pop culture osmosis for the nostalgia baiting of the JJ approach to compensate for shallow characters and story, and aren't going to like the various choices Lucasfilm made to try and attract woke Millennials, so unless you commit to making multiple cuts of each movie and risk the anger that'll get you from the perpetually unsatisfied harridans on twitter you're screwed there
-The Nerd Culture bandwagoners were 100% on board, until they let some dude use the middle chapter of their "planned trilogy" as a vehicle to act out his frustrations with the post-TFA fandom, killing every plot thread the hack before him was at least professional enough to set up and leaving nothing new for the following movie to build off of (this was easily their biggest mistake and is probably the actual reason episode IX is tracking so low - one thing I've noticed about every Nerd Culture obsessive who wasn't one pre-Big Bang Theory is that they love speculating about what's going to happen in future installments of their favorite franchises. Game of Thrones made a similar mistake as a lot of the fans were super hype for finding out more about the fantasy elements in the later seasons but D&D, in their infinite wisdom, chose instead to strip out or handwave away those elements)
-The kid market is gone because the woke screenwriters and directors they hired to pander to twitter consider themselves above this nerd shit and keep injecting hamfisted political allegories and a super srs tone into Star Wars products and discussion, and their politics also prevents them from creating interesting characters, so every Disney Donut Steel is a rainbow of beige diversity but are either one-note (Finn, Poe), actively annoying (Rose) or just a pair of pants for women in the audience to self-insert as (Rey). Meanwhile there's a MCU right next door that are fun, quippy, action-packed, and filled with at least reasonably written characters for little Johnny and Susie to play with.
-And the legacy audience who didn't reach the level of cult-like brand worship fucked off after TLJ basically told them to do so.
Well done, Kathleen! You should get a side gig working at USC's business school!
-Chinese largely only understand fiction in the terms of chinese history/mythology. In the OT, it is an upscaled Matinee, and any culture that understands Melodrama will do well with the OT - this (one of several) reasons it struck a cord in Japan. The PT trilogy was very top heavy plotwise, with enough action to keep a chinaman entertained for 2 hours, but that doesn't make then a fan.
Let me demonstrate what I mean:
There are (or were, loldisney) boutique showings on a regular basis of Star Wars, Alien, Rocky Horror...films that did no where near as well as the first Iron Man movie.
How many people do you know who still watch (or fuck, still remember) the first Iron Man movie?
-For TFA, JarJar makes a compelling mystery box. No idea how to deliver on it, but he know how to wrap a box and make it rattle intriguingly. TFA was also the first Disney movie, and when it wasn't complete Mickey Mouse shit, people went ape. People kept watching the film, looking for clues and hints about JarJar's mystery boxes. Is there something in the background about Snoke's back story? That background character seems like they're looking at Rey, are they a bouty hunter/imperial agent?
Then TLJ drops, and no only doesn't do anything with these mystery boxes, it smashes most of them with a bat. "Fuck you, NERD. You should be getting woke not playing with toys!" Rian says, setting the smashed box on fire. So now instead of people being disappointed and disillusioned with the 3rd film, they now get that with 2nd.
- For kids, they did the wrong sort of diversity. None of the toys are FUN, and the ones that are fun are donut steels from OT trilogy. Kids want a four armed green lizard man, not a dumpy asian girl. Girls don't want some flat girl with a bunch of stupid hipster man-buns, they want a cool glamorous doll.
deadline.com
