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Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

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Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#11

Post by jerf »

I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand.

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.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#12

Post by NeutralCrane »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

The only one of the sequels that had any balls was The Last Jedi, and Disney was so frightened by the backlash to some of its elements (like the idea that our hero could be-- gasp --a person of NON-royal lineage!) that it then spent the entire last movie trying to retcon everything that made TLJ potentially interesting.

I don’t think “the idea that our hero could be--gasp--a person of NON-royal lineage!” was even in the top 10 of the biggest issues people had with that movie.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#13

Post by GenerWork »

idle_zealot wrote: post #10
GenerWork wrote: post #3

It's one thing to make a bunch of stinkers, but then to pretend that said stinkers were in a completely alternate timeline through some sleight of hand retconning is absolutely bonkers and will fool approximately zero people. Let's hope that this is just what it claims to be: a rumor.

I'm not sure what you mean by "fool". These aren't real events, there's no such thing as an indisputable timeline outside of the context of an individual work. If Disney wants to make Star Wars movies set in a world where the sequel trilogy didn't happen, what's wrong with that, other than it potentially being confusing to viewers?

The article says that Disney wants to move the current sequels to a brand new timeline which implies that this new timeline is an official timeline in the sense that it's blessed by Disney, but it's not the timeline that most people would consider to be the official timeline, aka the timeline where the original and sequel trilogies happened. It's basically Disney going "Well, we can't ditch this, but it kinda sorta happened, but not in the timeline you think it did. Surprise!".

Meanwhile, anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together is going to look back at how Disney marketed this originally and think "Whatever you say, my guy".

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#15

Post by ramesh31 »

jerf wrote: post #11

I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand. 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 th…

>"I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand."

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.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#16

Post by msh »

jerf wrote: post #11

I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand. 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 th…

Or the dark empire comic book series.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#17

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #12
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

The only one of the sequels that had any balls was The Last Jedi, and Disney was so frightened by the backlash to some of its elements (like the idea that our hero could be-- gasp --a person of NON-royal lineage!) that it then spent the entire last movie trying to retcon everything that made TLJ potentially interesting.

I don’t think “the idea that our hero could be--gasp--a person of NON-royal lineage!” was even in the top 10 of the biggest issues people had with that movie.

That was certainly among the most vocal complaints I remember hearing about the movie at the time (other than the moronic "Too woke!" complaints), and Wikipedia supports my memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi#Audie...

> Particularly divisive was the reveal that Rey's parents are insignificant; many fans had expected her to be Luke's daughter or to share a lineage with another character from the original trilogy.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#19

Post by jerf »

msh wrote: post #16
jerf wrote: post #11

I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand. 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 th…

Or the dark empire comic book series.

So much ripe fruit just sitting there that the decision to wander away and do their own thing would still have been objectively crazy even if they had fully succeeded. It just would have been an objectively crazy decision that they managed to succeed despite making.

Re: Rumor: Disney to Remove Star Wars Sequel Trilogy from Timeline

#20

Post by jmyeet »

Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.

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...

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