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‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

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Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#91

Post by mongol »

it_citizen wrote: post #57

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…

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.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#92

Post by basch »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #13

> 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 wante…

I agree the buck stops with Kennedy BUT the original story was that Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) was hired to write a trilogy. He didn't write fast enough (for Iger?), and Abrams replaced him and his story. What we can deduce, is that ad hoc unconnected movies wasnt plan A.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/nov/09/star-wars-micha...

There is also maybe more recycled Arndt ideas scattered through the trilogy than he gets credit for.

https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/michael-arndt-re...

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#93

Post by taylodl »

the_doctah wrote: post #22

Does anyone actually think the problem stops at LucasFilm? It's Disney . They're ruining Marvel properties as well. They care more about pushing progressive ideologies than making a return on investment. How many bad movies and TV shows are they going to push out and then blame bigots when their propaganda fails to entertain? And then they can't even practice what they preach, removing black actors from posters to pl…

> They care more about pushing progressive ideologies than making a return on investment.

Stop it. Just stop it. You know that's not true. All they care about is the money. Ever wonder why everything in entertainment is as bad as it is? Because all they care about is money, not quality.

That's part of what makes Star Wars movies, and not films.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#94

Post by runesofdoom »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #73
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that her resume of successful productions is strangely amazing for how she's run Star Wars. Gremlins; E.T.; Indiana Jones; Jurassic Park; Twister; Schindler's List; Back To The Future; etc. Presumably, it's partially because she hitched along as Producer for almost all Spielberg films and it did her career wonders by association. So who is the replacement? She's produced on so many successful series th…

A resume only tells you what she did in the past (or way past in her case), not what she could potentially do in the future. And not to sound ageist (I’m old as well), but she’s almost 70 and at some point she won’t be in touch with what “the kids” want any longer. Feige is 50 for comparison. I know I don’t always understand why my kids like certain things nowadays.

You want the showrunners for Rings of Power instead? Amazon went for the best mix of young, talented and well-rexommended they could find, and they blew it.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#95

Post by theshrike79 »

runesofdoom wrote: post #94
bluedevil2k wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A resume only tells you what she did in the past (or way past in her case), not what she could potentially do in the future. And not to sound ageist (I’m old as well), but she’s almost 70 and at some point she won’t be in touch with what “the kids” want any longer. Feige is 50 for comparison. I know I don’t always understand why my kids like certain things nowadays.

You want the showrunners for Rings of Power instead? Amazon went for the best mix of young, talented and well-rexommended they could find, and they blew it.

The Tolkien estate blew it.

Amazon could only use Silmarillion, NOTHING else. They were seriously hampered on what they could touch without getting sued.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#96

Post by runesofdoom »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #53
adsfgiodsnrio wrote: post #25

>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…

Exactly, people need to stop pretending Star Wars is something it isn't. It ain't high science fiction, it ain't some coherent canon of beautiful authentic story telling. Apart from Rogue One and Andor, it's space shows for kids. The plots never made total sense, the acting was always corny, the writing wasn't exactly tight. All the way back to A New Hope. It's pew-pew-pew blasters in space, bad guys vs good guys, et…

Only he doesn't make as much money as his employers expected. Star Wars Episode IX should have made Avengers Endame box office, and it barely cracked a billion. Yes, a billion is a ton of money, but I'll bet Disney had projections and Rise of Skywalker fell short. His resume certainly looks pretty slim post-Star Wars.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#97

Post by D13Fd »

setgree wrote: post #60
bluedevil2k wrote: post #13

> 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 wante…

This is interesting to me because it's so at odds with how I took in the new trilogy. I thought only Johnson showed any vision at all, and I also thought his sense of small scale combat choreography was way better, e.g. the scene where Adam Driver and Rey fight those guys in the red suits. JJ's movies were so derivative of the original trilogy I sometimes wondered if he was messing with us, e.g. the scenewhere a char…

> This is interesting to me because it's so at odds with how I took in the new trilogy. I thought only Johnson showed any vision at all, and I also thought his sense of small scale combat choreography was way better, e.g. the scene where Adam Driver and Rey fight those guys in the red suits.

> JJ's movies were so derivative of the original trilogy I sometimes wondered if he was messing with us, e.g. the scenewhere a character says, if I recall, "it's just like the death star!" once they've unveiled...another death star.

I liked Abrams' first one best. It had some issues but it at least nailed the epic Star Wars tone and feel, and it's a solid movie and fun to watch.

Johnson's felt ridiculous and contrived, with the fake low-intensity chase, the weird dialog, the space casino, and on and on.

The third one was just an absurd mess, and involved total plot whiplash after the second one went in a different direction.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#98

Post by cmrdporcupine »

runesofdoom wrote: post #96
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, people need to stop pretending Star Wars is something it isn't. It ain't high science fiction, it ain't some coherent canon of beautiful authentic story telling. Apart from Rogue One and Andor, it's space shows for kids. The plots never made total sense, the acting was always corny, the writing wasn't exactly tight. All the way back to A New Hope. It's pew-pew-pew blasters in space, bad guys vs good guys, et…

Only he doesn't make as much money as his employers expected. Star Wars Episode IX should have made Avengers Endame box office, and it barely cracked a billion. Yes, a billion is a ton of money, but I'll bet Disney had projections and Rise of Skywalker fell short. His resume certainly looks pretty slim post-Star Wars.

Well, good, I hate what he did for both Star Trek and Star Wars, and his story telling style to me epitomizes everything wrong with Hollywood. Glib, shallow characters with no depth that I don't care about, and routine plot shortcuts.

But, again, Lucas was hardly a masterful writer, too. The prequels were pretty awful, IMHO, and of the original 3 I only really like "Empire Strikes Back"

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#99

Post by TMWNN »

leashless wrote: post #29

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…

>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.

Good point.

For non-comic book readers, Marvel has published dozens of issues of various titles *every single month* since 1961. Those stories (plus selected issues from the late 1930s to 1961) are the gigantic mine of ideas that the MCU draws upon. Not all the stories are good, of course, but there have been six decades for public sentiment to manifest and identify the best/coolest/funniest/most touching moments, characters, and—well—memeable points. The memorable way a villain redeems himself at the end of the third Thor film? That's straight out of the comics.

Star Wars had a corpus of its own to draw upon, the Expanded Universe of novels/TV shows/comics/toys/etc. Zahn's Thrawn novel trilogy basically saved the franchise in the early 1990s, after the first set of movies ended with nothing else in sight. I've not read them, but fans have gushed over them ever since and I presume that they could have made a good set of post-RoTJ films. Disney explicitly disavowed the Expanded Universe after acquiring Lucasfilm, but recently published another Thrawn trilogy to bring the super-popular villain into mainstream continuity. But instead of anything like that, we got the sequel trilogy, with the dubious accomplishment of turning the $2 billion box office of the first film into $1 billion for the third.

Re: ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

#100

Post by rado »

fumar wrote: post #40
d3ckard wrote: post #4

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

Andor was good. It didn't need Star Was as its universe, but it is perhaps the best Star Wars anything in the last two decades.

Abandoned it after 2 episodes, because everyone was grumpy, sad and serious all the time. Ridiculous.
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