I like Rey. Yes, she’s a Mary Sue, but she feels like my Mary Sue, in a way Luke Skywalker never did.
The Star Wars galaxy is a big place. There’s room for stories with the Force and without it. It’s better for the franchise if they keep the variety. There’s no need for every story to appeal to every fan, as it makes it more likely there’s some story for each fan.
She beat Kylo Ren in a light saber battle the first time they ever fought. She’s rather far ahead of Luke at the comparable point, who got his hand chopped off and the end of his second movie.
Was Ren injured? Sure, but Vader would have chopped Luke to pieces if they’d run into each other towards the end of “Star Wars” even if he was hurt. Ren nearly killed Finn, after all.
I’ve never really understood the need to use Star Wars as the basis for an extended narrative universe. It was never intended as such; it started with what were some generic tropes of space opera which were appealing just because no one had done that in film to such an extensive, lived-in degree, but despite enigmatic references to “the Clone Wars” and “the Empire” it isn’t as if there was ever any plan for a larger cohesive backdrop, and Lucas’ attempts to fill in the backstory of the Old Republic and the rise of the Empire in the prequel films highlighted the weakness in trying to manufacture a backstory that was never essential to being able to understand or interpret the original films.
The original trilogy of films was always a “hero’s journey” story with the Leigh Brackett tacked-on romance in The Empire Strikes Back, mostly to give more screen time to fan favorate Harrison Ford and an essential reason for Leia to exist in what is otherwise an almost wholly-dominated male cast (which coincidentially worked in creating a multi-threaded narrative with deeper themes of love, sacrifie, and betrayal after numerous rewrites) and while the suggestion of a wider story gave the tapestry of a potentially larger world as a backdrop, actually trying to weave new stories into the sparse and never canonically defined narrative universe ends up giving a very uneven and even contradictory history. I know people like their favorite characters and want to know more about them, but when the response is to create a bunch of story arcs that all center around the same few characters and all of the people related to them, it suddently makes what seemed like a vast universe about which the characters are a small but significant influence into a very tiny and incestuous little world where everybody knows/is related to/is enemies with everyone else which leaves little room for expansiveness.
Contrast Star Wars with a narrative like Asimov’s Foundation series, which was explicitly defined as a narrative that would cover hundreds of years with analogues to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire; Foundation (at least the original novels and arguably Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth) were consistent and supported an overarching narrative arc of the fall of the Galactic Empire and the effort to prevent humanity from falling into a long dark age, which felt like an expansive story against which the world-building (or in this case, Galactic Empre-building) gave texture to the backdrop. Star Wars too often feels like the Skywalker-Solo soap opera with occasionaly mystical pseudoscience thrown in.
There is really no narrative reason not to set new stories in a different milieu other than that commercially it is easier to pull people in by creating a generic heist plot and inserting a vaguely rogu-ish character who happens to be named “Han Solo” and labeling it “A Star Wars story” to pull in a guaranteed audience even if the story and acting aren’t very good. And from a creative standpoint, making and introducing a new narrative world is far more creatively fulfilling than just filling in bits from previous stories.
Stranger
Star Wars has burnt down its own house. Destroyed the main characters we grew up on are. Replaced by bad actors and recycled material they were.
The force awakens was hot garbage. Hmm, crash land on a desert planted, hide the plans in the droid, blow up the death star. Rip off
Rey is a flat character and Finn isn’t even good for comic relief.
I promise I read your whole post 
… I totally agree with this and it’s an aspect of what I call the “curse of the canon.” Fans these days get very worked up about canon, and I believe that content would be better if you let every screenwriter/director/etc. do whatever the hell they want when they’re assigned a project. If you want to change character backgrounds, fine. If you want to change background plot details, fine. If you just want to take one or two aspects and change everything else, go for it.
Yep.
I think this is what the franchise owners are afraid of, but I bet that consumers would get used to it. It’s not hard to use a handful of common elements to draw fans into a similar work.
I agree.
There’s only been four new movies so far, and two of those are specifically a continuation of the familiar series, and the other two are toe-in-the-water experiments to spark off new adventures of new characters in new directions. The 1% of fans who want a Knights Of The Old Republic movie, or the 3% of fans who are sick of Jedi, are not big enough audiences to cater a $200m movie to. You don’t jump into the deep end with something like this, it’s still in the experimental stage, they’re easing in slowly.
The two announced TV series, The Mandalorian series about bounty hunters, and the “Cassian Andor from Rogue One” series about espionage during the formation of the Rebellion, may still be within the timeline of the series, but they are at least about new characters and themes.
In defense of filthy lucre,
I mean, of course the franchise owners want to keep milking the franchise. They own the franchise, and the only way to make money from it is to keep making movies about it. If I’ve got skin in the Star Wars game, and it’s a choice between producing “Space Fleas: A Chewbacca Story: A Star Wars Story” and guaranteeing a $400 million box office with a $2 billion upside (the difference between “Solo” and “Force Awakens”, btw) or taking a chance on something that might make money or might tank, I am not turning down the big bux.
Of course, it would be nice if the franchise movies were always great. Sometimes you get “The Empire Strikes Back,” and sometimes you suffer through “Phantom Menace.” Sometimes you get “Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse” and it’s great, and sometimes you get Andrew Garfield in “Spider-Man: If He Was A Sullen Jerk” and you wish you were dead. But the calculus for the studios is that they are in the job of making money, and that takes precedence over experimenting with new stuff.
Getting the public into an entirely new fictional universe absolutely IS hard. It is just a matter of demonstrated fact that it is much, much easier to sell tickets to an established franchise than a new one; the likelihood of a new franchise bombing is an order of magnitude higher than a known one. Your best bet is always an established franchise, which is why Transformers movies, which are unspeakably terrible, turn a reliable profit, while Jupiter Ascending ended careers.
You can’t blame them. It’s what the audiences want, and a person making these decisions has a fiduciary responsibility to be sane about it. It would be an act of titanic professional incompetence to NOT keep making Fantastic Beasts movies.
While the goal of the businesses is to make money, the goal of entertainment consumers is to enjoy themselves. Retreads make money because people enjoy them. People like watching familiar characters and themes in slightly different situations. It’s why mythic heroes from the past have all sorts of fantastic stories attached to them. Instead of “new hero has new adventure” getting retold, it becomes “familiar hero has that adventure remolded into familiar themes”.
“Four new movies” (not counting the two Ewok films which I’m sure everyone is pleased to just forget about, the sort-of approved animated series and of course the Star Wars Holiday Special, which despite its absurd thematic discontinuity with all other things Star Wars remains the only unmodified canon of the original, ante-prequel era) is a 66% increase in the official canon of the Star Wars cinematic universe…and yet, those films have added almost nothing in terms of additional depth or breadth, and arguably not even in narrative as they have essentially relied up on retreading previous plots and themes, or in the case of Solo, literally existed as a way of stringing together the sparse references about Han’s prior escapades into a thinly drawn heist plot. We never really needed to know about how Han “made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs” any more than we needed to know why Richard Blaine doesn’t return to the United States.[SUP]*[/SUP] All of the few pieces of information the original films give us about Han Solo–that he is a smuggler with a bounty on his head, that he avoids the Empire and looks out for himself, that he’s really impressed with himself and his ship even though nobody else is–let the audience know that he’s a rough but ultimately honorable rogue, and everything else that made Han Solo a breakout fan favorite came from Harrison Ford’s portrayal of him.
The point is that having a narrative universe is fine if the purpose is to expand out into new stories and ideas, or at least be somewhat creative about retreading the own, but the post-prequel films have essentially either been crack-filling exercises explicitly designed for fan service appeal, or in the case of The Last Jedi, was intended to “break the mold” but in kind of the shittiest, canon-breaking fashion possible, and also made less sense than a Fast and Furious movie plot. There is nothing wrong with this, I suppose–it is what Paramount has been trying to do with Star Trek for a couple of decades now–but it is narratively and thematically uninteresting because it doesn’t actually create new stories or expand the sense of the larger world; the universe of the post-prequel films actually feels even smaller than the original trilogy because it is so clear how interrelated everybody is to everyone else. A true side character film, like one that explored Lando Calrissian’s rise from gambler-thief to autocrat of his own little gas mining colony, might truly be interesting and novel (as long as they don’t have him having a love affair with a droid–who asked for that nonsense?) but one that just fills in the gaps on throwaway references to settle fan debates over why Han uses a measurement of distance in the apparent context of time is…pointless. And any movie in which Emilia Clarke is not immediately the worst acting presence has major casting problems.
[SUP]*[/SUP]Captain Renault: I’ve often speculated why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.
Rick: It was a combination of all three.
I know this is a common argument for why entertainment studios shouldn’t branch out into new ‘properties’ but it doesn’t actually hold up very well. It actually isn’t all that hard to get the viewing public to buy into a new narrative world or concept, provided that it is well done and entertaining, or even just visually original. Witness Avatar, which was not even a very original story but immediately garnered a giant following, or the Terminator movies (the first three of them, anyway), or Marvel Studios taking nearly forgotten third tier characters like Iron Man, Ant-Man, and The Guardians of the Galaxy and using them to build and expand the most profitable franchise in existence. The trick, of course, is to make good entertainment with a clean narrative flow without trying to backfill or shoehorn in every other damn thing you can find in the cabinet below the sink.
And it is possible to expand that kind of world indefinitely as long as you keep adding to it instead of making the same story over and over again. You can even implement a formula (Marvel certainly has, although they’ve also made some notable steps to subvert their own formula when it was creatively valuable) as long as you are adding something new in terms of characterization, world-building, or an overall narrative. But when you almost literally make the same film over again–and The Force Awakens felt like nothing more than a fan-made clipshow from scenes of the original trilogy–it may draw in the fans but it won’t sustain a franchise indefinitely.
In the case of the original Star Wars, the ‘world’ it build was always centered around the mystical ‘Force’ (Vader makes a point of how potent the Force is even compared to the planet-busting Death Star) and to dismiss it as some kind of a fringe artifact isolated to just the original films is likely making a Tolkien film without dwarves and elves. There is a good movie to be made about space bandits eking out their existence while uncovering corruption and subterfuge on the part of an officious, autocratic government, but Joss Whedon already made that movie with more style and better dialogue than anything to come out of Lucasfilm, and on a fraction of the budget. Had he had some better casting and a larger promotional budget it could have been a much more popular film yet.
Stranger
Okay, let’s take those, shall we?
Avatar, you’re quite right about. We’ll see if the sequels hold up but yes, the first film made an assload of money - no one ever said it’s impossible to get people to watch new properties, just as movies like Toy Story, Jaws and, obviously, the first Star Wars prove.
But we’re not talking about a yes/no, black or white decision here; we’re talking about investments. All investments are a bet on probabilities. If you invest your $200 million in a totally new property, you might get Avatar, or you might get Cloud Atlas. You might get Iron Man, but you might also get Jupiter Ascending. The Terminator made a healthy profit but any number of new action properties have failed.
The simple fact is that sequels to established properties are a safer bet - Terminator 2 did way better than its predecessor. And now movies in a “universe” can do better still; Ant-Man and Guardians or the Galaxy were not really wholly new things. They were part of the Marvel presentation, and sold as such, and of course Marvel properties already existed in comic book form (and popular novels - Harry Potter, Hunger Games - can carry a shit-ton of popularity to the box office.) What we see with those properties is that even mediocre-to-bad movies, like “Age of Ultron” or the third Iron Man or TErminator 3, are sesnationally bomb-resistant and can be relied upon to pull in gigantic amounts of money. “Cars 2” is generally regarded as the only really bad movie Pixar has ever pumped out, and it made over half a billion dollars and probably five times that in marketing tie-ins.
The chances of an epic flop with properties like that is almost nil - I can’t really think of any examples.
Thanks for making my point for me. Two studios years apart made movies about roguish space captains in brown jackets. The one that made an okay movie with a relatively obscure property lost their shirts, and the one that made a comparatively poor movie based on Star Wars made lots and lots of money.
I mean, maybe that’s unfair, but if the bonus that will buy me a house and send my kids to good schools is riding on box office success, I know where my incentives lie.
It’s not like new properties won’t get created, and some of them will be great. Every now and then they make a Toy Story or an Iron Man. But the big studios need safe winners too, so expect more Fasts and Furiouses, Ages of Ultron, and Star Wars movies until they stop making money. Think of it like a long term investment portfolio - you want to take some chances in the hopes of a big score, but you need some safe stuff like index funds and money market accounts too.
A bigger factor is that nowadays movies are made for a global market, and it’s hard to make a nuanced movie with complex characters that will resonate with people in the U.S., China, India and Europe.
Better to stick with comic books, car crashes and explosions with as little subtlety as possible.
I mean, it’s not like there aren’t original, excellent movies being made. They just aren’t necessarily high concept movies, or movies with lots of comic book characters or explosions. Maybe that’s been played out?
Universal made almost zero effort to promote Serenity, and didn’t even display it in many secondary markets, and yet the film still managed to make back its modest (by sci-fi/superhero film standards) US$39M production budget almost entirely on word-of-mouth. Never mind that Joss Whedon used it as his calling card and template to make the first Avengers film, which essentially maps Serenity beat-for-beat with five times the budget and a better pedigreed cast to be the second-highest yielding MCU film to date in terms of opening weekend, domestic gross, and (estimated) worldwide gross. So, thank you for making the point for me, that if a studio promotes a mediocre film they can still make it popular despite its lack of quality, and they can sink a good film by giving it no support and marginal distribution.
Don’t misunderstand me; Star Wars will be a viable “brand” for the foreseeable future no matter how poor the quality of the films are; if the prequels didn’t kill it, just rehashing the beats from the original trilogy won’t, and J. J. Abrams is nothing if not a high grade hack in terms of fan service and aping the style of better filmmakers even if he forgets that you eventually have to open up the stupid “puzzle box” and reveal what is inside. But from a narrative standpoint there is little more to be mined from the Star Wars universe unless new creators are actually adding something to it, and in a way that reinforces the mysticism and sense of expansiveness of the original films. Conversely, it would be possible to create a new narrative universe with room for multitudes of different stories and themes and promote good films made within it to great profit. But making a Star Wars film without some reference to “The Force” is like setting an WWII film in Europe without Nazis. I mean, you could make a film about the Allies fighting against the Italians, but nobody really cares because Mussolini had the charisma of a circus clown and the leadership ability of a pool noodle.
Stranger
It’s better to play safe than take risks. But you can’t play completely safe and have to have plans to expand. It takes time and it takes guesses.
When Solo failed, there were so many post-mortem articles confidently proclaiming that they knew why it didn’t make money. Some articles contradicted each other, some thoughts were consistent across all of them. Bob Iger’s conclusion was that it was the release date messing up their marketing plan, and they have decided to be more careful with that going forward.
No matter how many clamour for “new stuff” and as far as I can tell it’s a tiny vocal minority, familiarity is what brings in the audiences, as long as it’s marketed well.
Have patience. Wholly new things are coming. It will still be risky for them even then, but if they work up to it carefully the risk will be tempered. By then you may not think of them as being new, because of their stealth introduction of those new main characters or storylines having been implied in other media, but it will be new, even if that’s the way they have to approach it. It’s what the EU comics and novels did in the 90s; start out safe then trickle out risky new ideas, and it’s what they’re doing now.
John Carter of Mars! 
They could’ve mined all those books for years to come. :smack:
Am I missing something with this “Star Wars is moving away from the Force” thing? The recent non-flashback movies had plenty of Force use. Rey pulls a [del]Jedi[/del] mind trick and wields a mean lightsaber. Finn manages to use that lightsaber pretty well too, despite the mythos that only Jedi and Sith can use one without chopping off their own arm or worse. 
Luke projects his image convincingly across interstellar distances. Some kid pulls a broom to himself.
What they do have is, as the title The Last Jedi indicates, is a move away from the Force being either the province of ascetic trained-since-infancy* monk-warrior Jedi or ruthless evil “Dark Side”-using Sith, nobody else. If the Force really does flow through all living things, why shouldn’t there be other schools of how to tap into it, or even people hitting upon Force use do-it-yourself style (Rey, Finn, and broom-boy)? IMHO, more people in the Star Wars universe don’t do it because they’ve bought the Jedi-or-Sith story. My guess is that the next in-series movie will be at least in part about the democratization of the Force.
*Little brat Anakin was too old! And how is “draft them as infants and toddlers and raise them in an ascetic order where human emotion is a sin” significantly different from what the First Order did to Finn and the other stormtroopers? :dubious:
As I mentioned in my OP, it was more about Solo, Rogue One, Resistance and the upcoming series, The Mandalorian. Aside from the meat-and-potatoes trilogy, I’ve been noticing a move away from the Force (and Force users) in recent projects.
Oh, I don’t know. To a great degree, that’s the beauty of the whole Star Wars universe. It’s BIG and it’s OLD. So there’s a whole lot of stuff that could go down entirely independent of the Force that would be really good to watch.
The Star Wars movies aren’t like the Harry Potter franchise where they literally revolve around wizardry and that world. They’re fundamentally about more human themes, with the Force being a sort of MacGuffin that allows for Luke’s story arc to progress. But both Empire and Jedi had big chunks of the story (Han and Leia’s parts) that were not Force-centric. And in large part, they were the better parts of the movies.
Look at it this way- what you’re saying is that basically any movie set in the nineteenth century American west HAS to be a Western, complete with cowboys, or it’s not any good. That’s not true- look at “Dances with Wolves”, for an example.
As they should. Remember that during the time period where Solo through RotJ is set, the Jedi and Sith are seen as “hokey ancient religions” and The Force as a bunch of “mumbo-jumbo”.
The Force should be used sparingly and only by a few gifted people, much like the way magic is used in fantasy like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.
The big problem any time you introduce supernatural powers is you create the potential of a “Force ex machina”. Like you need a reason why Obi Wan can’t just Force-crush the Death Star or Vader just Force mind control everyone to do his bidding. i.e. Luke projecting himself halfway across the Galaxy to “fight” the First Order.
But that’s my point, and I understand you all don’t agree, but I’d actually like to see more of those “few gifted people” and their stories. I loved the stories of Ezra, Kanan and Ahsoka, and none of them were highly-gifted masters. There’s a thousand years where they weren’t so few or in the shadows.