*When Sheev Met Shmi
Look Who’s Force-choking*
Disney has put billions of dollars into this franchise, and now they must take it back out! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
Seriously, though, cranking out more movies has been the idea all along, with the initial scheme being to release a stand alone or a trilogy movie every year. Here’s an article by the folks at Screen Rant: Star Wars: Disney’s Original Release Plan (& How It Changed)
They paid four billion dollars for the franchise. A sequel trilogy and a couple of standalones were never going to make that back (especially not with box office earnings being split between various parties). It’ll be interesting to see how motivated people are to see a new trilogy that has nothing to do with the main-line saga characters, though. Anyone taking (not literal, metaphorical) bets on how soon that plan changes?
Googling, I found an article that says the entire Star Wars franchise is worth something like $70 billion. That’s not just movies, of course. There are TV shows, theme park rides, toys, bedsheets, curtains, lunchboxes and a thousand other licensed merchandise products. I’m sure someone is even trying to figure out how to do “Star Wars: A New Hope” as a live musical on Broadway.
Excited. Loved Ragnarok (although I don’t think that level of humor would suit Star Wars). I’m gonna have to checkout out Jojo Rabbit.
On the bright side we won’t have to hear all the GOT fans whining about how the GOT showrunners have ruined Star Wars too.
Not inconsistent in the sense that it’s possible. But the funny subtracts from the drama.
Look at The Godfather as a counter-example. Could Coppola have including a bunch of comedy scenes in it? Sure, he could have added a food fight during the wedding scene. He could have had Clemenza doing fart jokes. He could have given Tessio a funny accent. He could have cast Buddy Hackett as Tom’s wacky sidekick. But it was a better movie because he didn’t.
The reality of making a movie is you have about two hours to tell the story of an entire lifetime. You have to make every minute that’s up on the screen count. Every character, every line, every line should be a piece of the whole. If the director lets himself get distracted by going off on a tangent - even an entertaining tangent - he won’t be able to tell all of his central story.
There is that. Because they did, and would have.
I wonder if Martin had done something to help GOT show it would be better? Maybe finish the books?
That would’ve been a start.
Things that might have been…
Thor is an inherently ridiculous character (and the MCU version is way toned down from the psychedelically-envisioned character in the comics) and the Norse myth Ragnarök isn’t really a tragedy but literally a story of the necessity of renewal and reinvention so the gonzo space fantasy tone is entirely appropriate. Inserting unnecessary humor into a film like The Godfather, which is really a Greek tragedy, would be inappropriate (although there are moments of light humor, such as Luca Brasi mumbling his thanks or Sonny’s wife describing how big his penis is while he is screwing his mistress upstairs)
I kind of feel this way about Fat Thor in Avengers: Endgame, however. The idea is milked for laughs (“You look like melted ice cream,”) and it is funny on first pass but it really isn’t consistent with the character of Thor. Sure, he’s lost his mother, his father, his brother, his best friend, and failed to save half of the universe out of the hubris of not just killing Thanos, but this should make Thor more angry and paranoid, not just give up and become an alcoholic frat boy. And when it comes to final battle with Thanos and his children, Thor revers to being the Angry God of Thunder, so the character change doesn’t really stick. I know they did this so that they could have the scene with Frigga but it would have worked just as well with her calming his rage versus soothing his angst.
Or B&W could have just not been in such a rush to finish the series so quickly that they destroyed every bit of characterization that had been built up over the previous six seasons. Writing for established characters just isn’t that hard, as long as you take the time to let their motivations develop organically from the plot.
Stranger
I’ve read all of the books but seen only the first five seasons of the TV series. But I could tell the show was fast diverging from the books.
Martin said many times he told the showrunners how the books were going to end. Either he lied about that or what we saw was Martin’s ending. I suppose it’s possible they ignored what he told them but I don’t see that happening.
It’s entirely possible to me that the major set prices of how the show ended were how Martin intends to end it. It’s just that they did a really bad job moving the pieces into position the last couple years.
Possibly the ending is the same but a different path was taken to get there. I remember the series being pretty faithful to the novels up to about season 4. Season 5 was definitely taking some of the characters in different directions. Then we moved back here and have not had a chance to see the later seasons since we don’t have HBO. (In Thailand, we were just watching DVD sets.)
The TV series might even be better. Although I think Jemaine Clement has a bigger hand in shaping the series than Taika.
Was it trying to be edgy? Quirky, sure, but I don’t think it was going for edgy.
Oh, and Taika is writing it (with one of the 1917 writers I think).