I actually like the idea of bringing back Palpatine for the sequels. It gives the whole saga a solid through-line, turning it into the story of several generations of one family trying to overthrow a terrible evil. Plus, having established that Jedi can come back as Force Ghosts, seeing what a Dark Side Force Ghost looks like would have been cool.
But it needed to be something that was set up in the first movie in the new trilogy, not just a swerve in the third movie with no foreshadowing or explanation.
I admit I only watched Rise of Skywalker twice. Even with a second viewing, it wasn’t clear to me if the Palpatine that Rey and Kylo fought was a (defective?) clone or if it was the same physical body that went down the shaft in RotJ. The way they did it ruined it for me.
At one point I was hoping that the main villain would have been Snoke, who would have turned out to be Darth Plagueis. Maybe that would have turned out better?
Another issue I haven’t brought up is the overall tone of the sequels, at least VIII and IX. The OT feels hopeful, even in the darkest moments when Luke loses his duel with Vader while Han is frozen in carbonite. Everyone gets their happy ending at the end of RotJ, with even Obi Wan, Anakin, and Yoda at least reaching the status of happy force ghosts. It’s obvious why the prequels couldn’t go this route. I’m still not sure, however, why the sequels went with what feels like a pyrrhic victory for the good guys.
Bullshit. Kathleen’s job as President of LucasFilms is EXACTLY to make creative decisions. That fact that she is named as a producer on the ST does not change the fact that her day job (so to speak) is to protect the franchise - a job she arguably failed at (or we wouldn’t have this thread).
I was all set to tell you that you were wrong, but I forgot that BSG started with a mini-series that wasn’t technically part of the series. Huh. Either way, “33” was a great story, well told, and TLJ could certainly have done (and did) worse than a riff on that.
No. Creative decisions are things like what is written, what is shown on screen, who gets cast. Though as CEO she undoubtedly has input, she is not deciding any of that. She is not the creative mind behind any of this, she is the one steering the productions that Lucasfilm handles. The directors and writers are the creative minds.
I don’t know why you can’t see the distinction; I think it’s very clear.
She is the President. The buck stops here and all that. She is responsible for ensuring that LucasFilms’ signature property doesn’t go off the rails. It did, IMHO. She failed at her job. If it wasn’t her job, she should have hired someone like Feige and made it their job.
It’s very clear she should NOT be in a charge of a movie universe - however good she is at producing individual movies.
That’s a fair opinion. You can like or dislike anything you want. I respect that, even though I disagree. She certainly should (and does) bear responsibility for any production failures, such as all the director swapping and budget blowouts. But she is not to blame for grumpy Luke, or flying Leia, or clone Palpatine. If you don’t like the storylines, that’s not on her.
She provides facilities, funding, and crews. She shepherds productions, but doesn’t tell the stories herself. And her failure so far is… [checks notes] profits of billions of dollars. And when things got a bit ropey, she shifted focus onto TV, which has worked out brilliantly so far. We should all wish we were failures like her.
Yes. Yes, it is. Not in her role as a producer, but in her role as President of Lucasfilm. The producer credit is a irrelevant. She is the head of the company and had one (real) job - that did not go as well as expected.
As noted above, there is evidence that Disney has, so far, not made back its investment in buying Lucasfilm - at least based on the movies alone. I personally tend to think they’re doing fine when you look at the purchase as a whole, but I do think they left money on the table with the ST since VIII and IX made less than VII (and IX made less than both VIII and Rogue One).
Well, let’s not get too excited. We have The Mandalorian (which was awesome) and Bad Batch (which is decent). It should be noted that every SW series announced so far has either Favreau or Filoni (or both) attached. They collectively appear to be taking the role of “protectors of the franchise” which is exactly what I said above - if Kennedy didn’t want to do it, she should hire someone to do it for her. To her credit, she appears to have seen the light.
The Marvel films have managed to tell one coherent story across about two dozen films, with a similar number of writers and directors, without the films constantly stepping on each other’s dicks. Someone* working for Marvel films was responsible for that. If it wasn’t Kathleen Kennedy’s job to do that with Star Wars, then it was her job to find someone to do that. Either way, that’s a significant failure.
You can’t compare every Producer with Kevin Feige, a one-in-a-trillion success story that relied just as much on luck than instinct as any other. It worked out for him, but that is not necessarily a path to success.
And most importantly of all, Kathleen Kennedy has course-corrected after these so-called failures you all are citing. She’s trying to make Lucasfilm work better than it was:
So what are you complaining about?
This is just your opinion, that because you didn’t like the films, that made them objectively bad and should be ignored? You can ignore them all you like, but for the people who liked them, they’re going to continue to embrace them. Lucasfilm has no motive to abandon those storylines. They will remain canon, and may even be improved upon after more stories are told during the sequel era.
I was just about to say this. While I think Kennedy screwed up the director hot seat, to basically set the minimum standard of a producer to Feige is ridiculous. Just about everyone says Feige pulled off a modern miracle with the MCU. No other producer has ever done so, nor do I think any will going forward. So it seems silly to assume that every producer’s job is to be like the MCU.
Well, that’s really overstating the uniqueness of Kevin Feige by a couple orders of magnitude. And we’re not expecting anything from Kennedy that LucasFilm hadn’t already been doing under George Lucas. For all their other flaws, when Lucas started making Phantom Menace, he knew exactly where he was going to end up in Revenge of the Sith. I don’t think it takes a “one-in-a-trillion” genius to figure out a basic out line for a three film series.
Those were all problems, but they weren’t the biggest problems. The biggest problem was the lack of an overall vision tying the movies together. And there’s nobody but her who can be to blame for that.
And yeah, probably she (or whoever she hired) couldn’t have done as good a job as Feige. But the point is, she didn’t even try.
The only reason that is true is because they had the OT as an end point. I don’t think Lucas knows what he’s going to have for lunch any given day, much less what will happen in a movie trilogy. The man is infamous for changing his story every time he’s asked. Most of the movies were pulled from his ass as they were being made.
Lucas had 2.5 good Star Wars movies in him. Even that number was more due to Kasdan and others than it was George.
No argument there. What does that say about the directors/writers and producer of that trilogy? Can you truly be called incompetent when your product makes millions?