Agreed. I mostly look at the TV shows as "filling in the cracks" of what the movies mostly only hint at.
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Bloomberg: Star Wars is Struggling to Win Over the Next Generation of Kids
- Thread starter Deleted member 51691
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While I didn't know a lot of kids who gave a shit when the prequels were out and one of those kids was infact me.
I do think this is an interesting point. You might have actually turned younger folks off by removing all the shit they liked from the series.
After reading your post and fudgepuppy's I think you're absolutely right.
I was just projecting my own criticism of the younger generation and I'm not really familiar enough with the MCU to paint it in such broad strokes.
It has more appeal because it's less limited in its scope of ideas, characters, environments, aesthetics etc. All that stuff is a huge burden on Star Wars that it can't get rid of easily.
I was 7 when The Phantom Menace came out, and I've always thought it, and the prequel trilogy overall, was total crap. I was the mark for those movies, and they missed entirely.
That's just me though.
Plus, you are saying all the same things that people said about the prequels a decade and a half ago. You're literally sounding like the "Old dudes" that complained about your Star Wars. Meanwhile kids like this are growing up with the new stuff and are loving it.
I don't think I read a single one of those crawls until TFA came out
I think this explains things better than many who have tried in this thread. Nice post.
yeah i think this is a totally lucid summation of the problem with these movies. and even for a lapsed fan like me, this stuff isn't satisfying.
Someone brought up Ninja Turtles to me regarding Star Wars. Every time there's a new Ninja Turtles, fans of the previous incarnation scream and shout "this is not MY Ninja Turtles!" and they're 100% right. "Their" Ninja Turtles is in the past. From hardcore, violent and gritty pulp stories, to lighthearted 80s surfer-style misadventures, to grounded live-action movies, to cheesey Power Rangers-esque live action television, to mature cartoon reboot, to Michael Bay-driven bombast, to CGI Teen Titans-style reinterpretation, to zany Looney Tunes style, etc.
Ninja Turtles should've been a one-trick pony that came and went with "cowabunga" and the Ninja Turtle Rap, but it was reinterpreted and re-envisioned over and over. It always alienated its former audience but ALWAYS built up a new and passionate new following among a new generation. Every generation has "their" Ninja Turtles, and they importantly stand on their own without a reliance on previous incarnations. So while it's always cool to see Bebop or Rocksteady show up, or a reference to Irma or the Archie comics, they're never front and center.
Star Wars is RELIANT on its previous films to a degree few other franchises are. Even Marvel movies - which bill themselves as part of a much larger universe - wisely are self-contained enough in every installment to be their own complete narrative among a larger narrative.
But 90% of Solo: A Star Wars Story doesn't resonate if you don't know, or already care, about Solo, Lando, Chewbacca, and the others, because a film like that exists solely to call back to those original movie moments. It was an expensive flop that was developed to answer the question "how did the Millennium Falcon complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsects?", a burning question nobody really needed to have answered.
The only path forward for this franchise is to fast-forward a hundred years or more into the future and have a change in aesthetics, atmosphere, and approach that comes with that. Things need to upgrade.
- Quirky, awkward robots bopping about is 70s shit.
- Dilapidated old spaceships with leather seats and glass windows that go pew pew is 70s shit
- Speaking of the 70s, people in their 70s are not typically action movie heroes and fair or not are not going to draw in the kiddos
- Raggedy tunics are not cool looking enough to be hero wear
- Somebody in this franchise needs to learn to write some fucking dialogue and have intentionally funny characters
- People need to start fucking. It's so boring that nobody fucks in Star Wars.
- Honestly we can skip the years-long training arc that requires our hero to take 2 movies to start being impressive
- Look at how Star Trek upgraded!
- Quirky, awkward robots bopping about is 70s shit.
- Dilapidated old spaceships with leather seats and glass windows that go pew pew is 70s shit
- Speaking of the 70s, people in their 70s are not typically action movie heroes and fair or not are not going to draw in the kiddos
- Raggedy tunics are not cool looking enough to be hero wear
- Somebody in this franchise needs to learn to write some fucking dialogue and have intentionally funny characters
- People need to start fucking. It's so boring that nobody fucks in Star Wars.
- Honestly we can skip the years-long training arc that requires our hero to take 2 movies to start being impressive
- Look at how Star Trek upgraded!
To be fair, this is precisely what Rian was trying to say with TLJ.
That film was a message to our generation to let it go already.
In hindsight maybe it should have been followed by a film not meant for our generation.
That's underplaying Disney's bigger goal with Solo; To see if audiences would be okay with recasting major characters to tell new stories with them. People forget just how small Solo's budget was originally, before the reshoots made it double. It was an experiment, a costly one at that. But Disney weren't just relying on nostalgia, they were putting out feelers for how to carve out the franchise's future.
My 2 cents - don't want to start a debate here, as I know the ST has some genuine fans here. I'm not one of them.
The two mainline Disney SW movies were awful. If not for the name attached, they'd be standing proudly next to Jupiter Ascending. They're a perfect storm of being bad on their own and being bad as a continuation of a franchise.
- both are glorified remakes (TLJ less so, as it mixes ESB, RotJ and 'subverting expectations') with rehashed plots
- nostalgia pandering without adding anything of substance
- TFA wants to simultaneously be a reboot and appeal to old fans, ends up dishonoring legacy characters and undercooking the new ones
- no regard for the mythos and worldbuilding, which are these movies' foundation
- no regard for what came before, only lip service; JJ's TFA is just carelessly indifferent, while Johnson's TLJ is actively mocking of the stories/characters and fandom
- disservice to all the new characters who really don't have time or opportunity to become 'their own' (maybe save for Kylo)
- TFA is an empty promise of the worn 'mystery box' idea
- TLJ is a petulant reaction to that focused on meaningless 'gotchas' and the idea of subversion, only to end up on the same tracks by the end, while somehow completely cutting the potential of a sequel
It was like a perfect one-two punch of awful. And Disney already laid the groundwork for the franchise's decline, by angering fans prior to both movies releases.
- they canceled the Clone Wars TV series, which by that point was a) beloved and b) really good
- they canceled the original tv series from Lucas set in the 'dark times' between PT and OT
- they canceled all the in-production games, including 1313 which was generating buzz with the fans
- they handed the license to EA, which proceeded to a) sleep on it for 7 years now, not counting b) Battlefront, which is mired in the lootbox controversy
- in one fell swoop they made the old EU redundant, a) making a lot of people feel cheated and b) making the SW world a lot smaller; it doesn't help that the new EU isn't that great (the new EU's problem is that a lot of it is inconsequential, it's a glorified promotional material for the movies, while the old EU, with all its warts was mostly interested in telling new stories)
Gutting the old EU made a lot of existing merchandise worthless, while making movies with undercooked characters that don't really have much to do (Finn, Poe, Rose, to a lesser extent Rey) made these characters less desirable as toys.
It's actually surprising that SW is doing this well. Disney is now in full damage control mode and to their credit they seem to be making all the right decisions to course correct:
- bringing back the Clone Wars
- making a tv series set in the OT continuity, with actual fans at the helm
- making another tv series and game in the 'dark times' period (maybe reusing some of the stuff from the Lucas tv series)
- retconing a lot of TLJ
- not really touching the ST period
Time will tell if it's enough to return the brand to the glory days.
The two mainline Disney SW movies were awful. If not for the name attached, they'd be standing proudly next to Jupiter Ascending. They're a perfect storm of being bad on their own and being bad as a continuation of a franchise.
- both are glorified remakes (TLJ less so, as it mixes ESB, RotJ and 'subverting expectations') with rehashed plots
- nostalgia pandering without adding anything of substance
- TFA wants to simultaneously be a reboot and appeal to old fans, ends up dishonoring legacy characters and undercooking the new ones
- no regard for the mythos and worldbuilding, which are these movies' foundation
- no regard for what came before, only lip service; JJ's TFA is just carelessly indifferent, while Johnson's TLJ is actively mocking of the stories/characters and fandom
- disservice to all the new characters who really don't have time or opportunity to become 'their own' (maybe save for Kylo)
- TFA is an empty promise of the worn 'mystery box' idea
- TLJ is a petulant reaction to that focused on meaningless 'gotchas' and the idea of subversion, only to end up on the same tracks by the end, while somehow completely cutting the potential of a sequel
It was like a perfect one-two punch of awful. And Disney already laid the groundwork for the franchise's decline, by angering fans prior to both movies releases.
- they canceled the Clone Wars TV series, which by that point was a) beloved and b) really good
- they canceled the original tv series from Lucas set in the 'dark times' between PT and OT
- they canceled all the in-production games, including 1313 which was generating buzz with the fans
- they handed the license to EA, which proceeded to a) sleep on it for 7 years now, not counting b) Battlefront, which is mired in the lootbox controversy
- in one fell swoop they made the old EU redundant, a) making a lot of people feel cheated and b) making the SW world a lot smaller; it doesn't help that the new EU isn't that great (the new EU's problem is that a lot of it is inconsequential, it's a glorified promotional material for the movies, while the old EU, with all its warts was mostly interested in telling new stories)
Gutting the old EU made a lot of existing merchandise worthless, while making movies with undercooked characters that don't really have much to do (Finn, Poe, Rose, to a lesser extent Rey) made these characters less desirable as toys.
It's actually surprising that SW is doing this well. Disney is now in full damage control mode and to their credit they seem to be making all the right decisions to course correct:
- bringing back the Clone Wars
- making a tv series set in the OT continuity, with actual fans at the helm
- making another tv series and game in the 'dark times' period (maybe reusing some of the stuff from the Lucas tv series)
- retconing a lot of TLJ
- not really touching the ST period
Time will tell if it's enough to return the brand to the glory days.
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Reading is for nerds. Show me laser swords and space ships.
Then they made a critical error in trying to carve out the future by strongly appealing to the past.
-The Clone Wars had pretty middling ratings, and its toy line was cancelled by Hasbro before the Disney buyout because of its struggles.
-Lucas cancelled the dark times TV show himself because of how expensive he envisioned each episode, deciding it wouldn't be feasible to film.
- Kotaku ran an article about the struggles at Lucasarts, which revealed 1313 as we know it was cancelled weeks before we saw the footage shown at E3, because Lucas rebooted it into a game about Boba Fett. That game was languishing in development hell.
- I'm not going to defend EA, but why would anyone expect Disney to have a clue about video games, outside of rewarding the license to the highest bidder? They haven't had a good track record on that front since the early 90's.
- The Clone Wars did the same thing, and frankly the old EU is better off dead.
I don't disagree. Solo was never going to please anyone. The initial backlash to it being announced was proof of that. But you can't blame them for trying.
Now Star Wars is clearly focusing on the new, with both announced trilogies focusing on "Unexplored eras" and the anthology series being thrown in the dumpster.
I'm not sure how true that is, because isn't "recasting major characters" with younger counterparts something the prequel trilogy did in earnest? So, yeah, Solo gave us a younger Han, Chewy, and Lando (but kept Ray Park as an aged Darth Maul), but the Prequel trilogies also gave us a recast younger Obi-Wan, Anakin, Boba Fett, etc. Some kept their roles (like Anthony Daniels and Frank Oz, mostly due to the fact they were mostly voice-overs, and the excellently hammy Ian McDiarmid), but Star Wars has never been above recasting major characters to tell prequel stories.
Though it does give credence to Rogue One's criticized attempt to CGI dead or aged actors back into modern stories.
You realIze they decided to scrap the EU before the Disney sale right? And the underworld show was cancelled before the Disney sale right?
And The Clone Wars was near death due to poor ratings and cancelled merch line before the Disney sale right?
And that 1313 was cancelled before the Disney sale as well?
I fucking hated nirvana and the beatles growing up until i personally discovered it later and liked them, starwars keeps getting pushed it makes sense they wouldnt be as into it. I partly think minecraft was so big because it belonged to their generation, same with fortnite. Theres no legacy its theirs and that's appealing
If their intention behind SOLO at the time of greenlighting was to explore new ideas and try to appeal to new fans then they have zero reason to be surprised it failed because the film delivered the polar opposite of that intention.
You can absolutely blame them for trying and doing the exact opposite of what they intended.
You couldn't really use Alec Guinness or Sebastian Shaw for Anakin and Obi-Wan in their twenties. Seeing as they were decades older in the OT, not to mention that they were dead before the PT started filming. Other than them, which characters are there in the PT that would need to be recast?
Solo is a much harder sell because Ford is so iconic in that role, and the film isn't set that far before you first meet him ANH. Making it a much harder sell.
That's not what I said at all, I said Solo was an experiment in seeing if people were okay with recasting the OT characters for future stories.
To add to the Clone Wars: Each episode was expensive, and it's obvious it got more expensive as the show looked better and better with each season.
Who would want to continue that after the guy leading it (and at times it was said he was paying for it out of pocket) is out?
And it's funny how people keep thinking it was Disney that scrapped the EU when it was always planned to be reset when George was planing his ST. It's not like he even followed besides taking small bits and pieces like a planet from it anyways.
Maybe make them less dark and depressing? The oddly injected humor never really balanced out the despair for me. They're too long too. I don't really know why kids would be into them.
Is any knowledge of the comics whatsoever required to enjoy the MCU?
That's what I mean by baggage.
Then I misunderstood.
But still if they were trying to tell completely new stories using young versions of established characters, like George did with the prequels, then they still did a bad job because very little of what they made was new.
Solo was, iirc, a passion project by Kasdan and the only reason he agreed to sign on for The Force Awakens. He's also the reason Lord and Miller got fired.
It was something that Lucas (and later Kennedy and company) agreed upon so he'd come back.
why he had a passion project about a young han solo that clearly no one cared about, i have no clue (and I liked the movie).
It has been stated, countless times, that the EU was effectively decided to be scrapped as early as 2011 when George Lucas started considering doing a sequel trilogy. As he was never going to follow the continuity of the post-ROTJ EU.
Pining that on "Disney" is absurd.
Pining that on "Disney" is absurd.
No but eventually the MCU is probably going to fall under that.
People keep bringing up the idea that you don't need to see all the films to understand what's going on and that each one is a small self-contained story that's part of a bigger universe. Then you have Endgame (and really any team-up movie) where a third of the film is the MCU's greatest hits. You would have needed to see Ant-Man and the Wasp just to understand why Scott popped out of a van and what he was saying to the Avengers at the beginning. "Wait, who's this glowing girl in red and blue? Where did she come from?"
I think it's the best of the Disney films but if they were expecting it to serve a different purpose than being a fun nostalgia romp they were delusional.
Or the fact that George Lucas couldn't stand most of it and hated Mara Jade, for example, but that is conveniently ignored most of the time.
I liked a lot of the EU stuff but I always thought of them as nice "what if" stories, as they are seen today.
Well of course it will. Everything does eventually. That's life.
Meanwhile it's still fresher and with wider appeal so obviously it's more attractive.
When it gets old and dies it'll be replaced too.
Endgame was a Season Finale though. Not exactly the best case to use for it. It was even billed as the follow-up to Infinity War.
To talk Far From Home at the moment, spoilers since it's most recent one.
The film only really expects you to have seen Homecoming and Endgame. When it makes references to films outside of those, it actually replays the scenes from those films, you don't need to see the original Iron Man or Civil War to understand Mysterio's frustration.
Gonna be interesting to see how the new Doctor Strange handles Scarlet Witch, espicially since it apparantly ties into the TV Series of WandaVision.
Depending on what phase you jumped into the MCU yeah, and it has far more required movies than SW does (which, at the moment, is only 8). The EU (games, novels, etc) and TV series, like old comic books and their various runs, aren't required to enjoy the most recent movies
How is it not the best use case? The point is starting at Endgame requires watching the previous movies. Starting some of the later phase movies require the previous ones. Star Wars only has 6 movies required to get into the ST, and really you don't even need to watch the PT to understand anything
You make a very valid point, JJ ironically expanded the star trek universe, by adding a whole other universe. But that was because of trek already established at least one other alternate universe. The issue in a way comes down to the medium I feel, with movies you are so restricted with time you need to set out with goal of world building/expanding. Oh starwars built a world, the prequels fleshed out that world more by filling in the back stories. I legitimately feel like their has been zero world building/expansion in the new trilogy thus far. I mean okay, casino planet lol
Good. The franchise has been held back by it. And that's not the same as me saying "go full fanservice/EU mode" either.
It comes down to variety, their is a superhero for everyone's tastes. Their is a style of superhero movie for everyone's tastes. That's unique to comic properties/universes. It's unique to media until the MCU started, having so much variety within a single property
I've barely seen any mainline MCU film (iron man, capt America, avengers etc) but was able to enjoy Ant Man and Black Panther knowing next to nothing about the comics or anything else.
Which of the Disney Star Wars films released so far can you say occupies a similar position in that cannon?
I think none of them.
1) The prequels weren't completely new stories. That story was already told by Obi-Wan in ANH, all the prequels do is embellish on what he said, while using a lot of OT imagery ("It's like poetry, it rhymes.") and adding a problematic "romance" storyline.
2) Again, they weren't trying to tell anything new with Solo. They were experimenting with recasting, to see if they could get away with it in the context of a new story. Using the cosy and familiar was to soften the blow of the recasting, while also keeping the budget down.
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You don't need to have seen the older movies to understand Rogue One or Solo. You'll enjoy them much better, but they're perfectly standalone movies on their own. And you don't need to have consumed any of the Star Wars comics, novels or games to understand any of the movies
Can you point to reviews or impressions of those films from people new to Star Wars to support your argument?
I guess we're gonna have to agree to disagree. I thought Anakin's turn to the dark side was set up well thematically. He already showed he had no problem pulling off a mass killing of civilians in response to his grief and revenge over the death of his mother in Ep 2 when he slaughtered the Sand People so swearing allegiance to Palp and killing the younglings in Ep 3 due to wanting to tap further into the dark side in order to prevent losing Padme was all set up believably. Christensen and McGregor both killed it during the duel (Portman is honestly the worst actor in the movie, yeah Lucas' lines can be bad but she wasn't even trying at that point). The overall environment, visuals and fight on Mustafar gave me a feeling I hadn't had since ESB. Mustafar is my favorite environment next to Hoth and Obi Wan and Anakin's duel is my fave next to Vader and Luke's first duel. The shot of Anakin and Obi Wan climbing up the lava gave me chills in the theater. And all the duels in the movie popped well and felt like they mattered, none of the duels felt throwaway. Not sure why you thought the choreography was bad, there weren't any weird gaffes like "Anakin standing still while Dooku cuts off his arm" in Ep 2.
Sheev's pointless wall jump into a somersault that landed him in the exact same place as he was before, just so Lucas could add CGI to the shot?
To a degree, yes... but both movies have MAJOR moments that are dedicated to characters that are not directly tied to any of the major principle characters. As a FAN, yes, it was nice to see some old familiar faces, but Tarkin wasn't necessary when we already had ANOTHER major general in the film doing the same role, Leia's cameo at the end was connective tissue to A New Hope but was very hamfisted, and the "best scene" involves Darth Vader slaughtering the Rebels... but none of the three characters I mentioned ever speak to or have any connection to the principle cast of Rogue One's narrative. The cameos are major, but OUTSIDE of the main story.
Same for Solo. It's enjoyable on its own, sure, but then you have a giant big reveal of Darth Maul, and that reveal is problematic because... what's the point? It goes nowhere, it doesn't tie into Han Solo himself whatsoever, and it exists 100% outside of Han's narrative, but it gets this big, major focus. It's a "tease" for... what? More Darth Maul? The dude was just killed in the TV show. His arc is over. It's just fanservice and the movie comes to a screeching halt for his appearance where he even activates his lightsaber for NO REASON just to go "remember this? He has this. You liked this once, right?"
Granted, I LIKE Maul. I'm happy to see more of him. But I also know it's not an organic part of Solo in any way, shape, or form. Even his connection to Qi'ra is unexplored, weird to fit back into overall canon, and her "dark twist" was probably meant for a Solo sequel we'll never get. As a stand-alone film, it can't stand-alone. It wedges in a major fan-favorite character without lead-in and also lacks any resolution for doing so since the film bombed and likely won't ever bother tying up this loose end (which is, again, for a character who was already tied up nicely in the TV series).
I really hate how the hate for Star Wars has made it impossible for me to enjoy searching for stuff about it. Like, if I want to look up Star Wars Rebels, I need to wade through like 5 pages of "STAR WARS REBELS SUCK AND FANS ARE IDIOTS FOR DEFENDING IT" crap before I get to anything actually talking about the show. And it's not like the "i hate it" is any good since most of it is "WAAAAAAH ERZA ACTS LIKE A CHILD RATHER THAN BEING A 'MATURE' WORK WITH BOOBS AND SEX AND BLOOD". With this virtirol being placed in every nook and cranny possible I'm not surprised kids have a hard time getting into it. The fan media is doing a great job making you feel ashamed for even liking Star Wars at this point.
Yes, that was a bad CGI obviously but who cares? The real reason that part is stupid is Palp taking down Fisto, Kolar and Tiin all at once with quick stabs. The actual duel with Mace and Palp was excellent though and I still stand by that the duels in Ep 3 were great overall and very satisfying fights.
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