My family usually sees a movie together around Christmastime. It's a democratic process but Star Wars was becoming a sort of tradition since we'd seen Force Awakens and Rogue One together the previous years. Naturally, The Last Jedi was the obvious choice last year.
Suffice to say I know 6 people in real life who hate this movie and who don't want to watch Star Wars films anymore.
The data is real. My wife and I.......both lifelong Star Wars fans, HUGE fans..........both now could care less about Star Wars and feel that Disney has ruined it.
I'm not just talking about TLJ (though that was the final nail in the coffin --- an emphatic nail) --- I'm talking:
-the complete erasure of all prior Extended Universe, including the Thrawn trilogy
- the terribly weak Rebels and Resistance series, with either lazy animations, terribly cliché and boring characters, horrible stories and insane additions to the lore of Star Wars (considering they are canon),
- the unbelievably weak Aftermath book trilogy by Chuck Wendig that had the most painful style of writing ever put to page
- the uninspired ANH reboot that was TFA, which singlehandedly doomed the sequel trilogy to an unsatisfying path from the very beginning
- the selling of all Star Wars game rights to EA and dissolution of LucasArts, and we all know what that has gotten us: some weak-ass mobile money-maker games and one and a half Battlefront pay-to-win games............oh, and a handful of cancelled or severely delayed games that actually showed some promise (1313 etc.)
- Solo
- the meddling with directors and other aspects of the film-making process along the way ; eg: the firing of Lord & Miller, and hiring of the terribly bland Ron Howard to fill the void ; the canning of composer Alexandre Desplat from Rogue One just a few months prior to the film's release, and the subsequent hiring of the mediocre Michael Giacciano to fill the void --- giving him only weeks to churn out an uninspired new Star Wars score....the first non-JW Star Wars film score that would grace the stage.......yeah, knew that that was a mistake from the moment that they canned the intro Star Wars scroll (and theme song) and had that terrible transition into the title screen and music for Rogue One.
Even before the Solo debacle, it was TFA that left us concerned but hopeful and then TLJ that left us completely hollow for the direction of this "New Star Wars" and left us both caring less about what will happen in Episode IX.
It's a very sad circumstance --- sort of like what Mark Hamill once said in an interview: "There's a saying that goes 'you can never really go home again' ", meaning that once you leave your home and childhood hometown, and stay away for years (let's say 10 or more), you can never really return back to what you had before. Times change, people change, definitions of quality change etc. You can never quite recapture that magic, no matter how hard you try.
The unfortunate part is that it feels like they didn't even genuinely try to recapture that magic. JJ Abrams' job was to reboot (copy) ANH and spin it uninspiringly for a new era of kids. Rian's job was to subvert expectations at all costs. Both of their job was to utilize the original Big Three, but make sure that their character arcs panned out such that they didn't take the limelight away from the new characters at all......even if it meant doing uninspiring or frustrating things with the character arcs of the Big Three that so many fans have grown to love.
