BW Media Spotlight

Sounds reasonably suicidal.

Before you start, this isn’t some “doom and gloom” article, nor am I going all Pollyanna on “we can totally save Star Wars, everybody!”, or any of that. This is one of those stream of consciousness articles that often comes off rambly to me but I have yet to be called out on them for whatever reason. It’s basically me thinking about where Star Wars is, where it would go, and where it could go if the people making it cared…and right now it doesn’t even sound like the creators cares.

Anyone who thinks the franchise is doing well is clearly not paying attention. Any defense I see tends to be either brand loyalists or along certain sociopolitical lines. The die hard fans have not been happy at least since The Last Jedi, if not The Force Awakens, while none of the Disney + shows outside of early seasons of The Mandalorian have gotten much in the way of praise. From breaking lore to forced false representation to in-fighting over which “daughter” gets to replace Luke Skywalker mistaken for one group “fixing” the franchise (as it turned out Dave Filoni just won the chance to get his “daughters” Ahsoka and Sabine into the new spot), to The Acolyte supporting the franchise’s villains to…does anybody even remember Star Wars: Resistance happened? The High Republic stuff is either a joke or a forgotten Disney Junior show. The last video game, Star Wars: Outlaws, so bad a dude got a 17 hour review going over every bit of broken story, game mechanic, and bug riddling that game, which isn’t doing Ubisoft any favors. I’m still trying to work my way through that one and it’s amazing how many different ways there are to fail at video game design.

So yeah, they’re not doing so hot, are they?

Disney’s new leadership recently met with Lucasfilm’s new management to discuss the future of the Lucasfilm properties, all of which have been damaged except for THX-1138, which if you ask me couldn’t get much worse if you tried. How do you make sex boring in a movie about a world banning it? Willow and Indiana Jones both had the title characters replaced by the “better” female character that nobody was interested in. I just hope American Graffiti isn’t on that list because I don’t know what they’d do with that. Meanwhile they made live-action sequels to animated works people have heard about, brought back Boba Fett because his armor’s cool and then made him lame, and in both cases people only care when they’re mocking it.

So how did Disney screw up one of the biggest geek media franchises? Simple: they hate geek media, like much of Hollywood, the same Hollywood that looks down on animation, so the animation studio decided to abandon and replace their legacy to play to the cool kids, which was all Iger cared about. Now we have new people, but no evidence they’ll fix the problem after years of broken hope that new blood would fix what went wrong. Marvel couldn’t even before Disney. DC hasn’t. Star Wars shows no signs of it. So if this franchise has a future, what is it?

Continue reading →