I’m not here to speak on the quality of The Mandalorian or its movie “spinoff”. I haven’t seen either. I don’t have Disney+ and can only go by what I’ve heard from fans, that the first two seasons were well received but the show dropped off storywise in the third season, when “baby Yoda” was brought back for profit reasons rather than story reasons when his arc was supposedly over with after being collected by Luke Skywalker for training. Apparently training Yoda/Grogu’s race is a lot faster than everyone else. Or DisneyFilm wanted to sell more plushies or something. That never ends well.
Sorry, Gremlin. On another show I might have liked you, but you don’t fit that show.
No, I haven’t forgotten what you did to Flash Gordon, NBC Saturday Morning programmers!
However, I can speak to the current treatment of the fanbase by the show’s new stewards. I’m more and more convinced that showrunners, directors, and producers are weaponizing unaware actors against fans as they try to rework franchises into their shows at the expense of what made the property so beloved in the first place. The SEECA crowd (snobs, elitists, egotists, corporatists who let them, and to a lesser but growing level the current activist movement in Hollywood) continue to alter properties to fit their tastes, partly because the studios aren’t paying attention but forcing them to only make existing IP due to being risk averse…only what they’ve done is almost a bigger risk in killing those properties by giving them to people who don’t care at the expense of people that do.
Yes, I do blame the creators for not caring what the fans want rather than show what they can do with an existing property and garner enough support to convince the studios and services to let them make what they want. I also blame the studios for putting the wrong people in charge. I do NOT blame the actors who are out of touch for making the show…but I WILL blame them for fan responses.
Enter Brandon Wayne, one of the suit actors for Pedro “almost literally phoning it in unless I need the helmet off for five seconds so I can make five other movies at the same time” Pascal for the Mandalorian sub-franchise. I get it. It’s a good assignment and a paid gig, hopefully being paid what you’re worth. In a recent interview with Movieweb, Wayne spoke out against the critics of The Mandalorian And Grogu, and used the previous hate leveled against Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace against the classic fans. It’s not the solid argument he thinks it is, and shows us that even the suit actors are happy to take on the fanbase as “toxic” rather than passionate. You can see from the start that article writer Manuel Demegillo has a few biases of his own.
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The Sequel/Prequel/Reboot Problem
Watergate was a scandal so big that they started calling conspiracies “(x)gate”. Comicgate and Gamergate are the latest examples, but something words just leave their meaning and get used wrongly. Mary Sue and “woke” are both victims of that in our current discussions on lazy storytelling. Also in that discussion is “fatigue”. A certain genre or franchise is losing audiences? Must be “fatigue”. Then they keep making it so what was the point of that label?
Added to the list of fatigues are sequels, prequels, reboots, and re-imaginings, because Hollywood goes to the well too often since they’re afraid of new things. The old stuff is more familiar, they reckon, more safe. It’s actually lazy marketing even if the people who make those movies, video games, and shows try to do it justice. Among other media but for this discussion I’m sticking mostly to movies, as that’s where most of the examples are coming from, but we’ll discuss the other stuff as well.
To help frame the discussion I’m going to use this recent article by Variety contributor Rebecca Rubin. “Don’t Call It a Sequel. Or a Reboot. Or a Remake. Why Certain Words Trigger Hollywood” goes over some of the more familiar terms when it comes to these various forms or remake or continuation and I wish I could find the Nerdrotic video where Gary Buchler goes over even more divisions because I wouldn’t be able to find the list, either. It gets ridiculous, but even what Rubin lists here shows that Hollywood doesn’t like that term because they don’t think the audience likes that term. However, like all of the other fatigues in entertainment discussion, it’s not that sequels and company are bad, it’s that the current people in charge are doing them wrong.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on June 18, 2026 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight, Video Game Spotlight and tagged commentary, gimmicks, Hollywood, movie sequels, prequel, re-imagining, reboot, Television and Movies, video games.
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