Star Wars Isn’t Dead, But It’s Getting There
Disney revived the Star Wars franchise, but it was never fully alive
Imagine that you are a passenger on a airplane that’s on a long trip, and everything seems fine despite some turbulence. Suddenly a guy in a business suit sits beside you and explains a problem he has: He is the chief executive of the airline that owns the plane, and the person piloting it is refusing to obey orders, so he has decided that he will forcefully remove the pilot from his seat and replace him with someone else.
Luckily you happen to be an experienced airline pilot, and so the executive proposes that you take charge of the plane as soon as he gets rid of the current pilot. He will do this regardless of your decision, so if you don’t accept he will just ask among the passengers to see if there is anyone who knows how to land a plane.
This is the situation that Ron Howard found himself in when Kathleen Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan asked him if he could become the new director of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The previous directors were refusing to obey orders and that was apparently a problem, so they wanted Howard to quickly take charge of the film in the middle of principal photography.
This is the reason why I have respect for him after watching his latest film, he managed to take charge and do the landing without any casualties.
However, the decision that Kasdan and Kennedy made has led to unforeseen consequences for the financial success of the film, and for the future of the entire franchise. The movie itself is mostly okay, it has many original ideas and is entertaining enough to justify an online rental, but the decision to fire Phil Lord and Christopher Miller did more than just hurt Disney’s credibility.
The real red flag is in the box office performance of Solo: according to early reports the movie made $150 million worldwide in its opening weekend, so the movie is not just under-performing, it might actually lose money, and this is due to its overtly inflated budget (reported at $300 million) which is the direct result of the forceful change of directors, and extensive reshoots.
The decision to fire the Lord and Miller seems hard to justify since anyone that has watched their movies knows that they would have produced one of the most funny and interesting Star Wars movies to date, rather than one of the blandest. Ron Howard made an impressive effort in taking over the production of a massive blockbuster in just eight days, and creating a film that’s coherent enough that the average viewer will not be able tell which parts weren’t filmed by him, but that doesn’t change the fact that many scenes in the film are directionless and boring.
And yet that doesn’t explain why the film is doing so badly in the box office during its opening weekend.
…
So I need to address the elephant in the room.
The Last Jedi is not the main problem with the Star Wars franchise.
The real problem is that the franchise itself was dead before Disney acquired it, but people refused to admit it. It’s hard to tell exactly when the Star Wars franchise died, for every Angry Birds Star Wars, or every canceled version of Battlefront III, there was always at least one successful series like Star Wars: The Clone Wars that managed to keep the franchise alive enough so that people never admitted that it was actually dead.
Many people would argue that the prequels were the fatal wound that doomed the franchise to an eventual death, but it cannot be denied that the prequel trilogy brought forward a lot of new ideas and significantly expanded the Star Wars universe, which led to the creation of many successful TV series, toys and video games, many of which are still beloved by deluded millennials. The prequels were the main reason why Star Wars managed to remain relevant in the popular consciousness for more than a decade.
However, the franchise was more or less dead by the time Disney purchased it: No new films were being released, all the major game projects at LucasArts were constantly being canceled, The Clone Wars series had relatively low ratings, and the books were apparently going insane with characters like Abeloth.
The task that Kathleen Kennedy had was not to kick-start the Star Wars franchise, it was to revive it after being dead for a while. And to her credit she managed to do a convincing job by hiring talented artists like Michael Arndt and J.J. Abrams. And while a lot of talented people were involved in the creation of The Force Awakens, the final product feels like a phantom of the past, relying heavily on nostalgia and references to appeal to an audience that still loves the old movies and games and toys and books and TV series and children’s card games on motorcycles.
What I am saying is that The Force Awakens is a sexy zombie.
The Force Awakens is a very entertaining movie, it has great action scenes, it has many likable characters, but you can just tell that there is something dead about it. This is more obvious with a game like EA’s Star Wars Battlefront that was released the same year, which had gorgeous graphics, sold very well and was fun to play, but it was ultimately very shallow and lacking in content.
So what Disney has been doing since then is trying to convince people that the franchise is still alive, that the dead corpse is moving, but it’s getting harder with each new film. Rogue One relied hard on nostalgia and cameos, going as far as reshooting huge parts of the film to include new scenes for Darth Vader and Princess Lea, and while it was well-received both critically and commercially, some people noticed that it had basically no character development and the story didn’t make any sense.
In the other hand it’s hard to know what Rian Johnson’s thought process was when he made The Last Jedi, how much creative freedom he had, and how much time he had to realize his ideas. I think he wanted to push the Star Wars franchise in new directions, while also appeasing his masters at Disney, but he failed. What Johnson probably didn’t anticipated is that many fans were gonna get extremely upset at the way some characters are treated in the film, and about the whole film being an attack on nostalgia itself.
Now all the original characters in the original trilogy are gone: Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are canonically dead, while the tragic death of Carrie Fisher means that Princess Leia isn’t gonna appear in any new movies (hopefully). Nostalgia has been the most powerful weapon at Disney’s disposal, and it seems they don’t have much else.
The failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story isn’t the product of a weak script or a conflicted production, it’s not just about the loss of credibility after firing talented directors, it’s not just about a boycott by disgruntled fans and a lack of interest in a Han Solo movie that doesn’t feature Harrison Ford.
The harsh reality is that Star Wars is dead, and has been dead for many years, we just didn’t want to accept it.
The plane crashed before it even left the airport.
