Does Star Wars Have A Future?

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?

There are still people who get excited over Star Wars. I’m watching the Australian version of LEGO Masters after finishing the UK version while I haven’t heard if the US version is getting another season. (Also, why did it take so long to finally let kids in on the US fun when the UK actually has the kids competing with the adults? Even then they didn’t think they could sell the show without celebrities and a different host.) Speaking of LEGO, the LEGO Star Wars parody movies and series are producing better stories than the franchise they’re parodying. Rowan Freemaker is the most interested Jedi in years while one of the holiday specials actually took the time to make Rey something the movies never could: interesting.

The problem is that Star Wars has fallen under the recently coined “brandfic” (credit: me) banner, people who want to use the brand to tell their stories instead of stories set in the Star Wars universe we know, or subvert things either for ego (Rian Johnson) or to push their own narrative and work out daddy issues (Leslie Headland). The High Republic was a joke from the get-go, a Star Wars era setting that clearly didn’t understand what makes good Star Wars in favor of people not into sci-fi trying to make sci-fi. Science fiction, fantasy, and superheroes all have rules to follow to make the world believable in their non-realism, but I have another article planned for that if I can get the chance to write it. Star Wars has rules too, set originally by George Lucas and expanded on by writers who wanted to build on Lucas’ galaxy rather than replace it.

I’ve heard the rumors and the hopes that the new people will just de-canon the sequel trilogy as if that will solve everything. It won’t. You can drop all the retcon bombs you want, but unless you’re willing to rebuild in this era where deconstruction is king that won’t help. The short version is there’s more to toss out than the sequels. Ryan Kinnel of RK Outpost as a more angry curse ridden but detailed explanation of why that won’t work.

According to rumors, Kathleen Kennedy would have left years ago while Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau would take over and “fix” the franchise. Rumors are useless. Galaxy’s Edge suffered from the price of the Star Wars themed park hotel, which I’m hearing is a bigger problem for the US Disney parks. It’s an article for a different site, but it does sound like the theme park designed for the average person is being claimed by the wealthy elitists while the attractions are being altered to promote the latest Disney film. Bringing back the original characters with new actors won’t save it. You’d have to toss out all of Disney Star Wars, but some people actually like Rebels, the LEGO parodies use those characters, and as Ryan noted marketing still uses them. Filoni was part of putting The Acolyte out there and his Clone Wars show included the Jedi looking so corrupt and foolish  that getting rid of them was a good thing, which The Last Jedi also seemed to favor. We even got “Dark Jedi”, which doesn’t make sense since you never hear about “Light Sith”, from Filoni’s shows.

Even giving Star Wars back to Dark Horse, which is having its own issues currently, means losing Doctor Aphra, a scientist with evil versions of C-3PO and R2-D2, which people who aren’t me have been enjoying last I heard. The Mandalorian got praise until it started focusing on “baby Yoda” Grogu instead of ending his story where it should have. Andor has it’s supporters even though it follows the same tone as Rouge One, which was an okay movie but was a tonal shift from the rest of the serial, samurai, and old war movie inspirations of George Lucas. If you look at the comments my friend enjoyed it more than I did, but he’s one of those casual audience people and a bit more open to things than those of us who pay closer attention to the expanded lore, especially those who follow it closer than I do. I know Han and Leia’s other kids existed and a hint of their story, but Kylo Ren also has his fans. Not enough to make him not dead like Adam Driver wants so he can play the character again, but they’re there. They just deserved a better story for him.

Taking time off would probably be the better solution. The franchise seemed to fare better in the “wilderness” than it did under Disney and even Lucas’ “special editions” and prequels. The sequels are leading to a reexamination of the prequels as a lesser evil, but this is still when fans demanded that Star Wars needed to be “saved” from Lucas, and we know how that all turned out. Now there’s a call for Lucas to come back and fix things, and we know that’s not happening.

You can’t just borrow from the Expanded Universe. Grand Admiral Thrawn is, from what I hear, a pale imitation of the serious threat he was in his own trilogy. Timothy Zahn created a clever foe, who used his brains as much as the force of the collapsing Empire, like finding a creature who could block the Force and limit the only known Jedi left. Though it seems like General Order 66 missed a bunch of Jedi who went into hiding, as seen in Rebels with both Kanan and Filoni unwilling to let Ahsoka die, and in good video games like Jedi: Fallen Order. Meanwhile Black Sun, a criminal organization part of Steve Perry’s Shadows Of The Empire sub franchise, has been referenced but is hardly the organization Xizor made of it and used in his failed attempt to replace Darth Vader as the Emperor’s right hand. Now there’s rumors (that again) of bringing in Mara Jade, but by the way the current canon is set up, the Emperor’s weapon against Luke turning into Luke’s wife after reforming is not going to be the same character. It’s just a woman everyone knows besides Han & Leia’s daughter that they can use but won’t be the same character. Even Darth Maul went from badass warrior to lame crime boss, less than half of the character he was after saving his life through the Force and replacing his lower half with machinery. No pun intended.

The best bet would be put Disney Wars on hold, let writers return to the Expanded Universe, make sure they actually care about the franchise and the Expanded Universe rather than that High Republic nonsense nobody cared about, and let fans choose their preference. Disney and Kathleen Kennedy screwed everything up. Forcing on the original (and best) trilogy is their best option, but you can’t replace those actors, even the dead ones. You can’t replace those stories even if you can tell stories beyond those characters. Right now there is no evidence that the new franchise masters care for Lucas’ original vision any more than the last ones and finally fans of “geek” media are catching on that nothing will change because they’re unable or unwilling to change. Filoni is all in on replacing traditional Star Wars with his vision for whatever reason he has. (Ego, money, both?) Can Star Wars be saved? Maybe, but current Disney and Lucasfilm aren’t going to make the necessary sacrifices because they’d be part of it. They still don’t know why Star Wars worked for decades and won’t try to find out. I don’t know if will ever get better, but odds are it’s still going to get worse. I don’t need a Force vision when I have history.