https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/12/25/let-it-die-star-wars/
We all know that Disney will be making Star Wars movies forever. Odds are most of them won’t be any good, but people will keep buying tickets so the Mouse House will keep cranking them out. They may even clone J.J. Abrams so he can keep recycling the
original trilogy over and over and over again. By Episode 25, everyone will be a Skywalker and the Death Star will be really, really big. Much bigger than your daddy’s Death Star!
Star Wars, like Thanos, is inevitable. But what if we could let it die instead.
I grew up with the original trilogy. Yes, I am one of those guys. For a while, I felt like I had an ownership stake in the franchise. Star Wars was special to us X-ers. But by now, most of us have realized that either we’ve outgrown Star Wars or Star
Wars has outgrown us.
We’ve outgrown Star Wars in the sense that the series has always been meant for children. When we were kids, we didn’t notice how childish the movies were. It helped that Uncle George didn’t talk down to us the way a lot of other makers of family
entertainment did at the time (cough *70’s Disney* cough). The original trilogy could be enjoyed by adults, so it didn’t feel like kiddie fare even though there was a seven-foot dogman walking around with no pants.
When adults who loved Star Wars in their youth were less than appreciative of Lucas’ prequel trilogy, he pointed out that the new movies were made for children. That seemed like a weak excuse at the time, but looking back the man had a point. As a guy
who is currently closing in on fifty, I am no longer the target audience for these Star Wars things, I guess. It’s easy to forget that since the first three movies were totally aimed at my generation.
Star Wars has outgrown us in that it has reinvented itself for other generations. There are people for whom the prequels are the *real*
Star Wars movies. I do not understand these people, but they exist. There are also fans who are fiercely devoted to the Clone Wars cartoon. Star Wars fans come in many shapes, sizes and ages these days. And we don’t always see eye to eye with our
fellow fans.
The biggest divide is likely over the latest sequel trilogy. That’s because the trilogy itself is divided between two creators with vastly different ideas about what a Star Wars movie should be. J.J. Abrams began and ended the trilogy with risk-averse
nostalgiafests that emphasized the importance of being born into a special bloodline. Rian Johnson told us we should let the past die and that anyone could be a hero.
I am sure the sequel trilogy has its fans. If people can rally behind the prequels, they will find a way to love just about anything with the Star Wars brand. But most people I have talked to, even if they like the Disney movies, have mixed feelings
about this particular trilogy and the way in which it was divided against itself. Who can blame them? It was a mess.
As an old school fan, I am prone to saying things like “there hasn’t been a good Star Wars movie since 1983 and even Return of the Jedi was a drop in quality.” For me, it was pretty easy to retroactively delete the prequels from my memory banks and
I’ll be doing the same thing with the sequels as soon as I finish writing this article. The original trilogy is all I need.
It would have been nice if the first Disney trilogy (there will be more), could have redeemed the franchise. When the new movies were announced, I think we all hoped that without the George Lucas’ out-of-touch tinkering, Star Wars could be Star Wars
again. But that’s never going to happen.
A big part of what made Star Wars what it was, was timing. The first movie came out at the exact right moment when Americans were ready to stop thinking about Vietnam and Watergate and have a fun little space adventure. If it came out much earlier, it
would have seemed frivolous. Wait too long and someone else would have come along and stolen Lucas’ thunder.
Today, we’re living in a world which has been reshaped by four decades of Star Wars. It’s a problem. Just ask the makers of John Carter. They made a movie based on stories that influenced George Lucas’ creation and ended up being accused of ripping
off Star Wars. It’s hard to avoid comparisons, but it’s also very important that you do.
Following the lackluster box office performance of last year’s Han Solo origin story, Solo, Disney has decided to back off from its aggressive plans to flood the market with all things Jedi. The next theatrical release is expected in 2022 giving us a
little bit of a breather between trilogies. That is a very good idea.
Hopefully, the folks at Lucasfilm are putting on their thinking caps and coming up with some clever ways to breathe some new life into Star Wars. Because if they come back with more of the same, that’s just going to suck all of the oxygen out of the
room. You can’t do another guy in a black helmet with a red lightsaber followed by an army of dudes it white armor. You gotta mix this stuff up a little, guys.
If it were up to me, I would wait a little longer. Let Star Wars play out on Disney+ for a while. The Mandalorian isn’t perfect, but it’s the best Star Wars story since Return of the Jedi. In the post-Skywalker era, TV seems like the perfect medium
to try out some new ideas for a while.
But Disney isn’t going to be satisfied with streaming revenues. They want that movie money. And more importantly the merchandising dollars that go with it. Hopefully, this time around they put a little more effort into planning things out before they
start rolling film. If they keep racing to meet arbitrarily determined release dates, they may find they have killed their golden goose eventually.
I want to like Star Wars again. I hope whatever they do next brings me back into the fold, but I am skeptical at this point. Prequel me once, shame on you. Sequel me twice, shame on me.
Star Wars is very much alive and there’s too much money involved to kill it. But I do hope that the folks in charge will slow down the output and be a little more purposeful with future releases. Not even Star Wars can survive indefinitely without an
injection of fresh ideas.
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