They should stop making weird garbage. Any time period, any genre, just stop with the bad scripts and low quality productions. Ideally in a movie format. But they couldn’t even get Obi-wan and Boba Fett right, and those were basically impossible targets to miss. Maybe their current infrastructure will collapse and it can be started over, but it’s hard to imagine.
I understand the dislike for some recent productions, but what is “weird garbage” to you is someone else’s introduction to Star Wars and their absolute favorite storyline. I am hoping this thread can be somewhere that folks can analyze the Star Wars fandom itself and speculate specific ways to ensure better financial and critical success. Any particular storyline you’d like to see represented in theaters? What would you do if you were in charge of selecting the next movie to produce?
I’m of the opinion that quality trumps quantity. The Mandalorian was a landmark moment, it had the whole world invested in Star Wars again. When it came out the attention to detail, quality and presentation was clear. As they’ve tried to latch onto that success and spin-up more and more concurrent projects they’ve all suffered in some way on the quality front, with Andor’s first season being the standout exception.
I’d like to see a return of a focused approach; tell a story, move on to the next one. The limited series idea has merit vs. films, but it has to be a script written for the format. If the story requires a film format, have the guts to stick to it, even if it’s a Disney+ only release. I’d much rather one quality project a year than three or four mediocre or compromised ones.
I agree with this to an extent! Back in GL era, it was quite focused on EU material surrounding what George was working on at that time/had worked on before. The KOTOR project was the biggest deviation we had ever seen, and amidst the PT, it was a wildly successful choice. I think 1 show, 1 film, and 1 game/year is a very achievable goal. Rotate these toward the preferences of the various core fan groups and I think we’d start to see a better trend in quality/viewership/reviews. Thanks for your thoughts. What do you think would be the best “one story” to focus on next? (Let’s be realistic and think past 2026 projects that are already slated)
Great write-up Acbagel!
Unfortunately I don’t think simply making “a little something for everyone” (i.e. different things for different people) is enough to unite the fandom, as each group generally seems to think Star Wars should only be made for their tastes specifically (even if not everyone admits it). Doesn’t help also that a ton of YouTubers nowadays make an entire living from hating Star Wars, no matter what it does.
Of all the groups you mentioned, I’m in the one that you described as “not very protective, fine with whatever direction Disney takes.” I honestly think at this point they should just keep doing whatever they’re doing, cause people will get mad no matter what. There was a time when even ESB was divisive, ffs!
It won’t necessarily unite the fandom, but it will at least satiate them to a degree. Right now I’d estimate you probably have 30%-60% of Star Wars fans saying they’re not pleased with the direction of the franchise (I know this is a wide range, but it’s pure speculation so I have to guess and be generous on either side. Either way, it’s a significant portion of dissatisfaction. If you read the study linked in OP, Star Wars consumer demand has decreased by 54% since 2020). OT purists have been mad for 2 decades, EU enthusiasts have been mad for a decade, GL Star Wars fans are up and down on the recent stuff, Disney-supportive folks are generally happy with recent years and glad for new stories, and casuals have been consistently tuning out post-2019. I think by throwing bones to various groups and hopefully crossing over here and there to satisfy multiple groups at a time, you’d foster a less angsty environment. They may never love one another, but if you give each group any semblance of real hope for something they want to see, then they’ll stay distracted enough to stop clawing each other’s eyes out.
Indeed, each group selfishly wants what they want and there’s nothing wrong with that. I would like nothing more personally than for Disney to announce that their Canon timeline is disbanded and they’re going back to the EU, similar to how they first did it with “Legends”. But do I think that would be “best” for the Star Wars brand? Not at all, and I think I have the self-awareness to say even though I selfishly want that for myself, I think that doing that would create even more rifts and fracture support for the stories I want to see. I want Disney to make a lot of money telling good stories so they can keep investing in quality production. There has to be a balance in strategies to accomplish this.
Yes, the YT/media “grift” must be entirely ignored by Disney. I won’t say the biggest YTers will hate “everything”, small sects will, but the algorithm does not support small sects of grifts. I run millions of $ in YT ad campaigns/year at my job and watch tons of channel trends, I am quite in tune with how view bumps work. The Acolyte is making people a LOT of money and they are milking it for all it’s worth, but the algorithm will soon move on to other content and the rage bait will move to another topic. Probably another franchise. These types of viewership spikes in “grift” channels did not occur during The Bad Batch, TCW S7, or Andor. I’ve done in-depth studies of a particular channel that during the ST era was capitalizing on the hype leading up to 8. They were making extremely positive and supportive videos pre-TLJ, and it was a nonsense “leak bait” channel that was pure made-up speculation, but they framed it as if they had “sources” feeding them info. The views were going WILD. I spoke directly with this channel and they sent me their earnings numbers. They were working 1-2 hours/day and making ~$150k/year. Post-TLJ, this channel rode the algorithm to capitalize on the controversy of the film, and then again after TRoS, and now the channel focuses solely on the “woke culture” in Hollywood. They have grown 5x and I’m sure their earnings are scaling quite well. This is obviously a channel to 100% ignore. The individual told me they genuinely don’t care/believe what they’re pushing and they just do it as a job to make a lot of money. I think these channels are very easy to identify, ignore, and not even take into consideration when looking at strategies for successful Star Wars.