That is the outcome.
The amount of hate I and many others got a decade ago on this forum, on other forums, Reddit, etc. after watching TFA for being the ones to raise the red warning flag early…
It was extremely clear where the franchise was headed from day one. Subsequent movies confirmed it. The box office trajectory of the franchise was apparent as early as TLJ, but arguably earlier in hindsight looking back at R1. The brand was being turned into a soulless corporate product. People ragged on George for many reasons, but at the end of the day he was one independent dude looking to tell his story. That was clearly never happening again.
A lot of us voiced our concerns that Star Wars would no longer be an event, that it would become over-saturated, and that while the general audience would turn up to the movies for a time, they did so largely in part because fans created fever-levels of excitement. Star Wars movies were kind of cultural landmarks. It was always a big deal.
Solo bombing was a giant air raid siren that got hand-waved away because of May “competition.” Like Star Wars ever had to worry about competition before that wasn’t Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings, which even then, was actual healthy competition. Star Wars as a brand was in trouble and fans continued to voice their concerns, but were loudly told this “wasn’t for them anymore.” Okay. So the fans left. TROS making Disney’s ‘trilogy’ the only of the three to have a straight downward trajectory with box office grosses, rather than getting the finale spike ROTJ and ROTS had, should have been the sign to put the franchise on ice and re-evaluate at a later date. By the end of the trilogy, the brand had lost over half its audience if we go off grosses alone. And that’s not even getting into the catastrophic merch and multimedia sales.
So instead of having some self-reflection, Dis/LF doubled down and dumped out a dozen or so modern day equivalents of direct-to-dvd movies onto their streaming service. Most of the remaining fans who stuck around finally had enough, and now the general audience saw the brand as junk you put on for “free.”
We’re now at a point where OG Star Wars fans are mostly apathetic and don’t bother tuning in at all. General audiences, lacking the personal attachment, just see it as background noise with no obligation to engage, and the new content failed to make a permanent connection with the youth like the OT and PT did. All you really have left are some OG stragglers and Disney fans. It should be clear by now that there was some irreparable devaluation going on in Star Wars land.
So M&G comes along and once again, we sit here and say it’ll flop. It should be pretty obvious by this point. But no. “It won’t flop! Baby Yoda! It’s Star Wars!”
Wow. Flopped. Front-loaded by Disney mega-fans, and then it falls off a cliff. Who woulda thunk.
Within like a day you already had the spin narratives about a movie not needing to make money to be successful, and how the next movie is the real test! Yeah okay. See you in twelve months for the next goal post shift, I suppose.
I still adore George’s saga and the original EU, but I haven’t touched a second of Dis/LF’s output since TROS. Once the literal biggest name in pop culture reduced to cheap, shoddy DTV content that can’t even break even.
Many of us said all this would happen beat-for-beat from day one, and we were told to shut up. Being proven right isn’t really a win in this case, and I take no pleasure seeing what state the franchise is in. Absolute travesty.