Amid the endless rumours and speculation of disastrously mismanaged movies and Kathleen Kennedy stepping down, we ask ourselves a simple question - what on Earth happened to Lucasfilm?
10 years ago, we'd all be saying it's impossible not to make 1 billion with any Lucas film IP. Now we're laughing at the idea that any of their IP would make a profit. Kennedy's legacy is running the most profitable franchises to the ground
Considering how massively as successful anything they make that is even remotely average, there is plenty of evidence for them to know that it's literally a money printing machine but they STILL refuse to make even the most minimal effort in the right direction. They're ACTIVELY trying to fuck everything up.
Disney could have done 10 years of Skywalker extended universe stuff and another 10 years of old republic stuff easily. Yet Kathleen said no content existed and they used their own 'original' ideas to create the most generic protagonist ever "Rey Palpatine" .
I have said this for almost 10 years now. They could have done the Thrawn trilogy, used Timothy Zahns books to write the script, each movie would have made over a billion dollars easily, and everyone would have been happy. It was pure pride on Kathleen Kennedys part that led to the situation Disney is now facing with Star Wars.
@@colewagner3435 This is what I don't understand. I'm no die-hard SW fan, but remember reading Zahn's Heir to the Empire. That included Mara Jade, who seemed a much more interesting character than the Rey they created. Apparently she was created by Zahn *because* the existing SW lore lacked strong female characters, yet here was one that was prepared earlier. I've no idea what rights issues there are around the extended universe, but as I understand it, anyone writing in that space had to give Lucasfilm pretty extensive rights.
@@brolohalflemming7042 you hit the nail on the head. Mara Jade was an already established and liked character that would’ve been the ideal addition to the Star Wars universe. She was already involved in the story for the Thrawn trilogy, and she has an amazing character arc across those three books. Not to mention that Disney could’ve also done a whole series around Mara Jade and what she did with the empire. And, since she’s a strong female character, everyone wins on all fronts. It’s astonishing to me that Disney literally has endless amounts of already made material to use in their shows and movies, and chooses to use none of them.
@@colewagner3435 And if they use any of it. It to cherry picke and make a water down versions of it or ruining it and killed it off as fast as possible.
We couldn't even get Luke, Leia, and Han in a room together for the sequels. Not even for one scene. That's how inept Disney is. That's how badly they screwed things up.
@@jrus690 take Palpatine out(which is fine cause he's a villain that the younger generation was stuck facing) and you still get Yoda, Obi, and Ani in 1 place together at some point
The decline of Star Wars is absolutely KK's fault. The wokeness was brought in by her and it all comes down to personal insecurity. She put so much emphasis on overwriting Lucas' legacy with her own she completely neglected that the stories you tell need to resonate with the people to be successful, not just yourself.
Disney did that, since 2016.. to espn... starwars... comic book movies now... abc'snews.... i can name them all and most of them have some kind of idealogy they put into it, leaning to... the side of one party
I used to think this. But the wokeness is throughout Disney and Bob Igor had plenty of time to correct KK and he chose not to. I think it was a corporate culture in Disney that bled down into Lucasfilm.
See, there is plenty of room to criticize Kennedy for her running of LucasFilm but this line of attack is more a "I hate her because she's a woman" attack. Fact is, over the top "wokeness" is a Disney wide problem and it's arguable that Star Wars isn't even close to the worst offender. I mean hell, Andor was pretty much devoid of "wokeness" (there were strong female characters but they weren't over the top girl bosses and were balanced with strong male characters)... when was the last time you could say that about a Marvel production?
Star Wars has gone from being a cultural touch stone to something you wouldn't now touch with a barge pole and that does take some doing but Disney managed to do it.
I dunno, it's still one of the biggest franchises around. Star Wars was already reeling from one massive disappointment before Disney came along anyway.
This is all part of the message (plan) they want to undermine the cultural impact of things like starwars, really need to break our spirit. Trashing these great franchises and cultural heroes that stand up for what’s right, they can’t have people thinking this is how it should work.
Studios? You mean a whole political party, brother... it's Disney and they are on what side? Joe's... and not so much Joe as they are in the pocket of Xi
And still people will suck the IP hard if they bring a somewhat okay-ish movie or series because people still love the franchise and have sooo much benefit of the doubt.
That photo of K.K. smiling with her all female colleagues whilst wearing t- shirts that said ' the force is female '. That should have told you everything.
@@samblack5313 Same. TFA was where Star Wars died for me, I didn’t bother with the last one at all and at most I’ve dipped into Mandalorian. Haven’t bothered with the rest.
You could argue that Chapek was left holding the bag for a lot of crap that Iger implemented and when it started falling apart Iger got to put on his Superman cape and come back to save the day from his own failures. The Little Platoon is right that Iger was astute enough to setup a patsy and position himself to be the hero who was needed to save Disney. That is SW Emperor 3D level chess.
Has to be something big! Any dirt on who she had to blow in the 70’s to advance in Lucasfilm with no talent or intelligence … will have aged about as well as she has. She must literally know where bodies are buried!
@@alexfriedman918 She and Iger are narcissists without doubt. She raised Lucus ans speilburg up in order to rise her own renown. Narcissists are all about legacy. They will never admit fault and it is sad that they chose Disney to leech off.
nah, I just think that people in charge of Disney are "geniuses" and they think that KK is doing a great job only fans are ungrateful and they can't appreciated creative decisions made by brilliant Katty ! Plus there nothing to replace her. Just look at Paramount; for last 14 years they stubbornly refused to fire Kurtzman, even though he demolished Trek beyond repair and he is still doing this! Studios just refuse to make changes, unless they have knife on their throat - that make you think how bad is situation at Marvel that they decided to fire Victoria Alonzo.
Yep. And one of those big stinky floaters too... not a nice compact and properly dense sinker. This one is only semi solid and still bubbling gas as it enters the pot....
@@hotfightinghistory9224 For me, its one of those turds that makes you bleed and is too big to flush. I dont really care about the smell because Im in pain and my bathroom is flooded.
It's more like the scene from Dumb and Dumber ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6AVMcJa77PM.html The toilet is out of order and Rian Johnson just unloaded a mud tsunami
Lucasfilm can't even successfully sell merchandise anymore! Merchandise! This is what made George absurd amounts of money, and they have managed to mess that up, along with their entertainment ventures. Truly amazing. 🤣
That’s what’s mind boggling about Disney’s handling of the IP: under Lucas it was an absolute money-printing machine, despite the movies. Under Disney it’s a white elephant _because_ of the movies.
@@Ebalosus even if the prequels were bad, at least George didn't disrespect the characters. This key difference is why he was still able to make buttloads of money. I don't know how any executive at Disney or Lucasfilm could release TLJ; the project should have been halted at first draft immediately and then necessary changes be made. Yes, it made $1 billion which caused them to be blind for far too long.
There are great writers out there, I’m sure - as always. They just won’t get hired as long as people are picked based on ideology and diversity. That’s why no studio is doing any better…
@@alanrobertson8626 and then it’s worse when they pander a completely different set of ideals towards other national markets. It’s a foundation of pure lies and financial suicide.
@@alanrobertson8626 diversity is great as long as it comes after meritocracy. The problem is diversity is now coming before it, which is why mostly everything out now is shit, for the most part ..
The problem is that every initial project director (JJ Abrams, Rian Johnson) wants to bring their own script with them, and more often then not there needs to be a well crafted script by a team of writers who know the actual lore. The fact KK didn't think of the creative impact, and only worried about making her artists and shareholders happy (pushing SW Merch), shows she really isn't cut out for managing such an important intellectual property. It's sad that it has taken this long for them (Disney) to figure this out.
Funnily enough she is a monster very much of Disney’s own making, mostly because she was too conciliatory to them and they didn’t push back enough against her. If they had gotten the Harry Potter IP like they really wanted (SW was more of a consolation prize for them), even with Rowling telling them to fuck off and her controversies, they would’ve been making bank because the Wizarding World parks make bank, as do the books and ancillary merchandise. Instead they’re left with an IP that was an even bigger golden goose than Harry Potter and utterly ruined it.
Nah, she was pushing for diversity before the ink on her contract was dry. One of the first things she did was blast out those "The Force is Female" shirts. One has to wonder what the state of Star Wars would be if they gave the job to Rick McCallum...
Remember Jurassic Park? In the original book by Michael Crichton, Tim is the older brother and the computer nerd, while Lex was the annoying jock. It's Tim who resets the park's systems, but for the movie they switched them to give the female sibling more importance. Also, in the book, after Malcolm says his famous line "God creates the dinosaur, God kills the Dinosaur", yadda yadda, everyone simply contemplates what he just said. Instead, in the movie, Dr. Sattler adds "The dinosaur eats the man. The woman inherits the Earth." Now guess who was one of the executive producers of Jurassic Park... 🙄
If a fry cook at a fast food restaurant managed their fryer a thousand times better than Kennedy has managed LucasFilm, they would have been fired after a day for incompetence.
For the past 25 years, Disney has focused on acquiring successful IPs (Lucasfilm, Marvel)/studios (Pixar) /leveraging their own IP (live action remakes), instead of trying to tell good original stories. This has been a highly successful strategy for a while, but that has now run its course. Their ability to be a real movie studio has completely atrophied, they just don’t have it in them anymore. Hell, they even hollowed out Pixar’s unique synergy that was responsible for so many amazing original stories.
I honestly never thought Pixar would become as awful as it has, it was one of the last good things about Disney & it’s just as shit as the rest of Disney now.
Part of Iger's promotion to CEO in 2006 was to change the energy and culture at Disney. And the only way he saw to do it was to bring outside companies' in, ie. he took all the Pixar executives and put them in charge of Disney creative. Unfortunately, all this consolidation of power eventually broke the fighting spirit of said companies as they perhaps got too comfortable, too corporate, too political.
@@matthewgaudet4064 I thought Onward was pretty good, in spite of the forced lesbian reference. Haven’t any of the films since then. Most of their films seem to be struggling at the BO these days though.
Kathleen Kennedy is the luckiest secretary in Hollywood-- literally an assistant who was handed a producer credit from Spielberg for doing her job on a movie that turned out to be a mammoth hit, and because of the way Hollywood works, was brought into the orbit of the biggest filmmakers of the 80's and 90's, and had her name associated with all of their work. Her tenure at Lucasfilm paints the picture of a woman who, rather than recognizing just how obscenely lucky she'd been, instead believed she'd never received the recognition she deserved, and bitterly set about killing off all of their classic characters to replace them with avatars of herself. It's comically silly, but that's how it looks to me.
Lucasfilm shouldn't be surprised by Star Wars' death. The Rise of Skywalker's story was like a T-800 that went back in time and terminated the franchise before it was born. It made Anakin's journey and redemption meaningless, it made the actions of Han, Luke and Leia meaningless. Lucasfilm put a bullet in their own franchise and now wonder why it's non-responsive!
Yes! They ruined established characters because the cant create anything new. Then when they do (like Snook) there's no back story. And who remembers the "story for another time" when Rey was handed Luke's lightsaber?? Never watched beyond TFA, too disappointed to go on
That was after Skynet went active in Last Jedi and wiped out most of humanity Of cours, Force Awakens, while the least terrible, did still build Skynet and deserves a share of the blame
@@InfernosReaper Force Awakens sucked just as hard - Han dead, Han and Leia split up, lame story, audience laughed when Kylo first took of the mask in my cinema lol - JJ Abrams hack job supreme. It was a success because it was the first and people have bought into the idea it was somehow ok - it wasnt it was pure suckage
@@poocrayon4588 It was not great, but *some* setbacks weren't too crazy and could have been accepted, *if* the story actually went somewhere interesting After all, in the first movie they blew up the super weapon but by the next one they're *still* hiding out in obscure locations with the Empire still going strong. Empire remnants isn't too crazy, but definitely weird that Han not only got the reset button hit with his life and abandoned the love of his life, but he also *somehow* lost his ship and *never* bothered going back for it? That's not as bad as Luke closing himself off from the force and wanting to go die, yet leaves a map behind and doesn't bother to ghost himself until he has *no* reason to.
@@jimmaurer8361 Ah yes "A good question ... FOR ANOTHER TIME!" I HATE when stories use that cliche, like anyone in that situation would say "no, say the basics on the way, I NEED to know". But JJ got to have his pandoras box of mysteries and intrigue ... Garbage.
It’s just crazy the shift in businesses, not just Disney, not wanting to make the best products possible for their customers so they can make the most money possible.
In the case of this latest rumour about KK the word is it comes from the woman herself. She was, apparently, so angry about the meeting that she came back to her office fuming at everyone about it.
There are quite awesome Star Wars books and games out there that have 1000000x better plot than any new Star Wars movie but they just do not care for some reason. They want to use the characters known by the mainstream audience…
@twentyfivedegeessouth2199 Because::... 1. Kathleen Kennedy is a talentless ((and thusly)) envious, spiteful, hateful bitch 2. Bob Iger is a car salesman who missed his calling (( and an utter dunce when it comes to political philosophy... I don't see him as an ideologue aka a "True Believer" in Neo-Marxism )) 3. And, with the noted exception of Nelson Peltz and Ike Perlmutter, it seems to have shareholders who by-and-large are either out-of-touch, cowards or a little bit of both
I'm guessing that Disney was scared of a Prequel-like backlash and distanced themselves from the Lucas' treatments. I'm also guessing that hack Jar-Jar Abrams immediately gave them a call after the IP acquisition and they went with him instead. It's still KK's fault.
Why do you look at it that way? For me STAR WARS will ALWAYS be the original movie from 1977. Everything that has come since has been a derivative work. There is no DOWNFALL for me. STAR WARS is and always will be one of my favorite films... even more enjoyable than The Empire Strikes back - whose special effects have not held up. The AT-AT attack on Hoth in particular looks very much like models filmed on fake snow.
@@kurtzahringer9750 Definitely will be. There were poor business decisions about when to release, what to release etc, but mostly it's just amazing how the writers consistently disrespected the previous stories EVERY TIME.
@@mikemontgomery2654 I watched half of the first movie in sequel trilogy and that was enough for me to know it was garbage, it obviously went off a cliff after that. I watched Rogue One and found that to be half decent but not until it had been out for a while and had past the smell test with trusted critics. Haven't watched any of the made for TV stuff because it all looks bland and uninteresting. They would have been better off just doing live action remakes of the cartoons, at leat then the stories would have been decent, though I wouldn't put it past Disney to totally screw that up.
The moment she said, "We don't have a lot of material to work with". After ejecting the entire Star Wars legends, and expanded universe material. I knew there was no going back.
I actually agreed with the decision to not adapt from the books. If they stuck to the books they would have been locked in to telling a story that a lot of fans already knew. The blunder was that they didn't have an established outline for the new trilogy. They didn't know what was going to happen in episodes 8&9 before they started shooting episode 7. They had the easiest touchdown in movie history and they fumbled the ball.
I'm late to the party, but I just watched Top Gun: Maverick. Imagine this: a film in which the white male hero is not a fumbling doofus, is seen by everyone around him as extremely capable, courageous, and the man you turn to when things get tough. And the film made a lot of money and is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish. Contrast that with what the woke Hollywood crowd did to Han Solo (he didn't know how to repair the Millennium Falcon but a girl did) and Luke Skywalker (turned from a hero who inspired hope to a sad, bitter old man who'd come to despise the ways of the Jedi). Let's just face it: the age of heroes is gone from cinema, except for a few rare films that will dodge the butcher knives here and there. We still have the classic films from decades past to watch, but Hollywood has no future, just a glorious past and a miserable present.
And yet they STILL manage to make Maverick flawed (in a healthy way) - his love life is a mess, he's still haunted by the ghost of his dead friend (and his dead friend's wife, who asked him to fuck up his dead friend's son's career and keep the reason a secret from the boy, therefore giving him even more guilt to carry). And then the only other person he can trust dies, leaving him with a huge burden to carry (major props to Val Kilmer, who should have got a supporting actor Oscar, and to the way they chose to write Ice out). He's got a shitload of baggage on his plate; but damn, the man can still fly a plane.
Top Gun: Maverick starred man who jumped on Opera's couch 15 years ago/practitioner of Scientology but nobody cares anymore because its a man. Obi-Wan went from being man who was a Jedi/trainer/chopped Darth Vader's legs off to hermit guy who Luke has not seen a while.
Season 3 was sabotaged. Grogu wasn't supposed to be there, but Kennedy got marketing to demand his return, claiming that toys wouldn't sell if Grogu were absent. The result was a premature return in the BoBF Mandalorian episodes, followed by Grogu becoming a superfluous character in a season where he isn't needed. Also, Bo-Katan seems to be stealing much of Din Djarin's screen time, leading to the possibility that Kennedy is interfering with the plot too.
I still recall the 10 minutes of denial followed by white-hot anger as the credits rolled on The Last Jedi. I said there and then that I would never pay to watch Star Wars again -- and I haven't.
And the lost opportunities they had. We can now no longer have Lea, Luke, and Hans together on screen without the digital resurrection. All the goodwill they had, the potentially infinite amount of material they could build on, the potential of the franchise, all wasted to churn the continuous stream of content needed. Even ideas that they may have taken from the extended universe (Palpatine returns) didn't work or have rhe same impact. Say what you will in hindsight, but people were pretty excited after the Force Awakens and Rouge One, if they had even continued down the same path we wouldn't be talking about a dead franchise. At this point, Star Wars may need to disavow the sequel trilogy to move forward. Or hire Lucas, give him full creative license and a big check and see what happens.
@@bwill887 For me Force Awakens was OK but Rogue One got me thinking that if they can make a film like that then that shows they are thinking out of the box but after that it just went down hill and Im not even going to mention that it was because of the message its also due to bad writers not understanding the franchise and also being bad writers in general and also KK constantly falling out with directors and a sense of them not knowing what they are doing The Book of Boba Fett became The Mandalorian show and now The Mandalorian is becoming the Bo Katan show with Andor I saw that as them coming to their senses but that show didn't stand a chance due to how terrible the two previous shows where
@@davidsummer8631 I am thinking it is a combination of changes in the writing room, studio interference, and not understanding the source material or backgrounds (warping a space ship at Palpatine's planet would likely destroy everything, why not do that). I am not entirely sure where the Mandalorian was going for season 3, but given the ending of season 2, this isn't it and it is hard to say what a writer with a clear path will do if the studio doesn'tallow him to tell his story. The change in writers is what I blame for the broken plot threads in the sequel trilogy (Rey's parents being importnat at first, then not at all, then a key driver of the plot). The message is problematic but for a different reason, it has created characters with no real character, either being paragon of virtues that never struggle and always win, mustache twirling villains with no good in them, or a bunch of side characters that range massively from incompetent pieces that need saving to geniuses based on what the plot demands at that time. Weirdly, Ren was the most interesting character in the sequels but he never won against Rey or forced her to withdraw, an interesting character bud a bad villain and the films suffered as a result. Factor in the lack of consistency where no one ever grows and you have a problem. Good franchises get this, the characters have to grow, be humbled, become better (or worse if it's a villain) otherwise the story is just static. I am with you, Rouge One was great. Obvious issue is that you couldn't really build on it and a prequel show, especially after the bad content put out, and it doesn’t have a chance. Andor showed that, despite being a pretty good show in all honesty.
@@bwill887 The Mandalorian should have ended at the end of season 2 why they have continued is because they want to connect the show to the sequel films which have already been pretty much disowned by enough people already so that doesn't make any sense to me and they never had the key points of all the sequel films worked out before they started to shot so how can you build a character in one film when you dont know how they are going to be used in the next film.
The criminal thing with Star Wars is it doesn't look like there was ever a plan, an arc for the movies and shows. There's been no quality control or pride in what they shat out either...Kenobi and Boba Fett. They've had this hubris that they can do whatever and it will just sell because it's Star Wars. Well Joe public has "woke" up and realised it's garbage mostly and walked away.
Fett is weird because it involved some of the same people behind Mandalorian and they couldn't even remember that Bob had no reason to futz with the Sarlac pit because he *knew* where his damn armor was by that point. I get wanting the spectacle, so just have him go there and blowing it up because *he wanted to* rather than *he is a moron*
The common thread between Star Trek and Wars dereliction and decline is JJ Abrams. He needs to be properly recognized as the killer of franchises and the hack writer that he is. I don't know how he has escaped criticism when he is at the tip of the spear for two monumental downfalls.
The business model at Lucasfilm revolved around the fact Lucas owned all the merchandising rights. That is how they made money hand over fist without new films. The company was profitable and independent, but no one is infallible and I think it showed toward the end of Lucas’ reign. Now the mystique is lost because they keep resurrecting and changing old characters to the point where death is meaningless because we all know they can just retcon it and suddenly Vader is back. Sometimes less is more. I wish it stayed independent, but things change. It is best to let it go and remember the good times rather than endlessly quibbling and lamenting how things have turned out.
A huge inter connected universe with closely plotted timelines and a bible to keep things straight to tell stories from? Hmmm...It appears that I have an outline of that in the first few pages of Star Wars: The New Jedi Order Force Heretic II Refugee by Sean Williams and Shane Dix copyright by Lucasfilm Ltd in 2003 which is a book pulled at random from my bookshelf. Kathleen Kennedy? "No, throw all that garbage in the toilet and flush it." Movies from the Expanded Universe of Star Wars would have had a built in book fanbase as well as the original Star Wars fanbase. No, throw all those Older fans in the toilet as well.....
Have you seen rings of power. Even when using the source material these arrogant artists are such sycophants to their own egos that they will try to improve the stories with modern morals and thereby ruin all of their beauty until they blend into the amorphous grey mass called "content".
The creative staff at Lucasfilms went into the sequal trilogy with the mistaken belief that the fans were unsaphistifcated morons, they believed that as long they called it Star Wars, had spaceships, aliens, lightsaber fights and pretty explosions that the fans would happily buy tickets and merchandize and happilly drool in front of the screens. When the fans turned out to be a little more sophisticated than they thought, their egos would not let them admit they made a mistake and they have been trying to prove the fans wrong and themselves right ever since. Yhe most ironic thing I think is they are chasing a fan base that has never really gone in for sci-fi.
I said this a while ago on one of Doomcock's Star wars videos a while ago and I'll say it here as well: seeing Disney possessing the brand of Star wars in both their physical appearances at the parks and in the form of movies and TV shows like I'm looking at a bunch of dolphins and Shamu at SeaWorld being restricted of their freedom in the open ocean. It's almost cruel to see how Disney has completely robbed this amazing franchise of that sensation that you would have when you found out that a new Star wars movie was coming out. Remember the excitement that you felt when you first saw those laser swords beaming from those little flashlight looking things, then when you found out that the movies were going to explain Darth Vader's origin almost 15 years later? Well unfortunately we'll never get that sensation with this franchise again. In the same goes with the Marvel franchise, and even the DC franchise. I remember people being so excited for Batman begins that people left and right were wearing some sort of Batman paraphernalia in preparation. Now the magic truly has gone.
They used to be sacred. People would wait on line for them for days. Can you imagine anyone caring about the next set of Star Wars movies enough to camp out overnight?
@@genyatus Possibly. I know nothing about it's story, so can't really give an opinion on it. I have played the knights a lot though. Great games and story.
@@ALeCoq112 Certain parts of SWTOR really retcons or ruins the Kotors, especially Kotor 2 and the Exile. There are high points here and there, but the MMO is indicative of BioWare's issues with good writing.
I agree with Platoon when he says that we’ve been hearing KK’s getting fired rumors since The Last Jedi. I won’t believe it until it happens at this point. It is a very nice rumor each time though. That being said, why hasn’t Disney fired her yet is the real question. She is costing them money by the truckload and evaporated good will with the efficiency of a supernova. What is she doing for the company? What dirt does she have?
I'm not sure anyone else is an F1 fan, but I feel like the Kathleen Kennedy rumour is like the endless rumour of Porsche joining F1. It's always next year they'll announce something and it's now I'll just believe it when I see it.
F1 has been trying to get Audi and Porsche to join since 2014, they’re so desperate for new engine manufacturers. Context: F1 switched to hybrid engines in 2014 in an effort to attract manufacturers but all this resulted in was Honda joining.
I feel really bad for John Favreau because he was originally hired to just work on one show, which he was even hesitant to do at first before they hired Dave Filoni as co show runner. Now he has to be in charge of basically a broken franchise where it started off great with the end of season 2 perfectly setting up a bright future with Boba Fett getting his own show, Gina Carano’s Cara Dune getting her show, Ahsoka getting her own show, and Mando going on to do his own things separate from Baby Yoda. There was also a ton of separate Star Wars content like other spin off shows, animated content, and films. However everything changed when Disney fired Gina Carano and cancelled Rangers, then Boba Fett was an absolute disaster of a show with the studio freaking out and trying to turn it into the most bland accessible television series that needed to set up Mando season 3 for some reason even though Mando season 3 could’ve just had that set up in season 3. This led to Boba Fett being a rushed critical failure. One bright thing however that is going on in the Disney Star Wars galaxy is Ahsoka which seems to be going strong except for one small problem which is Dave Filoni. This series has taken that man’s full attention which hasn’t allowed him to take the time to equally work on other Star Wars content except for maybe Bad Batch. Boba Fett, Mando, and most importantly Kenobi (which was the biggest screw up Disney has made since the sequels) have all started to fall apart because clearly that creative spark is missing. It’s not Jon Favreau that has made these series and characters work, it’s Dave Filoni and Ahsoka has taken that man’s full attention. Anyways most of the announced Star Wars films have been cancelled and Mando season 3 is currently directionless. Season 3 honestly feels like we’re all just beating the left over side quests after completing the main story missions of the series. So yeah bright future ahead of Star Wars!
I didn’t realize it until reading your comment, but yeah, Ahsoka is about the only show I’m holding out hope for. I’ll keep watching Mando and Bad Batch unless it takes an Areoverse nosedive..but yeah. I guess I’m just kinda done. And as good as Andor was, I still forget it exists.
As long as you have at least one strong empowered Mary Sue that can do no wrong, a white man who is a laughably incompetent bumbling fool, and several token minorities including a transsexual robot, I'm sure they'll accept your script right away.
Go for it. Even if it's something that no one else sees. If you redraft once then you'll be doing better than Rian Johnson, and he writes "professionally." Maybe you'll find that you really like writing :)
How do you make a trilogy without a story arc? If you submitted that as a project idea at USC film school, you'd receive a big fat F. "I'm going to make a trilogy, but I'm only going to write the first part, film it, and then bring in brand new writer to decide what to do in part, three. Then, I'll wrap up the trilogy by having someone else write the third part, deciding what they want the third act to be."
I’m firmly of the opinion that KK has dirt on a lot of big players in Hollywood. I mean she was Steven Spielbergs assistant for years and we all know how Hollywood is. I think they haven’t fired her because she may even have dirt on Bon Iger.
@@Wonderboywonderings Controlled opposition has uses in politics, by dictators who don't care if they are personally liked. Its not useful in situations were your reputation and legacy are they only things that matter. If DC is controlled opposition, then all KK would have demonstrated is that lots of people legit hate her guts, and she would have given all those people a public persona to rally around. Honestly, you are as bad as those folks who shout _FAlsE FlAg!1!_ whenever some random thing happens.
I've worked as an Associate Producer etc, sure you organize a lot but the producer is the creative element, not the associate. Had a show dropped on me and it is way harder than it looks, I eventually declined as knew I couldn't do it properly. Kennedy and others like her are glorified secretaries, they havened earned the right to be creators, their egos fail to acknowledge what the audience can see, they are inept and have no creative talent.
Not everyone is an artist. Not many people, if we're honest. I've never met a genuine artist that can be creative from 9-5 daily, that is not how inspiration works. A true artist will find passion in something and become completely consumed by it, this isn't a 9-5 process. Kurt Cobain was an artist, he wrote in bursts of inspiration, not emerging for weeks on end, finally emerging unshowered, looking like a homeless man, with a piece of art that he had just obsessed to the point the rest of the world vanished while he created it, as did he. His creative genius didn't happen at the office after his scheduled morning routine. "ok, now is the scheduled time to be inspired and creative"
One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the modern age, will be how the frack did Kennedy manage to keep her job, despite literally running Star Wars into the ground.
Disney executed the most masterfully conceived plan to find a way to make star wars and marvel fans hate star wars and marvel movies. not just, not be that interested in, like actively hate. taking an audience that is primed with everything inside them to WANT to like your product and making them all hate you is an amazing achievement. I didn't think it was possible, but they did it.
They did even better than that. I came to the point I don't really care. Probably will never watch anything new from star wars, currently I am more interested in reviews about how bad it is, it is much more entertaining than TFA and TLJ. Since TLJ I am not interested in watching any SW.
@@matejerdos8878 Even "better" they've retroactively killed my interest in everything that came before. _I_ didn't think that was possible, not for me anyway, but here we are. Now everytime I look at Star Wars I just get sad. I was a big EU nerd in my teens; like I was practically a historian for a galaxy far far away. The quality was up and down, sure, but really that's every major media franchise (it's why I didn't buy for a moment that the "new" EU would have better quality control. From _Disney._ yeah okay). Losing 30 years of collaborative history, a _consistent_ history (which again wasn't always perfect, but even works penned by a single author can sometimes have continuity flubs. I think the hierarchy system that was put in place was the best way to go, because errors are inevitable and the hierarchy accounted for that, rather than relying on the naive belief that every error will be caught if you try hard enough), that _really_ killed a lot of my interest. The idea that 99% of every piece of the franchise you consumed, from the movies to a level in a game, actually "happened" insofar as the greater canon. You can't make up for 30 of history like that (Especially not with the new EU basically ripping off the old EU except worse). And even the movies are less enjoyable for me now. Sure, the original six films were all made free from the shackles of the EU (notably breaking it at one point and leading to the Ruusan reformation retcon), and I could easily enjoy them separate from the rest of the EU, and often did. But I won't pretend it wasn't cool seeing every background character, knowing their name, species, origin, and favorite color. Still, I could live without it. But even with that removed, it's just...I don't know. It's hard to explain. But going back to the original six, even my absolute favorites (E3 and E6 represent!), the sense of heroic optimism the films presented, or the setup for the endgame in the prequels... It just feels pointless and hopeless, now. Maybe it's because the disney trilogy rendered it that way, and I'm for some reason unable to separate the original six from them, or maybe I just mourn the loss of George Lucas' touch. He wasn't perfect, but the Star Wars saga was his and nobody else's. No one else could have made Star Wars like he did, for better and for worse. Seeing the spearhead(s) of any series or project leave always stings, at least for me. Even if it can sometimes be for the better, it still always feels like that personal touch is lost. i dunno why i decided to reply to a month-old comment with this rant
It's an indication of how bloated, indecisive and full of bureaucracy these productions have become that a deadline of over 18 months is considered impossible. This despite all the technology which SHOULD be making the process a lot quicker than it was in the days of shooting and completing on film. The writing isn't even starting from a blank sheet of paper. The world is all there and populated with a multitude of existing characters. A competent TV writer of the 1960s would have had a decent outline in a few days and a better draft script than any of recent memory in a couple of weeks. Of course it would then require the production to more or less stick to that script and not frig around with ever-changing CGI and reshoots lasting longer than many great films got in total. Produce a good, solid sci-fi action adventure which just works and fans and not-particularly fans will embrace it with relief.
They fired Carano, which tanked the Rangers of the New Republic show - requiring them to absorb the plot elements from that show into The Mandalorian to keep their intended story plans. I'm pretty certain the Doctor Pershing episode for example, would have been told in the Rangers show. Then there's the "bring Grogu back immediately" thing, which I think is a clear case of Studio Meddling. That led to the jarring Book of Boba Fett stuff and recaps and retreads in the Mandalorian that would have not been needed if Grogu returned later (which I assume was the original plan).
Carano did Disney a favor by giving them an (admittedly feeble) excuse to fire her. She's an absolutely terrible actress, stiff and completely wooden. Brie Larson expresses more emotion. Friggin' Bill Burr acted circles around her. Any series centered around her would have been a disaster.
I hope the worst thing that happens to me is I get forced out of my job with enough money to enjoy spending the rest of my life doing whatever I want to.
See, I don't agree with you there. Great stories need an element of tragedy, and Luke finding out to his horror that Han died while he was in exile felt fitting to me. Granted, there were so many things I agree they did terribly wrong with the sequel trilogy, but they did hit a few good notes. The major problem as I see it is that Episode 8 was permitted to derail elements that 7 had put in place and 9's problem was that too much of the first half had to be cobbled out of unused footage because Carrie Fisher had died and they could no longer make major changes that required reshoots. 9 raised a middle finger to much of 8's fuckery, but again it had to spend too much of the runtime doing it.
9_9 Doomcock has been predicting KK’s firing every week for like 8 years now. More likely she’ll retire peacefully. And then he’ll still claim he was right somehow.
Surely The Rise of Skywalker killed Star Wars? They turned The Force from this esoteric, mystical power that you could tap into given training into magic healing, magic telepathy, magic projection - basically, the Force does anything the plot wants it to do. Every superpower must have at least one limiting factor. Superman isn't Superman without Kryptonite.
What really has to be kept in mind is that Disney paid a total of $4billion for Lucasfilm, so it already had a massive financial hole to dig itself out of before there is much chance of profits.
They just really screwed up by attacking, alienating, and gaslighting fans. Customers and what they want drive business, you don't get to tell them what they will like. Its simple really, but not for Disney for whatever reason.
I pray that KK gets booted out once Indy 5 doesn't make money. If KK doesn't get booted out now, she won't ever leave :/ Her ghost will be presiding over the entirety of Lucasfilm until the sun expands and swallows the earth.
The parallels between Lucasfilm and 343 Industries is incredible. Both taken over by incompetent managers when the original visionaries left. Both Halo and Star Wars suffer from a lack of vision
@@sigurdholbarki8268 Wasn't being sarky. His bit about waiting for Kathleen Kennedy's age to intersect with the national average lifespan made me choke on my drink.
2:47 EXACTLY THIS. We have been hearing that "Cathleen Kennedy is done" "Cathleen Kennedy will be gone soon" etc for years and YEARS and yet she is still around. What are the odds that she will be gone this time huh?
Two pretty big scalps gone in the last fortnight, and the economic conditions are right. Lucas Films haven't released anything in cinemas since Solo, so I can well believe she will "retire" if Indiana Jones bombs, or being set up for a fail if they don't get a Star Wars Movie out by 2025
The problem in Hollywood is more than just Disney unfortunately, I already saw an article about John Wick doesn’t need Keanu…get ready for relatable assassins
Part of the reason the newer Star Wars movies from Disney did alright was because most of the average fans didn't know about "The Message" and went in rather naïve and blind to the agenda. Once peoples eyes began to be open, they simply can't un-see "The Message" in all these movies! I told a friend about "The Message" a while back and he watched the newest Doctor Strange and he said, "The entire time I was thinking, yep, he's right, it's a M-SHE-U and girl bosses movie!" Because men suck and women are awesome don't you know!
The problem with Lucasfilm is they didn't correct course at TLJ. Assuming their box office peformance to represent the quality of their turd. And now they've dug a hole too deep for them to get out of.
When it comes to Jon Favreau, I keep thinking of that promotional interview for BoBF with Temuera Morrison and Ming Na-Wen, in which Temuera says that he (righly) found that Boba "talked too much" and took upon himself to call Favreau about it... and Favreau was in a plane, seemingly having other things on his plate and replying "yeah yeah, whatever". Surely that's not how a property like BoBF, and SW at large, should be handled. But whether it's Favreau, Rian Johnson, Taika Waititi or JJ Abrams, all Lucasfilm seems to do is to rely on "flavor of the month" directors who never fully commit themselves to the franchise; the only two exceptions being Tony Gilroy and Dave Filoni, but the former is a self-confessed "non Star Wars fan" who uses the SW universe as a background for this political thriller stuff while the latter is an animated series exec who has no business doing live action products. Is there really no one in Hollywood who wants to be fully in charge of Star Wars, who wants to become the real heir of George Lucas like Berman was for Roddenberry? I find that hard to believe.
Berman got ahead of himself and screwed the pooch with a series of mediocre ST films that put TNG into its death spiral. BUT … no ST movie series is worse than JJ’s.
Yes, 8:30, a classic mistake I see companies make time and time again.. “this is where we are making the most income, so this is where we need to focus our efforts,” without considering the influencing factors in other areas; oftentimes these areas are big for revenue because they’re built on something bigger, rather than simply being the sole attraction of customers.
If its true that Iger said that to Kennedy I will gladly boycott the Indiana Jones movie to get that woman fired. Not that I was going to watch it anyway, i avoided the last one like the plague as the series had a great finish with Last Crusade, no need to ruin it after that but they did anyway.
Disney need to come out and renew their promise to consumers, and commit to providing them with high quality content above all else, and anyone within the company that doesn’t align with these necessary values from then on will be shown the door.
Pure pipe dream. Disney is done because they've destroyed their reputation. Disney married themselves to woke, rainbow, and reduction of parental rights. As sentiment continues to turn against that it'll only get worse for Disney. Florida was the only thing keeping them afloat in the theme park industry and the financial benefits there just got nuked. My guess is they'll decline until their only existence is merchandise, movies, and an online presence. I expect the parks will be gone without a real miracle. Good riddance to them. Walt would be livid.
You can't fire 1 activist without a full blown war, look at alonso... imagine trying to fire them all. You can't fix it, and I don't care if you do. Go get money off the new audience you spat in my face for, it will never come from me again.
The lesson hear is don't put the person whose job was to fetch the coffee in charge of your most viable and valuable asset and expect them to do a good job in using it.
Weren’t we supposed to be getting a High Republic set of stories?? Am I remembering correctly? I feel like it was a couple years ago we had a bunch of announcements on that
I think Disney actually gave Kennedy a lifeline because if their demand to her was to just make a SW movie with no other demands, she can just make a movie, ANY type of SW movie, and keep her job... This is like Sony just having to get a Spiderman movie out from time to time to keep the Spiderman movie rights...
This is where you end up when you hire people who don’t like the IP, and don’t like the IPs existing audience or that they’d have to produce something said audience would enjoy. Maybe if they built half the writers/producers/directors salary into the financial success of projects, there would be incentive.
I grew up with Star Wars. Favourite franchise in the world. Loved practically everything that came out for it. The toys, games, films, you name it. Now? I sigh when I walk past the toy line at my local store because nothing is selling. I don't even feel compelled to pick up anything for myself because the spark just isn't there anymore. Andor was the last thing I genuinely enjoyed and I haven't touched anything since. I don't even care for the animated shows anymore. The Scribbles of Fredo Fett was the last straw for me.
I went to a local comics and collectibles store and all of the Star Wars toys were at the front. I figured he didn't particularly care if they got stolen.
I like the Mandalorian theory that season 1 was primarily taken from the scrapped Boba Fet movie and that's why the writing has steadily gone down hill. Kind of like when the ran out of GoT material.
I also agree with the idea that KK probably cannot ever be fired and that's in her contract, but we can't see it because if we did that would prove the only reason she's still there is because of the contract, not because she's a successful producer.
