Star Wars Is Struggling to Win Over the Next Generation of Kids [Bloomberg Link Only]

Bloomberg [Link in Body] ^ | August 7, 2019 | Crayton Harrison

[C19fan]

Link to Bloomberg

[C19fan]

I guess Mary Sue and her gang of misfits is not going over well with Millennials and Generation Z. I grew up you had a real princess, a loveable rogue and his buddy, and an idealistic day dreaming youth. The villain was as cold as hard steel not a whiny, emotive boy; although the boy has his moments.

[C19fan]

“Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson is developing a new trilogy,

Rian will complete what he started....killing Star Wars.

[pepsionice]

The peak (I think) was around 2005 with the 6th production....Revenge of the Sith. In terms of the story, the characters, and the thrill....that was it.

These five produced since then (2015 to now)....are fairly boring, and really nothing new. This talk of a three-set group coming out in 2022/2024/2026? It’s possible that we might only see one of these, and the rest are canned for a decade while they try to figure a new direction for the story.

I’ll even say that the Last Jedi (2017)....was probably the worst of the entire group.

[a fool in paradise]

Star Wars is almost 45 years old. And it was not an original concept in space opera.

And in the years since Star Wars it became the template for many franchises of comics, movies, tv series, video games, etc.

So it’s being “done better” by what has come from elsewhere.

The “whole” star war story (from episode 1-9 plus 2 extra films) isn’t “all that”. A universe of creatures and “fate” or bad script writing puts a dozen characters in the center of everything for 9 films.

[noiseman]

The peak occurred in 1980 with The Empire Strikes Back. You’re right, though, that The Last Jedi was by far the worst. It makes The Phantom Menace look good by comparison, and has almost made people forget about Jar Jar. The latter is near miraculous.

I was 14 when Star Wars debuted in 1977. It was the perfect age to identify with Luke and his desire for adventure. To anyone who experienced the first two movies in particular, everything that came after is a pale imitation and the latest batch of movies are nothing less than abominations (except for, arguably, Rogue One - it was actually pretty good).

[Flick Lives]

You’d have to have a heart of stone to not laugh over Disney, having paid Lucas $4B for the Star Wars franchise, has now fallen into the sarlacc’s pit.

[Poison Pill]

Why is it so bad to say that Star Wars had it’s run and now it’s over? Disney and other corporations are gaming copyright laws as it is.

[Deplorable American1776]

The new title of the next Star Wars movie: The Return of Moronic Insane Liberals, who’ll ruin Star Wars!’

[stinkerpot65]

Feminist sermon for soy-boys.

[GrandJediMasterYoda]

I went to the very first one in the theater back in 1977 and it blew my mind. What made it great was it was something new in terms of special effects and the great theme music. But then like the movie Rocky you can’t keep squeezing every single last dime out of it with endless sequels and expect to make the same splash. Originality is what brings people in more than anything. Yes it wasn’t an original concept in space opera, but the special effects were and THAT is why that first movie in 77 was a monster hit. I remember that clear as day talking to my friends in school about all the effects, how did they make Lukes car float, how they made the light saber light, and then the sound of it!! it was just really amazingly new back then.

[a fool in paradise]

The original trilogy had it all (soundtrack, locations, cast, effects, quotable lines) and even later audiences might have been able to enjoy those films but the rest of the story just isn’t there. And someone joining in now? Not sure what they’d go to.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets didn’t do well in America and I don’t know how it did in Europe where the source material was from. Certainly some of the justification for the ho-hum performance at the box office was explained as “we’ve seen all of this before”. In a sense because so much sf film from the past 40 years took from the comics that existed before those films.

Blade Runner aped Alejandro Jodorowsky’s comics too because the talent he brought together to work on his Dune project in the pre-Star Wars 70s later found production work on Alien and Blade Runner.

[Jewbacca]

Exactly.

Apparently there is no room for men in space.

Only womyn.

[david1292]

They should just call it “Social Justice Wars.”

[x]

The “whole” star war story (from episode 1-9 plus 2 extra films) isn’t “all that”.

True, but it's a lot easier to see that and say that now - when we are all older and the wave of enthusiasm has passed by.

Star Wars built on memories of 1950s science fiction and even vaguer memories of 1930s adventure serials, so there was something a little nostalgic about the enthusiasm.

If somebody's own childhood memories are of Star Wars they'll look for other forms of entertainment that build on that.

When Star Wars hit big, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was on television, but nobody was watching.

They wanted a fresher reshuffling of the material and found it in Lucas's movies.

Same thing with kids today.

[a fool in paradise]

Buck Rogers had a disco soundtrack and a tv budget.

Audiences watched Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica and other tv fare because of the success of star wars.

The star wars tv special wasn’t “all that” either.

[Wilhelm Tell]

The first Star Wars movie and The Empire Strikes Back were masterpieces. Everything else ranges from okay to bad. There really is no way one could expect that any subsequent movies in the franchise would be much more than just okay. Masterpieces don’t happen all the time.

[a fool in paradise]

>>Apparently there is no room for men in space.
>>Only womyn.

It's been done before. Either there was a movie that kicked off the tv series or a movie compiled from the tv series but I saw this in the 70s and 80s on UHF channels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maidens

Star Maidens is a British-German science-fiction television series made by Portman Productions for the ITV network. Produced in 1975, and first broadcast in 1976, it was filmed at Bray Studios and on location in Windsor and Bracknell, Berkshire, and Black Park, Buckinghamshire. The series was partly financed by a German company, Werbung im Rundfunk (Advertising in Broadcasting), which dealt with distributing funding from the limited commercials shown on West German public TV. In this case, it was acting on behalf of the channel ZDF, which showed the series in West Germany.

The series presents a “battle of the sexes” and role reversal scenario in which male protagonists must escape servitude to women of an advanced civilization. The planet Medusa, home to a highly evolved and technologically advanced humanoid race, was already ruled by its women when a rogue comet knocked it out of its orbit of Proxima Centauri. Drifting through space, the orphan planet's surface became uninhabitable, and the inhabitants survived by building underground cities. The series begins with Medusa's entry into Earth's solar system. At first heartened to discover Earth, the Medusans are disappointed to learn that the human men are dominant there. Two Medusan men escape by stealing a ship and flying to Earth.[1] Despite a successful escape, the two are pursued by the Medusan security forces. When the Medusans fail to re-capture the two men, they bring two human hostages—a man and a woman—back with them to their home planet. The series’ 13 episodes concern the two groups’ attempts to adapt to life on the different planets while brokering an exchange for the hostages. In the series finale, the Medusans’ ship is pursued by another spacecraft, this one belonging to an alien race that has hunted Medusans in the past. Despite their technology and the antagonism they displayed throughout the series, the Medusans prove incapable of actually fighting an enemy, and only the intervention of a Medusan ship flown by an Earth man defeats the enemy. The saved Medusans return home, likely with an altered opinion of men...

[HarleyD]

Marvel is heading the same way. They may be cranking out the movies every 4-6 months but the movies are always the same. Now that they’ve started all the PC tinkering that will be the end.

[rbg81]

They should just call it “Social Justice Wars.”

---

Yup. Notice that the article does not even gloss over the reality that the current trilogy sucks.