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Here's my opinion on how to defuse many aspects of culture war: reduce copyright length to at most 40-50 years.
Consider. Lots of people were upset when Rian Johnson deliberately made the Last Jedi to be about fighting "toxic masculinity" and "fan entitlement". But he is not the problem. I am not here to criticize RJ. His interpretation actually had some interesting ideas even if it was badly executed and inconsistent with my general concept of what SW movie "should" be.
The problem is that Disney anointed him to be the one to save Star Wars from smelly nerds. And there's nothing you could do unless you had a billion dollars to buy SW from Disney. Except in the end this didn't work out for "woke" cause either, because TLJ did poorly at the box office so Disney hired Abrams who overrode every RJs decision. Everyone loses.
I think part of the reason why "culture wars" are so bitter is that all sides are essentially reduced to pressuring (or begging) large, faceless corporations into reflecting their values. This creates mutual distrust because both sides know that corporations will drop your values the second they stop being profitable. It is fundamentally toxic.
But if noone owns IP then we can have both "based" and "woke" version of every franchise. Fans will rise to the occasion to make both. Hence, less bitter culture wars.
Of course, there's zero chance Disney ever allows erosion of copyright, but it is fun to speculate.
I would have greatly preferred Zahn's Thrawn trilogy to be made into films rather than what we actually got. The talent is there, the stories were made by people who actually know what they're doing...
I still don't understand how Johnson was cleared to make such a bad film. There was a huge, irrelevant anti-capitalist tangent with about as much subtlety and sophistication as a brick to the head. There was Rey being a Mary Sue, which is not really a Johnson innovation though he intensified it. There was Holdo, attacking Poe for his toxic masculinity of actually fighting and winning. I remember sitting through the film and thinking 'oh she's not telling them her plan because she knows there's a spy who was revealing their location' but it turned out that she had no clue what she was doing, not even an engineer's special subject-matter knowledge that FTL-ramming was practical. Apparently it was just a 1 in a million shot as of film 9. It compares very poorly to Zahn's Luke-Thrawn tractor beam vs torpedo duel.
Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer? A lot of thought went into the effects, into the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars. The film looked good and that takes effort. So why didn't people think about having a slightly better written anti-capitalist plot? Is it just Kathleen Kennedy's corrosive influence? She wasn't so bad in 7.
The real issue is that the "woke" version has billions to burn on marketing, big budgets and polish. You can find "based" indie games on steam or watch anime. Just about everything in Hollywood is ideologically locked down. The 'free marketplace' of ideas is a bit like the Italian 1935-6 invasion of Ethiopia. No matter how hard the Ethiopians fought, regardless of whether they're in the right or not, the Italians had the money and technology to overwhelm the opposition.
On the other hand, some fan productions are spectacularly good and direly impeded by copyright. Consider 40K's The Lord Inquisitor and Astartes. The Lord Inquisitor's soundtrack is an absolute banger, despite the faces being somewhat off. Five years of AI development could surely fix that. TLI got cancelled by Warhammer for copyright reasons, Astartes got bought out and is on Warhammer TV or some streaming service nobody watches or cares about, myself included. Thus the video I link isn't the creator's channel, the originals got taken down.
Hopefully AI will just crush the copyright problem. When you can feed it some MP4s and crowdfund some computing power with crypto (and there are many possible options), use some mid-level technical skill... Nobody can stop you doing what you like. Not unions, not laws, not copyright, nothing at all.
He's not clueless. He knows exactly what he's doing: he is a giddy social justice warrior whose goal is to spread those messages through any vehicle at his disposal, and he won the lottery with Star Wars.
Almost mid-way through Glass Onion there's a monologue by Edward Norton's character about what it means to be a "disruptor," and that true disruption is bringing down the system. Although many speculated that this character was based on Elon Musk, it sounded to me at times that Johnson was using this character* as a vehicle for his own thoughts, especially with that monologue that was essentially Johnson's argument for what he did with Last Jedi.
For a bit, I wondered if Johnson was betraying an admiration for Musk, but as the ending twist plays out it reads instead as if Johnson assumes that Musk wishes he was Johnson, a true disruptor!
Johnson's work is fully intentional, and as Glass Onion's final scene reveals, he doesn't care what is damaged in the process; in fact, damage is the point.
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