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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.
I would argue that Kennedy, as the titular head of Lucasfilm, bears ultimate responsibility, but then she hired Tony Gilroy and we got Andor, which I would argue is one of the best viewing experiences in the Star Wars oeuvre since 1981 and ESB. Andor is more anti-empire than anti-capitalism (i.e. it's what Star Wars started out as), but one of the things I find interesting about it is that its theme of rebellion against a seemingly all-powerful but grossly abusive and incompetent system has been embraced by both (extreme) sides of the US political spectrum--perhaps because both of these extremes want the same thing: System collapse to be replaced with [something.] It could be called genius, from a marketing perspective, but I don't really think anyone knew this would happen.
That's all quite peripheral to my enjoyment of the series, however. The characterizations, world-building, acting, music, and cinematography were all just incredibly refreshing, and far superior than the awfulness that was Obi Wan Kenobi, which is almost a literally crying shame since Ewan McGregor came back for this role and it could have been done so much better in the hands of someone who was driven by a desire to build art and not ideology.
The thing is, Andor is actual art. It makes an honest portrayal of an aspect of the human condition. And in that is universal. Hell I think it's well written enough you can root for any of the characters.
The imps are not nazi caricatures like in the PT, they're bureaucrats and military officers of various levels of competence desperately trying to maintain order as the cogs of an incomprehensible immense machine that can have no nuance.
And the rebels are not plucky underdogs who do no wrong but the true face of those who would fight tyranny: bank robbers recruited by shady politicians with dodgy credentials as murderers, traitors, thieves and naive idealists.
I was able to relate to pretty much all characters as humans, from the tired garrison commander who wants to leave his shithole post to the egoist thief who knows from experience in the end everyone is in it for themselves.
If there is any justice, memory of this show will far outstrip that of stinkers like TLJ, and I'm inclined to think there is, for if every line of ROtS is etched into my mind, I have already forgotten all about the Kenobi show.
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