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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 a "rule of cool" writer. He writes things that seem fun in the moment but he doesn't do verisimilitude or rich world building. His range is very limited.
Look at Looper. The parts where limbs are cut off in the past and disappear in the future don't make any sense under any consistent time travel rules. It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".
He's a bad match for Star Wars. It's space opera in a rich exotic universe. Consistent rules and world building are very important for the genre.
His "Star Wars" spin off trilogy was going to have no spaceships, no lightsabers, and no force. Basically it was not Star Wars. He just couldn't get his own trilogy made.
To understand what went wrong, you have to understand who Kathleen Kennedy is.
Yes, she worked with Spielberg and Lucas for years. But she was never a creative. She's an enforcer.
Her job was to manipulate and bully the studio and the press into doing what the creatives needed.
She managed to rise up the chain to be in charge of LucasFilm. But she's still not a creative, and she doesn't even like Star Wars.
She wants to make feminist empowerment movies. She doesn't know what makes a good SW film, but she's sure as hell not going to let some dirty man babies tell her what to do. So she hired directors that had recently done some big sci fi movies (Star Trek and Looper), told them to include feminist empowerment messages, and assumed everything would work out.
I agree he wasn't a good match, but "rule of cool" wasn't the reason. Star Wars is a space opera conceived as "WW2 fighter planes, Jidaigeki, and Wild West, ... IN SPACE." In other words, rule of cool. None of the rich details of the exotic universe make sense, they are there because they look cool. Lucas wanted to cast a Japanese period drama samurai star as Obi-Wan Kenobi because of "how cool that'd be". Consistency is maintained in OT and prequels because of inertia and involving a single auteur whose vision of "cool" didn't change too much.
Hiring a "rule of cool" director was a good idea. The mistake of was that Johnson's brand of cool was different. Hiring a director who worships "canon" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it can work for some time, but eventually it will result in milking the original vision empty, producing soulless merchandise.
I think both these things can be true; Star Wars probably is the exact kind of setting that can't run on Rule of Cool all of the time, and Lucas' ideas were reined in by those around him during the Original Trilogy (such as his wife)--the Prequel Trilogy allegedly is the way it is because Lucas got full control and little pushback.
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