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Leading up to TFA all the nerds at my job sat around and speculated about every little detail for weeks beforehand.
In between movies we all sat around and speculated about what would happen next.
Then TLJ came out and everyone shrugged and we never talked about Star Wars ever again. The third movie came and went without comment since most of us didn't even bother to see it.
TLJ killed Star Wars. It just objectively did. It took a revered pop cultural touchstone and obliterated it overnight. It should be studied as a scientific curiosity, because I wouldn't have believed it possible.
I don't think this is true, actually. My experience of fandom debate was that TLJ certainly had a lot of people talking about Star Wars, and it didn't end it all. On the contrary, some of the post-TLJ material was well-received. If anything, I think the biggest ST-era breakout was The Mandalorian, which was post-TLJ. I've seen in the wild people with Mandalorian bumper stickers on their cars, or graffiti murals of Baby Yoda. The ST itself didn't make much impact, but The Mandalorian did. (Some years after that, Andor went on to have widespread critical success, but I rate that a bit lower because I don't see as much genuinely popular reaction to Andor. There's no Andor equivalent of Baby Yoda.)
My recollection of the time was that TFA brought with it a lot of hype and optimism, TLJ was extremely divisive and split the fanbase, and 2019 brings us both RoS, which was universally panned, and The Mandalorian, which was successful and widely enjoyed, even by people who disliked the ST itself. Rogue One was also genuinely popular on release, with maybe hopes that the franchise might be rallying after the disaster of RoS, but everything since then has been a steady drip of mediocrity - nobody cared about Solo, and nobody cares about The Book of Boba Fett, or Ahsoka, or Obi Wan, and then The Acolyte was the nadir of the TV progression thus far. Official Star Wars material has slid into mediocrity and garbage and nobody cares any more. Andor is the one bright spot in terms of fan reaction, but Andor is noticeably a much more niche product.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead, as a franchise, and that Disney is mostly to blame, but I see doom setting in with the very premise of the Sequel Trilogy. TFA was well-received at the time but it set the films on a course towards irrelevance.
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Anecdotes aren't data, but all I can really argue with is the hyperbole here: "killed", "obliterated", and "overnight". Data-wise: box office totals went from $2.1B for TFA to $1.3B for TLJ to $1.1 for RoS among the trilogy movies, and from $1.1B for Rogue One (pre-TLJ) to $0.4B for Solo (post-TLJ) side movies. On the one hand, 1.1 billion dollars is still decent money for a zombie, years after TLJ! On the other hand, it sure looks like a ton of people heard the bad reviews and skipped TLJ, a fraction of the ones who wouldn't skip it sight-unseen were like you and didn't bother to see RoS afterward, and most of the ones who did see RoS were probably just looking for some closure and aren't interested in or aren't trusting of Star Wars movies in general anymore.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with "The Mandalorian and Grogu" next year. Box office receipts are just so much cleaner than estimates of streaming viewership. I'd put that in the "side movie" category, naturally, but will it be a $1.1B side movie or a $0.4B side movie? On the one hand, it's coming off of the most popular Star Wars TV show. On the other hand, the show already lost popularity and acclaim in its third season (not to mention with its spinoff show), and the attitude of "Look, Grogu! We still have Grogu! No plot closure for Grogu yet!" is a pretty blatant cash grab attempt, centering a character who was expected to be little more than an amusing MacGuffin until "Baby Yoda" toys started selling by the zillions.
They jerked the corpse around for as long as they could and made some Baby Yoda money along the way, but I knew the deathblow had truly been struck when even a reputedly-good project like Andor got shit for views.
I think bringing Baby Yoda back in 2026 is going to feel like someone trying to bring back fidget spinners. I think their goose is just cooked and this is going to be the part where they really have to face that fact.
Andor had a somewhat slow start, which for a TV series probably hurt a lot. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Rogue One, you weren't going to walk out of the theater, so you'd end up making it to the good parts. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Andor you'd just never watch the second episode, and I wasn't ready to agree with the good reviews until the third.
But yeah, I think you're right and I'm only getting into the weeds of why you're right. They can't just ask us to trust them for more than an hour anymore. I don't watch anything Star Wars now unless I see a variety of good reviews by trusted reviewers first, so unless they advertise enough to get me or my kids interested enough that I'll seek out the reviews, we don't bother, and that means we'll never be part of any viral hype ourselves. I'm hoping the next movie will be good but I'm definitely not going to see it on opening night.
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Also if you look at the weekend breakdowns for TLJ, it performs pretty well in the first weekend and then there’s a massive crash after that due to bad word of mouth. Blockbusters tend to be front-loaded, but it’s a much bigger drop than is typical.
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