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You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi.
I know, I know, it's a terrible Star Wars movie, for all the reasons laid out eloquently by acoup.It's jokey when it should have been serious, it completely screws up both Stars Wars lore and actual military stuff, and it's a weird convoluted mess of a plot. None of the new characters are likeable, and it makes us retroactively dislike the old characters too.
But.... maybe that was the point. Maybe the movie did exactly what it said it would do in the title... it killed the jedis. Permanently. It's the last of them.
Imagine that you're Rian Johnson. You're not someone like Michael Bay or JJ Abrams who can endlessly churn out fun blockbusters. You're an "autor" director, who takes himself very seriously and writes all your own movies. Also, you're relatively young in your career, having made a grand total of 3 movies (all rather low budget) before being suddenly handed the reins to Star Wars. You've obviously heard of Star Wars, but you were never a big fan, and you've spent your entire filmmaking career under its shadow. Your personal inspiration for getting into filmmaking was Annie Hall, a weird surreal comedy movie that came out the same year as original Star Wars but is about as different as it's possible to get.
What do you do with this thing? The eyes of the entire world were suddenly focused on you. You know basically what they expect, of course- a fun blockbuster movie that's basically a soft reboot of Empire. You could do that. But that's boring- it's been done before.
I think what he did was to take it in a very "meta" direction. It's not really a Star Wars movie at all, it's a movie about the relationship that Star Wars has with its fans. Specifically the most obsessed, hardcore fanboys who have been rewatching the same few movies over and over for almost 50 years now while mindlessly consuming all the new products. I think he wanted to scream "get a life" at them like William Shatner. I also think he wanted to sabotage it a bit, to stop the Disney Empire from endlessly remaking this one silly movie from the 70s for all time. (part of the reason the original is so good is that it's a remarkably short and self-contained story- it was hard even for them to stretch it into a trilogy, and it really shows the cracks when you try to stretch it any further than that)
This movie is almost a parody of Star Wars, a much darker and more brutal parody than Space Balls. It starts by completely throwing logic out the window by showing a space battle with gravity to drop bombs from the world's slowest bombers. Then it portrays Leia as some sort of coward who tries to cancel the mission at the last minute when it's obviously correct for them to go for it. I believe this is intentional, to make us realize that Star Wars was always silly Space Opera and really should not be taken seriously by anyone. There's certainly no reason to think that "Princess" Leia was any sort of great military leader. She was originally just a damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Why should anyone be taking orders from her?
In a similar vein, I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues. That's actually a realistic and interesting story, it's just not the one we expected from Star Wars. It's essentially a comedy of errors.
Then there's all the Jedi stuff with Luke, Ray, and Kylo Ren. Here's where I think the movie really finds its mark. I remember a time not too long ago when "Jediism" was being taken semi-seriously by some people as a philosophy. The original movies made the Jedi look so cool and wise. But this movie just savages them. Luke is this weird, disgusting old man who has completely given up on everything. Ray is a silly, naive little girl who's constantly falling for everyone's tricks. Kylo Ren murders his own leader for basically no reason at all. Yoda makes a brief cameo just to use force lightning (!?) to burn down all the sacred Jedi texts, before literally telling us "time it is for you to look past a pile of old books." All of them completely fail at actually doing anything to affect the larger war going on- the resistance is mostly wiped out by regular guns.
I think this was done very artfully and intentionally to kill the Jedi. It's not easy to kill off a fictional character- as the next movie showed, you can always write in some excuse to bring them back to life. Even actors can now be brought back from beyond the grave by digital technology. But when you make both the Jedi and the Sith look, not just incompetent, but disgustingly, stupidly incompetent- it really turns the fans against them. It makes the producers not want to bring the dead characters back, which is what really matters.
A lot of people have criticized it for leaving nowhere for the next movie to go. All the plot beats from The Force Awakened were tossed aside, a lot of the main characters were dead, and the ones left alive no longer looked like heroes. I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies. There's no where good for it to go, and it's unhealthy to just wallow in nostalgia. I feel like people have largely forgotten about The Rise of Skywalker by this point (what a bland, forgettable movie), but they definitely will remember The Last Jedi. The https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/ subreddit to hate on it is still, to this day, surprisingly active! People really hate this movie! (edit- I meant https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ but it's kind of funny that there's another active subreddit just to hate on that one, and at first glance I couldn't even tell the difference)
If I'm right, I think Rian Johnson pulled off one of the all-time greatest troll jobs in history. He got Disney to pay him to make a movie that didn't just parody its biggest brand, but made even its biggest fanboys realize some of it is. I feel like it used to be somewhat cool for everyone to like Star Wars. Or you could use it in an ironic way like the unipiper. I don't see any of that anymore. As Mr Plinkett tells us, Disney is cranking out Star Wars content for TV now, going in all sorts of crazy directions, but no one is paying attention. It just doesn't have the cultural relevance it once did. Harrison Ford might have spent much of his life grumbling about how he dislikes obsessive fans, but he still kept it going. Rian Johnson was the one man who could actually kill this franchise and save us from an eternity of shitty corporate nostalgia and soft reboots.
I'm far from convinced that TLJ was what actually killed Star Wars. For my money TLJ is easily the best of the Sequel Trilogy, though I admit that is a low bar. The Force Awakens had a positive reception at the time, but that reception was based almost entirely on hype, and as time has passed, I think audiences have cooled on TFA and have mostly come around to realising that it's bad. And, of course, The Rise of Skywalker was obviously garbage from the moment it hit theatres - I have never seen anybody, even the most devoted of fans, try to defend that mess.
My sense is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to cook a meal with the ingredients he was given, and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected. J. J. Abrams did more to make more Star Wars impossible, and the profusion of forgettable Disney TV slop only did more to undermine the brand.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now, but I think that death began with the Disney acquisition, its first signs were evident with TFA, and then by RoS it was too obvious for anyone to deny. TLJ is a bad film. But it is not as bad as either its predecessor or its successor, and while it took part in the franchise-killing Sequel Trilogy, I don't think it can be accused of either the first or the last blow in that killing.
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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