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The king is dead, long live the king.
If you were turned off by The Force Awakens (which, contrary to what Kennedy says, was disliked for being too much like the OT), it's been a decade. If Last Jedi killed your fandom it's been 8 years. I don't know how you can sustain constant hope and disappointment with an IP this long. I tapped out mentally in-theatre with TLJ. Every time I wanted to jump back in because they seem to have figured it out (e.g. when the reviews for Mandalorian were good) they quickly reverted to form.
Whoever is still with it is the new audience and they've made their peace with Kennedy or like her content. The mega-haters who were praying on Kennedy's downfall have to have tapped out. I skimmed the channels of some of the usual suspects and the comments are basically fatalist. In part because they seem to hate Filoni too for some reason, but also because the game of wishing her gone has gone on too long to be amusing.
Look at what you just said: Star Wars ushered in the blockbuster era! Even the Prequels maintained a $650 million floor. And we're all coping that one TV show out of all the material produced did well on TV.
The prequels killed any interest I had in the IP (in hindsight, viewing it as an adult rather than a kid, Return of the Jedi was also bad). Specifically the second one since I had hopes the first awful one was a fluke. Nope, just garbage. So I guess I'm coming up on 24 years of not seeing why people still get invested in it.
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Honestly? I've never really had a soft spot for female action heroes. I say this being a comic book nerd who did actually enjoy Storm, Wanda and Barbara Gordon's arcs in Lifedeath, House of M and Oracle: Year One respectively. But female power was not something I found "fascinating", it certainly hasn't been a novelty for as long as I've lived. It always felt like artificially imposed social pressure rather than organic interest. Also never liked the idea - long before it became an industry mandate - of established male led action franchises handing over the symbolic and narrative center to a female successor either, well before that became an industry mandate. I noped out of TFA once that bait and switch happened, way before TLJ (in)famously dialled it up to 11. Now we can certainly argue which trilogy probably handled narrative execution, pacing, directorial vision, dialogue beats, subplots and cinematography better than the other.
But none of these "safe critiques" address the foundational rewrite at the heart of the Sequels, that Star Wars was a boys' IP. Boys loved it because it centred on what boys disproportionately enjoy: spacefaring civilisation, starcrafts, galactic battles, trench runs, lightsaber combats, training hierarchies, rivalry, sacrifice, and a classical male hero growing into responsibility and status. The Original Trilogy understood what young boys (their prime audience) aspired to be, that is why it is so timeless. Over a decade into the culture shift that's thoroughly penalised every instance of male heroism and ambition as "moral crimes" to be corrected, I think it's totally fair to just sit back, crack a beer and say, "I'm tired, boss".
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Surely, The Mandalorian also counts as a success. It was possibly more popular and influential than Andor, if not as critically acclaimed.
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Filoni is a creatively middling hack, he only looks good because he’s been standing next to Kennedy for the last ten years, and at least he doesn’t despise the source material he’s working with.
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