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I want to talk about what a pulverized skullfucked corpse Star Wars is anymore without the Culture War Thread's pretense of being edifying in any way, so here we are.
Yeah so listen, there's a Star Wars movie coming out like four months from now and as far as I can tell no one gives a shit at all. There's just zero hype or awareness. I know there's a big marketing push yet to come, but come on, think of what the prelude to a Star Wars movie was like back in the pre-TLJ world where people still gave a shit.
But even when the marketing does hit?
"Hey guys remember the Mandalorian? It was on Disney Plus a few years ago. Okay yeah I know the last season was kind of bad, but remember when it was popular? Oh and attention everyone in the entire fucking world who isn't a Disney Plus subscriber, remember Baby Yoda from like keychains and plushies and stuff? Well he's part of a show called the Mandalorian that you didn't watch but will hopefully want to turn up to a theatrical movie for."
Like good fucking luck with that pitch. Star Wars is screwed and they know it. They're so screwed with this movie that Kathleen Kennedy couldn't wait another four months to retire. Seriously the timing of her stepping down is a huge red flag to me. If she really thought the movie was going to get anywhere she'd stay unretired for another twelve or thirteen weeks and go out on a high note.
I bet this is the last Star Wars movie ever made. They've been prevaricating on everything else waiting for this to flop so they can call it.
I think it's not just Star Wars thing. They run out of creative juices about couple of decades ago, and now they only can deep-mine existing IP and consume and regurgitate what their predecessors did. Nobody is excited about this slop anymore. They are just milking it dry, because that's the only thing that is left to them. And when they will be replaced by cheap AI-generated models, nobody would know or care.
... yeah. And worse, they don't even seem to be able to deep-mine existing IP, or consume and regurgitate, in any sense except of mine tailings or vomit.
As a metaphor, I'm a real big fan of FLCL. Yes, it's very central example of anime that's filled with awkward surface-level visuals and the 'deeper' meanings are still not exactly high literature, and it's even self-referential about talking about anime that's got deeper meanings that aren't that deep and awkward surface-level visuals. There's a very uncomfortable 'how much of this coming of age story relies on everyone being a pervert' section.
It's short, it's to the point, extremely well-animated, has a great message executed very well, manages to fit into the right space of weird without being incomprehensible, and for a decade and a half, it was done. If you were a really big nerd you could read the manga, but it's a completely different story, something parallel and maybe interesting but about as related as two different Gundam universes. People often point to the paucity of Avatar in fandom spaces as evidence of how shallowly people engage with it, and that's not wrong, but FLCL shows the other way that can happen. It's got a mere double-digits coverage on AO3, and even on FFN it's tiny (at <600 fics, it's worse off than Redwall). Where Avatar loses out in fandom spaces because it's so vapid that anyone trying to use the setting can just serial-numbers-file-off into original fic and be the better for it, FLCL is hard to do anything but a visual reference, because going any further risks the original taking over. It has a universe with potential, but any addition is a subtraction.
And, in 2018, Toonami threw out another two seasons. FLCL Progressive and Alternative received... mixed receptions. You could get five different opinions on them from four different fans. Both suffered, badly, from some lackluster animation in signature scenes, Progressive leaned really hard into satiating the fans, and Alternative twisted hard away from the wacky hijinks into a more measured and slower-paced story. From a culture war perspective, Progressive's intentionally dialed up the squick factor (there's several overtly sexualized guro and vore scenes, the only upskirt is from a chubby guy who's a bit of a dork) to hit people who misunderstood or 'misunderstood' the interpersonal relationships in FLCL proper, and Alternative's flirting with girlboss syndrome despite having a main character who's recognized in-setting as a real bitch.
But they were stories. Even where Progressive was accused of repeating too much from FLCL, it had drastically different themes and story notes that could tell you how it was going to go, and what the differences would be (cw: spoiler for eight-year-old anime). Where Alternative doesn't quite make sense in the series timeline (supposedly originally intended as a prequel, which gets really pessimistic, there's evidence for prequel, sequel, or even AU); it doesn't just flip everything that happens in the original and Alternative the bird.
It can be done! It just... doesn't.
It's doubly frustrating because there's so many better concepts and ideas already written in so many of these universes, and the showrunners can't do it, or notice that they aren't able to do it. Fucking Truce at Bakura would have made more sense than the actual sequel movies.
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I read a post a while ago, maybe here, that the new media stars are nowhere near as popular as the old. There will never be another Tom Cruise, and just about the only insanely popular singer is Taylor Swift, yet she's still nowhere near Michael Jackson's peak. Old times were total cultural dominance; new times are just competing for an ever-shrinking sliver of attention.
It seems that movies are about the same. I can't picture anything being as influential as the original Star Wars anymore, nothing ever being as universally acclaimed and omnipresent. The MCU might be very popular, but it's also widely hated, and I don't think you really miss out on much, culturally, by avoiding it entirely.
Of course, the new IP being terrible isn't helping anything.
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I never thought people would look fondly on the fucking prequel trilogy. Shows how badly Disney has mismanaged the franchise.
I will admit the revisionist history I see from redditors regarding the prequel trilogy is surprising. I was a kid that was pretty much the target audience for the prequels when they released in the 90s, and even as an eight year old they were underwhelming and immediately forgotten. The only parts that genuinely made an impression on kids and entered into the canon were: Darth Maul and double-bladed lightsabers, podracing (mostly because of the great Nintendo 64 game). While there was hype for the Phantom Menace, parts 2 and 3 were attended with no hype, even from children.
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The prequels felt like they were real Star Wars even with their bad aspects. Much of Disney Star Wars seems plasticky, fake, interchangeable with other late 2010s/2020s media.
Where were the lightsaber battles, not one good lightsaber battle in the whole sequel trilogy! Nothing to rival Darth Maul, Dooku or Battle of the Heroes.
The space battles weren't that great either. They did to Star Wars whatever was done to make skim milk.
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As bungled as it was, there's a lot to appreciate about the prequel trilogy! Some epic scenes. Great music throughout. Memes for days.
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I liked the prequel trilogy at the time. It's not perfect, but on the whole I enjoyed it a great deal and think that it was a worthy Star Wars trilogy.
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To indulge in sheer schadenfreude-driven bitterness for a moment...
Good.
I loved Star Wars when I grew up, but right now, Star Wars needs to rest. The franchise needs to just lie dormant for a while. It's done this before - 1983-1991, for instance - and probably been better for it. Our media overlords should put it down and stop trying to exploit it.
Maybe one day there can or should be a Star Wars renaissance, but it is not happening now. Give it at least a decade of rest.
It really doesn't though. Maybe they should give up movies, but for whatever reason they never give the public (me) what it wants when it comes to video games, no matter how successful. For a period, up until around the late 00s, Lucasarts was producing some absolutely killer Star Wars themed games. And I don't think they've run dry the mine of both the storyworld of the Old Republic (which is just better in nearly every way from mainline Star Wars) or style of games such as the old Jedi Academy games. They just won't do them because it's not GAAS optimized slop. And when they do do something like an open world Star Wars game (killer in theory) they insist on wokifying it - but you don't have to do that.
I wouldn't read them, but probably you could theoretically do good books. Comics in the west are probably dead for a generation, at minimum, but if that weren't so you could theoretically do that too.
Anyway, there's still a Star Wars world at Disneyland, so I don't imagine they'll give up totally soon. It takes money to dismantle that thing, and anyways, it honestly looks cool. Speaking of, I heard they're finally giving up forcing the turd sequel IP line exclusively for Disney's Galaxy Edge and letting in nostalgia bait like Vader along with the joke that is Kylo Ren and the neo-Rebellion. Wise.
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I checked the official star wars channel on YT and didn't see any trailers for any upcoming movies in recent history.
I've seen the "trailer", because I regularly a bunch of movie trailers. I'd call what they've shown more of a teaser.
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What was the last big marketing push for a movie that you can remember in general? In the last five years, I can remember:
I can't even think of anything for 2025. The wicked sequel might have had something resembling hype, if you squinted.
Maybe I'm just living under a rock or something, but it really feels like movies as a cultural touchstone have just sort of fizzled out.
The promotion for Wicked and Wicked: For Good kind of blur together because there was so little time between them. It just feels like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have been out promoting the same movie for three years.
I think they tried to hype Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but no one cares about the plot of Mission Impossible movies enough to get excited about seeing the second half. Going in all I could remember was that there was a submarine and and AI in the last one.
Marvel couldn't get any hype going. Captain America: Brave New World had too many well known reshoots and production problems for people to get excited.
I think Hollywood's big problem is that they locked in things like the "Representation and Inclusion Standards" for the Oscars during peak woke. The pipeline to make a movie is around 5 years.
So when some major projects underperformed in 2023-2024 followed by Trump getting re-elected, they lost faith in the movies coming out and didn't want waste a lot of money on marketing.
A Minecraft Movie managed to generate a lot of hype in the kids movie category.
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Maybe F1 The Movie, heard some noise about that one.
F1 movie was itself marketing, it's a modest success based on the size of the investment but they're going ahead with a sequel because it was well received and rebates, sponsorships, and the actual involvement of F1 (and attached investor $s) saw it as good for the F1 brand.
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I thought RLM's recent video on the future of the Star Wars brand made some good points. They'll probably never again be a big tentpole brand that's universally loved by almost everyone, but... maybe that's OK. Maybe even for the best. They can create lots of different content that doesn't even pretend to fit into the same universe, and each can find its own niche with a different group. So the people who like Westerns can go watch the Mandalorian, the people who like spy movies can watch Andor, the people who like Feminist Wicca stuff can watch the Acolyte, and the people who just like cuta things can buy baby Yoda plushies. Also: the box office gross of the movies hardly matters, the profits all come from things like toys, video games, and amusement park rides.
Yeah they've had shit luck with all that too. It might shuffle on indefinitely in tertiary media, like some Depression-era comic strip no one realizes is still running, but it's dying as a cultural phenomenon.
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