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I think the real cost, the real problem, is the reputational hit from admitting they fucked up, alongside the shame, blame, and perhaps even legal responsability, it puts on the creators (producers, directors and writers, mostly) of the publically disgraced movies and the chilling effect it would have on future works.
Imagine how it would go! It's hardly a new phenomenon, bad movies get made all the time at all budget levels, but admitting it means throwing people under the bus. It means telling, quite directly, to the dozens of fans of episodes 7-9 as they are that they have objectively bad taste, talk about spitting on someone's soul. For any producer, director or writer who is about to work on a Disney movie, they'll have seen how Disney failed to stand behind their works. Are they going to imply the movie I worked years on is shit if it doesn't make them enough money? For the public, they'll have seen how Disney swore, for years, to the tune of billions of dollars that episode 7, 8 and 9 were the sequels we always wanted to the Star Wars saga.
No, I don't think we're gonna get a redo. If that bad all women Ghostbusters movie was never officially disgraced by Sony, Disney's not going to do it with Star Wars. At least that Ghostbusters movie could be pushed into a corner never to be talked about again, while SW killed off or bastardized beloved characters. It's best for them to maintain the fiction that they were perfectly good movies that simply for whatever reason, didn't resonate enough with audiences. The best they could do to correct it is a split timeline, JJ Abrams' Star Trek-style, that they then splice over the bad one, and I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off in a way that doesn't feel like a massive ass pull; at least Star Trek had a history of time travel and diverging timelines.
I think the Star Wars brand might actually be toast. I do get your point but 7-9 did very real damage that a full cancellation of those might work.
GOT would be harder because the end wasn’t terrible it was just bad relative to the earlier work.
Mandalorian and Grogu is currently doing worse than Solo, and is being beaten by a horror film. I agree with you. The sequels divided people, which was enough to cause people to lose interest in it, but now most of the voices who were defending them are quiet. Nobody cares enough to press the issue any more.
I recently saw an article in one of the geek publications where the author was like, “yeah, the sequels were inconsistent and undermined each other, but the people who say this was because of feminism are still misogynists.” I’ve never met someone who defends the movies. They suck. But cancelling them wouldn’t do much. The energy’s already gone.
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