I know I’m being contrarian, but it is a risk to let it stagnants. The worst you can do is to turn it into pre-Marvel Sony/Spiderman. That is a textbook example of of not taking a creative risk and turning your cash cow into cash minnow.
If the sunny Episode 4 is not followed up by the darker Episode 5, who knows what could have happened? Would SW be as big as it is now? Lucas et. al., for all their faults, took creative risks. Especially with Episode 1. And I applaude him for it. I’m NOT a hater of Episode 1 (especially since I have never watched Episode 4-6 in cinema, but only on tele.)
I know you’re not defending them here, but it really annoys me whenever someone frames a hypothetical original or creative movie as a “risk”. It may be about bean counting for the bean counters, but as a movie viewer all I care about is to see something good that interests me. Endlessly reproducing similar 7/10 asexual action movies with a spattering of semi-witty yet family-friendly one-liners should be the financial risk. The only remarkable thing about Disney is that similar franchise milkers usually only manage to dish out 5/10 movies.
That’s what Disney does in my view, and picking JJ for Ep9 is the latest in a long line of decisions that demonstrates the nature of this machine. They aberrated for awhile by picking a range of cool and trendy directors to direct movies, but then fired mostly all of them to varying degrees!
The universe just isn’t fair that this is what rakes in the dollars. Oh and yes, I will be seeing Ep8 and Ep9 opening week in the cinemas even though I know better because Star Wars™.
The last line is so true, but I do think you’re underestimating the risk to Disney continuing with its formula, as family-friendly spectacles that are “better than most” will likely garner good box office indefinitely. And Disney does occasionally get a homerun that far exceeds a 7, like the Russo brothers films
One of the best ways to put it is that because of the additional creative freedom given to Marvel properties not controlled by Disney, we occasionally get disasters like Fantastic Four, but we’d also have never gotten Logan or Deadpool.
I really hoped Star Wars was going to be used as a platform for a variety of diverse movies, at least in the spin-offs, including potentially more gritty, adult movies, or really any type of movie (horror, romance, comedy, war, harder sci-fi, etc). Star Wars is one of the best setting platforms for sci-fi/fantasy ever created.
I think the movies are always going to be hemmed in by the Manichaean good vs evil thing of the Jedi. I mean it’s baked in, not like you can work around it. Maybe if the movie has no Jedi you can fuzzy up the motivations a bit, possibly Rogue One did? I still haven’t seen that one.
Rogue One opens up a couple of lines into the moral grayness of some of the things special forces/spies do in the name of overall good, but then the movie punts it by having the main character give a rah-rah speech in the back half of the story and everything goes back to black and white conflict.
Red herring or not, IMO there are just too many giveaways on where the plot can go. I’m sure there will be some unspoiled surprise in the final movie, but the trailer already showed a lot.
Well jeez, I thought that looked kind of lame. No awesome shots like the first movie had of the Millennium Falcon swooping around. Maybe I’m over Star Wars.
