It's one thing to make a bunch of stinkers, but then to pretend that said stinkers were in a completely alternate timeline through some sleight of hand retconning is absolutely bonkers and will fool approximately zero people.
Let's hope that this is just what it claims to be: a rumor.
I'm not sure what you mean by "fool". These aren't real events, there's no such thing as an indisputable timeline outside of the context of an individual work. If Disney wants to make Star Wars movies set in a world where the sequel trilogy didn't happen, what's wrong with that, other than it potentially being confusing to viewers?
Indeed, a story is whatever the viewer wants it to be, because it's fiction. Disney marketing and time are effective brain-o. Nobody will care in a couple decades, other than the niche watchers of the "real story behind Star Wars Disney".
The article says that Disney wants to move the current sequels to a brand new timeline which implies that this new timeline is an official timeline in the sense that it's blessed by Disney, but it's not the timeline that most people would consider to be the official timeline, aka the timeline where the original and sequel trilogies happened. It's basically Disney going "Well, we can't ditch this, but it kinda sorta happened, but not in the timeline you think it did. Surprise!".
Meanwhile, anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together is going to look back at how Disney marketed this originally and think "Whatever you say, my guy".
OT, but when did actual plot details of fictional universes become business decisions?
I can understand the business side setting constraints for plot writers to include or exclude certain characters (to tie-in with merchandise and promo campaigns) and maintain reputation, family-friendliness, political orientation, etc. But I always assumed that apart from that stuff, the business side would be mostly uninterested in the storytelling details.
But "cinematic universes" feel like something different. The fictional world and its continuity itself becomes a business asset. Suddenly writers are implementing executive decisions how the world should develop.
On the one hand, it feels a bit like devaluation of the craft. In another context, some space time anomaly that ties different timelines together could make an interesting story, but here it feels functional.
On the other hand, I wonder why they even bother with an in-universe explanation. They could have simply announced that the sequel trilogy is noncanon, or made the next part into a reboot or something like that. Are they so worried that parts of the fandom will drop off if the continuity is ever interrupted? (Ignoring how many times things were already retconned)
I think that's what feels weird about cinematic universes for me. They feel like someone is trying to build a real-world business empire inside a fictional universe.
Wouldn't it be incredible if they remove the sequel trilogy from canon and rebrand "Legends" as the actual post-Galactic Civil War timeline? I'd certainly like that.
I was bit angry when Lucas decided to make prequels (in the late 90s) instead of using original actors to make sequel, but now I understand why. The only way to continue original trilogy is to undo everything they achieved and spit on their legacy. That's why there shouldn't be any sequel. Let them have their victory and make new, original saga, in different universe.
The best places for a timeline redirection would be any time in the interval 2006-2014 (easiest), or in 1984-1998 (most satisfying).
A clever solution is to do the former, in a way that allows for a later consistent adoption of the latter.
While this requires older fans to retcon many years of their own lives, I think we can all agree this will be a small price to pay. Disassociation can be an adaptive response to trauma.
I'm surprised Mando and Grogu is testing so poorly. Maybe I'm a nerd but I was very excited for it!
> The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for around an $80 million domestic opening over Memorial Day weekend—a number that would make it the lowest debut in Star Wars theatrical history.
I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand.
It's what they probably should have done from day one.
I'm not saying the Thrawn trilogy is like the highest art ever made. It's glorious pop schlock fun, as Star Wars should be. But it reminds me of the way that manga is so often treated as storyboards for the anime adaptations. The books, being books, can't be quite so directly translated, but it's close enough that it shouldn't strain any competent scriptwriter. Assuming Disney still knows how to find such people, a proposition not well supported by recent evidence.
Also, automatic three-movie plan, which could be used to fix up one of Hollywood's biggest problems. I don't know where Hollywood gets its swaggering confidence that they can make multi-movie epics while simultaneously having no plans whatsoever for what the next movie will be, after their repeated, catastrophic, and expensive failures trying to create them. What if, and hear me out here, try not to let your head explode at the audacity of this idea, they didn't try to spend billions of dollars just sort of "winging" it? What if they had an actual plan for how they were going to spend billions of dollars over the course of a decade? I know, I know, it's a crazy idea, but maybe they should give it a try.
Even Shadows of the Empire as a standalone movie would be a breath of something new and fun.
Maybe not the highest art ever but both were solid stories memorable enough for us to remember decades later. Thrawn was a respectable villain. We weren't supposed to like him but couldn't deny his competence.
Of memorable blue people, for comparison I've watched Avatar twice and don't remember a thing about it.
So much ripe fruit just sitting there that the decision to wander away and do their own thing would still have been objectively crazy even if they had fully succeeded. It just would have been an objectively crazy decision that they managed to succeed despite making.
>"I still think even now they could print money if they'd just do an honest adaptation of the Thrawn trilogy. Even with all the damage they've done to the brand."
They could print money by just having Bob Iger stand silently in front of a camera flipping off the audience for two hours and calling it Star Wars. Every one of those films were profitable. They'll keep doing it, and people will keep paying for it.
The only one of the sequels that had any balls was The Last Jedi, and Disney was so frightened by the backlash to some of its elements (like the idea that our hero could be--gasp--a person of NON-royal lineage!) that it then spent the entire last movie trying to retcon everything that made TLJ potentially interesting.
TLJ was almost great, but clearly needed to see Rey go dark at the end, while Kylo turns away from the dark side, and we get a role-reversed third movie. It was heading there so clearly that I have to think juking and doing the obvious, boring thing was a studio meddling issue. “Ok no you can do a lot but you can’t do that.”
I don’t think “the idea that our hero could be--gasp--a person of NON-royal lineage!” was even in the top 10 of the biggest issues people had with that movie.
It was at lease top3 though, with "the casino interlude didn't advance the story" (which _was_ the point, heroics in a war are often useless). My main issue with TLJ story is that it felt half baked/unfinished in many way. Rey going dark/grey would have been a good finish.
Most of the other issues are from TFA, because that movie made no sense. Oftentime strategically, movies do not make any sense, but that does not hamper their plot (in the movies Lord of the ring The Two Towers/The Return of the King, strategically the decisions are pure nonsense; when the books did a lot of work to explain how they end up in those very bad positions, but hte movies are still great if you don't really think about it). In TFA, i just can't understand why the republic are now rebels who use guerrilla/freedom fighter tactics. I don't understand the strategy behind anything, and honestly, the plot devices are too big to be excused. At least TLJ tries to answer the " but why?", often poorly, but at least you have explanations (and sometimes some punts to JJ abrahams, but honestly, fair play.)
That was certainly among the most vocal complaints I remember hearing about the movie at the time (other than the moronic "Too woke!" complaints), and Wikipedia supports my memory:
> Particularly divisive was the reveal that Rey's parents are insignificant; many fans had expected her to be Luke's daughter or to share a lineage with another character from the original trilogy.
Remembering and reading the source articles, divisiveness wasn't the fact Rey's parents weren't royal lineage, it was that fans are going to speculate, and Disney did nothing on or off screen to manage that speculation. In fact, Disney fanned the flames leading up to it.
Rian Johnson: "It's something that is absolutely going to be addressed... The other part of it is there are lots of surprises in this movie and lots of twists and turns, and I really want people to experience those when they see the movie for the first time. "
Ok, so years of oh, ah, and then the big lineage reveal comes and she's just a peasant girl. Screen rant called this "anticlimatic," which is was. The easily could have managed that earlier with a decent plot and decent writing, but the whole trilogy seemed to be written by a bunch of high school students.
Balls without brains. Had some interesting turns for another story, different characters, a standalone movie. But to twist Luke into a milk-drinking murderer is not only beyond the pale but, not particularly intelligent either.
I'm reminded of the related Mr. Miyagi meme, LaRusso: "Will you train me?", Miyagi: "I hate everything and want to die." The End.
It's one thing to subvert everything that your fanbase loves about a franchise, but if you don't give the audience any narrative payoff for doing so don't be surprised when they come to burn your house down.
The biggest problem is fans. They want to re-experience what they had when they first saw it, then get mad when the movies don't live up to their past experience. I was 7 when Star Wars came out. I had all the toys. I saw the movie a dozen times. It was an experience. As an adult, when I watch to again, I think “wow, this is really not good.” The special effects hold up , but the acting, the dialog, the pacing is all “meh”. When i compare it to the new movies, it’s the same. They are just not good.
And of course Disney wants to recapture the money bonanza that was generated by the original trilogy, but if they do anything that angers the fans, it get boycotted. If they try to stick with the original patterns, it gets called a remake. They are in a lose/lose situation.
Ultimately the fans need to let the nostalgia go and let the current generation build their own favorite movies instead of being told this or that franchise is the best.
I too realised that the films just aren't very good on re-watching them as an adult. The new films are not good in a different way though.
There was never even an attempt at a cohesive story, let alone a single vision for the sequels. It was given to different writers and directors who all had free reign for their projects and took them in different directions. They weren't just "not good", they were a mess.
Funny, the deeper I get into film the more I respect how much the original trilogy does really well. Especially the first two, Jedi’s got some “I have a story I want to tell a certain way but am stuck with more characters than I need and refuse to budge on either front” issues in the script, among other script issues (some giving us a preview of problems that would really come to the front in the prequels)
I thought the pacing for Asoka was particularly glacial. I get they were going with a thoughtful/slow burn but there was soooo much empty staring into space, landscape shots, filler content walking through the highlands with nothing happening, etc. I think they should have gotten Thrawn in the mix by episode 3!
Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
> Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.
We have 4k77 and the follow-up projects. I doubt Disney would release anything I’d prefer to those. They would probably find a way to make their version slightly worse.
Let's hope that this is just what it claims to be: a rumor.
Meanwhile, anybody with 2 brain cells to rub together is going to look back at how Disney marketed this originally and think "Whatever you say, my guy".
I can understand the business side setting constraints for plot writers to include or exclude certain characters (to tie-in with merchandise and promo campaigns) and maintain reputation, family-friendliness, political orientation, etc. But I always assumed that apart from that stuff, the business side would be mostly uninterested in the storytelling details.
But "cinematic universes" feel like something different. The fictional world and its continuity itself becomes a business asset. Suddenly writers are implementing executive decisions how the world should develop.
On the one hand, it feels a bit like devaluation of the craft. In another context, some space time anomaly that ties different timelines together could make an interesting story, but here it feels functional.
On the other hand, I wonder why they even bother with an in-universe explanation. They could have simply announced that the sequel trilogy is noncanon, or made the next part into a reboot or something like that. Are they so worried that parts of the fandom will drop off if the continuity is ever interrupted? (Ignoring how many times things were already retconned)
I think that's what feels weird about cinematic universes for me. They feel like someone is trying to build a real-world business empire inside a fictional universe.
A clever solution is to do the former, in a way that allows for a later consistent adoption of the latter.
While this requires older fans to retcon many years of their own lives, I think we can all agree this will be a small price to pay. Disassociation can be an adaptive response to trauma.
“Anything that came out after I was born isn’t that great.”
I could not agree more.
> The Mandalorian and Grogu is currently tracking for around an $80 million domestic opening over Memorial Day weekend—a number that would make it the lowest debut in Star Wars theatrical history.
It's what they probably should have done from day one.
I'm not saying the Thrawn trilogy is like the highest art ever made. It's glorious pop schlock fun, as Star Wars should be. But it reminds me of the way that manga is so often treated as storyboards for the anime adaptations. The books, being books, can't be quite so directly translated, but it's close enough that it shouldn't strain any competent scriptwriter. Assuming Disney still knows how to find such people, a proposition not well supported by recent evidence.
Also, automatic three-movie plan, which could be used to fix up one of Hollywood's biggest problems. I don't know where Hollywood gets its swaggering confidence that they can make multi-movie epics while simultaneously having no plans whatsoever for what the next movie will be, after their repeated, catastrophic, and expensive failures trying to create them. What if, and hear me out here, try not to let your head explode at the audacity of this idea, they didn't try to spend billions of dollars just sort of "winging" it? What if they had an actual plan for how they were going to spend billions of dollars over the course of a decade? I know, I know, it's a crazy idea, but maybe they should give it a try.
Maybe not the highest art ever but both were solid stories memorable enough for us to remember decades later. Thrawn was a respectable villain. We weren't supposed to like him but couldn't deny his competence.
Of memorable blue people, for comparison I've watched Avatar twice and don't remember a thing about it.
They could print money by just having Bob Iger stand silently in front of a camera flipping off the audience for two hours and calling it Star Wars. Every one of those films were profitable. They'll keep doing it, and people will keep paying for it.
Most of the other issues are from TFA, because that movie made no sense. Oftentime strategically, movies do not make any sense, but that does not hamper their plot (in the movies Lord of the ring The Two Towers/The Return of the King, strategically the decisions are pure nonsense; when the books did a lot of work to explain how they end up in those very bad positions, but hte movies are still great if you don't really think about it). In TFA, i just can't understand why the republic are now rebels who use guerrilla/freedom fighter tactics. I don't understand the strategy behind anything, and honestly, the plot devices are too big to be excused. At least TLJ tries to answer the " but why?", often poorly, but at least you have explanations (and sometimes some punts to JJ abrahams, but honestly, fair play.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Last_Jedi#Audie...
> Particularly divisive was the reveal that Rey's parents are insignificant; many fans had expected her to be Luke's daughter or to share a lineage with another character from the original trilogy.
Rian Johnson: "It's something that is absolutely going to be addressed... The other part of it is there are lots of surprises in this movie and lots of twists and turns, and I really want people to experience those when they see the movie for the first time. "
Ok, so years of oh, ah, and then the big lineage reveal comes and she's just a peasant girl. Screen rant called this "anticlimatic," which is was. The easily could have managed that earlier with a decent plot and decent writing, but the whole trilogy seemed to be written by a bunch of high school students.
I'm reminded of the related Mr. Miyagi meme, LaRusso: "Will you train me?", Miyagi: "I hate everything and want to die." The End.
And of course Disney wants to recapture the money bonanza that was generated by the original trilogy, but if they do anything that angers the fans, it get boycotted. If they try to stick with the original patterns, it gets called a remake. They are in a lose/lose situation.
Ultimately the fans need to let the nostalgia go and let the current generation build their own favorite movies instead of being told this or that franchise is the best.
There was never even an attempt at a cohesive story, let alone a single vision for the sequels. It was given to different writers and directors who all had free reign for their projects and took them in different directions. They weren't just "not good", they were a mess.
I thought the pacing for Asoka was particularly glacial. I get they were going with a thoughtful/slow burn but there was soooo much empty staring into space, landscape shots, filler content walking through the highlands with nothing happening, etc. I think they should have gotten Thrawn in the mix by episode 3!
Very large companies are generally very bad at consistently producing original content because everything in a corporat eenvironment skews towards not taking any risks. Big companies want a repeatable formula. It's why we get to many sequels and reboots with depressingly few new properties. HBO has been the exception to the rule. I would've also said Apple TV tends to corporatize content into being inoffensive. Modern Family (even though it wasn't an Apple production) is kind of like the perfect Apple TV content. But we have things like Severance and Silo so maybe there's hope.
Anyway, the retconning and corporatization around Star Wars has been depressing to watch. The whole "Han shot first" was a line in the sand more than 30 years old that seemed to stem from George Lucas's desire for a lighter classification for the films. The Phantom Menace of course was very much aimed at a younger audience even though the plot revolved around a tax treaty dispute of all things.
The sequel trilogy was for me, as an original Star Wars fan, deeply depressing. I honestly haven't even watched the last one where Carrie Fisher did her best Mary Poppins. And honestly the whole prmise of midichlorians (from the original trilogy) and inheritance of Force ability was really offensive and against the original spirit of Star Wars. I mean as anyone example of corporatization the name "Rey" was chosen to be easily pronounceable in many languages.
Look where we started. The inspiration for Star Wars was the Viet Cong resisting American imperialism in Vietnam (direct from George Lucas) [1].
Disney produced beloved classics like The Jungle Book, Aladdin and Snow White. In the 2000s, they seemed unable to continue this creativity and it became an amalgam of Pixar and the MCU (and later Lucasfilm). Pixar was a culturally antiestablishmment company started by Steve Jobs (yes, yes, he bought a London computer graphics division). The MCU took decades of creativity in the superhero space and basically turned into 2000s era patriotic films. You can guess why the timing.
Oh it's worth adding the Star Wars originally had an expanded universe that was kinda managed by Lucasfilm. Disney abandoned this on purchasing Lucasfilm and some fans were very upset. This included Chewbacca having a wife and family back home. It was all fan fiction, basically.
Disney could very much use the Star Wars milieu to tell stories relevant to our times. The 2025 Superman movie did this for example. and it made some people very upset. But Disney absolutely will not do that. So I really don't think it matters what they try and do.
[1]: https://screenrant.com/star-wars-george-lucas-vietnam-war-in...
We have 4k77 and the follow-up projects. I doubt Disney would release anything I’d prefer to those. They would probably find a way to make their version slightly worse.