Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
Ripley > Rey
Ripley went from Persnickety 2nd Lieutenant to Flamethrower-wielding-xeno-killing-badass. By comparison, Rey would be a xeno killing badass with no explanation of how she got to that point. Just because. Your expectations have been subverted! And before you say it, yes I'm aware of all the gender fluidity in the Alien movies. But you know what? I frankly don't give a ****. They are well written movies for the most part, save a couple of the later ones. Suspense and horror well done for the time it existed in. Even today, few things stand up to just how... terrifying the Xenos really are. How helpless as humans we are when pitted against them.
Older movies are just better written. I can't put my finger on it, but I feel this is where most modern movies fail hard. Their writing is sucks... it's like they have absolutely no idea how to write a progressing story arc.
As somebody who writes movies for a living I'll pretend to be offended and point out a few things.
One, this is preposterous. Look at anything A24 puts out. Look at genre benders like Get Out, Moonlight, or even Logan. To make the generalization that anything "new" sucks is preposterous.
Two, look at these films and you'll see something they have in common: minimal studio interference. Studios have stopped making low to mid budget films. In a post digital filmmaking world the sea of smaller production companies cover this space and turn to the studios for distribution. Or sometimes, magically, like with Logan, Deadpool, or Blade Runner 2049, the studio actually trusts the director and is hands off. But for the most part, studios these days stick to their franchises as only they can afford them and the security of a promised pre-existing audience hardwired to the IP. Because they have so much riding on it, the studio will micromanage it, exhaust a chain of writers with changes driven by market research, test audiences, and rando notes from execs who wish they were creative, but aren't.
Three, ironically, this model is in a lot of ways the fault of Star Wars. The high-concept summer blockbuster made-for-everyone movie is the only true genre studios love. After Jaws and Star Wars invented the blockbuster we had an amazing run through the 80s where concept was king. If the 70 pre-Star Wars gave us the new generation of filmmakers that challenged the rules, the 80s was when scripts were allowed to go nuts. After 30 years though, as I said above, studios are more conservative and less likely to take chances when there are so many outlets producing films with much less overhead. The IP driven high concept for-everyone film is still king, it just changes shape every now and then. Obviously, it's superhero films now. But the scope of these films, how they are written, and what the studios want them to do is 100% 40 years of trying to recapture Star Wars magic.
When everything is punched into a formula and planned to engineer an exact type of film, creativity suffers. There is no shortage of well-written scripts in Hollywood, or original ones, but those are not safe bets for a studio. ESPECIALLY if we're talking about a huge IP like Star Wars. They aren't going to break form. Marvel is no different, most of their movies are the same structure-- but they cast so brlliantly you're happy to watch their characters do the sane stuff over and over.l
Finally, general audiences are just to blame as anyone else. If there's a drug dealer in your neighborhood some people will blame their presence gor whatever the junkies may do. Others will say the junkies wouldn't be hooked if it wasn't for the dealers. Supply and demand is symbiotic. The one thing that the portion of fandom that dislikes TLJ is doing right, is bycotting with their money. Disney doesn't care about angry fan videos on youtube, or man babies destroying their action figures. They don't even care if Solo bombed. But if IX bombs, and the TV show flops, and whatever comes next also fails to perform, they'll care. I still don't think angry fans out number general ausoences, but we'll see. Point is, to say Hollywood is lacking in quality writers is a over-generalization, as well as a myopic understanding of how the business works.