The Star Wars discourse has gotten so messy and both sides are really to blame now.
We now have Prequel apologists and people rewriting history saying that people LOVED the prequels lol. While it may be looked back on a little more fondly for the memes (Hello there); they were still terrible movies for being so disjointed. This argument is also made for both why the Sequel trilogy will be hated and eventually loved...
A biiiiig part of that is that the people who were just kids when the PT came out -- for whom the PT
was their Star Wars -- just...love it. Not because it's good, but because they love it. I would also argue that the kids who grew up with the Clone Wars cartoon especially dig the PT. As a result, they've become apologists for/defenders of the PT. For example, I've seen defenses online of the dialogue in the PT which was -- at least decades ago -- described as "wooden" almost universally. Now people describe it as "Shakespearean," which suggests to me that they've never really read Shakespeare with even a teensy bit of depth, and what they're responding to more is the somewhat stilted and artificial sounding lines. I do think that, stylistically, it's a kind of heightened melodrama (especially in Ep. 3), but it doesn't really jive with much of the other dialogue. This is true, however, in the OT as well, especially in ROTJ. There are some
clunky scenes in ROTJ like when Leia talks with Luke and finds out she's his sister and gives that "Luke, run away. Run far away from here..." line. It's just...clunky. It's not "Shakespearean."
Shakespeare is archaic
wording, but the actual dialogue and meaning is amazing, layered, and evinces keen insight into the human condition. "Hold me, Anakin. Hold me like you did by the lake" is....not that.
From my perspective, the PT is deeply flawed and uneven. I respect it for being truly the work of an auteur -- good or bad -- and not something designed by committee, but George needed more people around him telling him "no" and "that's a dumb idea, and we aren't gonna do it." However, having recently watched the entirety of the Clone Wars series in chronological order and then capped it off with ROTS...I can see why people dig the PT.
Conceptually it's really cool, and I loved the Clone Wars cartoon overall. I still think ROTS handles Anakin's fall clumsily and way too abruptly, but the Clone Wars show helps a bunch with that (especially the final couple seasons). I think what you're seeing vis a vis the PT is a "halo effect" from the show.
There were toxic fans, mostly against the Anakins imo. Lloyd was bullied at school for playing Anakin which is really unfortunate. Christensen was also criticized. I think we can argue that modern actors like Tran suffer more insults thanks to the greater prevalence of social media and how easy it is to send out a tweet andtheir release of these fans do detract from properly critiquing a film or product as bad imo (dont insult or attack actors for doing their job).
Jake Lloyd was just a kid who did a gig. He didn't write his dialogue, nor did he have the experience and voice as an actor to say "Nah, I'm not gonna play this the way you're suggesting." I gather in the few other roles he'd appeared in pre-TPM, he was actually pretty good. This tracks with pretty much everyone's performance in the PT. No one is at the top of their game, although some are better than others. Hayden Christensen, I have maintained for
years, is an incredibly talented actor. Watch him in Shattered Glass if you don't believe me. He's
amazing. And what happened to Kelly Marie Tran was ****ing disgusting and shameful. You can take issue with the films she was in (I do, at least in the case of TROS), but she played her part well and I hope her experience in Star Wars doesn't keep her away from acting. She's got chops.
But yeah, corporations are now using the excuse of toxic fans to justify their harsh attitudes. On the one hand, it is kind of cool that corporations are going to bat for their employees. But on the other, they are redirecting attention away from making bad products to put the onus on the consumers. Even critiques of "super hero movie fatigue" is a poor excuse for the MCU just releasing bad movies.
I mean, there
are crappy fans out there. There are "fans" who hate
everything that comes out, which I gotta say makes me wonder if it's fair to call yourself a "fan." Not saying you have to love every aspect of a franchise, but at a certain point, when someone hates, like, 80% of what constitutes a franchise, I think at the very least you have to qualify
what you're a fan of. Like, "I'm a fan of the old school Star Wars. Like, the stuff that came out in the 80s and whatnot." Oh, ok. Cool.
There was already a big drop from Force Awakens to Last Jedi (936M life time gross vs 620M) so the drop from last to rise is not as steep (532M).
Disney did already make $12B from star wars though so they did come out with a nice profit and can likely still milk fans by giving out the IP for games, rereleasing the OT and PT. I dont see the value in the tv shows but people seem to love Andor. Unless Disney suddenly needs money, they wont sell Star Wars and sadly, I dont think another studio would do the IP justice anyway.
So, one, Disney will
never divest itself of Star Wars. It ain't gonna happen, folks. They won't get rid of Star Wars or Marvel or Aliens or Predator or any of the other properties they own, because...why would you? Why would you give your opponents the tools to make money, especially at your expense?
In terms of the popularity of the sequel era, I think it's
possible that kids like my kid will take to them the way the PT generation did with the PT...but I think it's perhaps less likely. That's down to two major factors, though:
1. There's a
lot more competition for eyeballs now. There's just...so much stuff for kids to get into anymore, and so much of it is available on demand, at will. In terms of Star Wars, my kid is enjoying the Clone Wars cartoon right now, but also loves the Lego Star Wars stuff because it's goofy, fun, and she gets to interact with the material in an easily digestible manner. Of the PT, she saw Episode 3 at her grandparents' house because it was on TV, and she liked it (even though it was sad), but she hasn't seen the other PT stuff and isn't super interested in it. She can't stand Jar Jar (I've taught her well
). But she watches this stuff when she's not watching Percy Jackson or the Hercules cartoon series from the early 2000s or Bluey or whatever. She also burns out on things fast. Last year, Harry Potter was EVERYTHING....right up until she'd consumed all the content, and then she moved on to something else. She still likes it, but she's not
so into it that it dominates everything she enjoys the way it did.
2. Disney's strategy has shifted away from the ST era almost entirely. There's been barely any content developed for it. There's Old Republic/PT-era stuff, there's "interquel" era stuff like Rebels and Andor and such, and there's OT-era stuff and stuff just after the OT era (e.g., Mando, Ahsoka, etc.). But the actual ST era itself has been pretty much left alone. Without other content around which to rally, I question just how into things todays kids will be. I mean, they'll likely remember the films more fondly than the rest of us grumpy greybeards do, but will they be
fans of that stuff? Eh...I dunno. I'll also say that the ST now feels kind of...myopic when it's compared to pretty much everything else. It's got a very distinct style of its own, but it just feels so...self-contained and constrained. The First Order doesn't really
feel like the Empire, but it has the Empire's vibes. But it doesn't have the Empire's
history, so storytelling about its rise kinda doesn't work as well. It's this huge military power that seems to pop up out of nowhere, takes over the galaxy for, like, 3 years, and then is utterly defeated. It's this weird flash-in-the-pan experience, and because JJ didn't really seem to have much of a vision for the films beyond "We'll do the OT, but embiggened," it sort of feels like "Well....ok. guess that's all done with now." I mean, where do you go from there in terms of storytelling? Say what you will about TLJ, but at least it opened the possibility to taking the setting and story of the ST and spinning it out in a lot of different directions. You could take
time to tell the story beyond what we saw, but then in swoops JJ to wrap it all up and tie a bow on it, and...now what? We're just gonna re-recycle the
Empire/First Order/Final Order/Sith Eternal/Whatever-the-hell-the-bad-guys-are-now? Is it gonna be white-armored Space Nazis mk. 3?
To my way of thinking, the ST is a narrative failure not simply because I think the whole thing feels rushed, very uneven, and like a re-tread rollercoaster without a real core...but
also because it seems to foreclose further storytelling. What the hell is Rey's trilogy (the one that's rumored, I mean) supposed to be about, anyway? What's the
vision there? Where's the
conflict? How do you introduce
drama and
threat and
danger to the galaxy again?
This was one of the main problems with the ST, too, and it's one of the things that old school fans hate the most. ROTJ ends like a fairy tale "And they lived happily ever after." Except, they didn't. They lived pretty miserable lives of constant struggle, and then the galaxy and their personal lives burned down around them. You gonna do that again with Rey?
Plus, so much of what was introduced in the ST seemed barely fleshed out. I gather a bunch of stuff like comics and novels are working on that (e.g., providing greater clarity for who the hell the Knights of Ren are), but that doesn't really penetrate into the wider consciousness. You ask me, if Disney wants to go into that era again and go beyond it, they need to lay the groundwork with TV shows to establish the state of the galaxy, the players, the factions, the threats and conflicts, all of that. They need to do actual worldbuilding that can break thru to a wider audience. But they aren't. And that's a big part of why I think the ST is, at least for the foreseeable future, kind of a dead letter.
