Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
I agree with a lot of what you are saying— yes TLJ divided the fanbase, yes Solo bombed, and I’ve said repeatedly in this thread that the ONLY thing we can honestly critisize Kennedy for is that her job is to hire the right people for the job, and her track record at that is not great.
As for how much money is lost— it’s too early to tell. The ep9 take has to be considered. SW is a mega brand and has multiple revenue streams. Box office alone isn’t a determining factor. Technically only Solo was a bomb. Every studio has bombs.
Rian’s trilogy is not career suicide. There’s no evidence of that. There’s still not concrete proof the ant-Rian crowd isd anywhere near as big as angry fans think it is if you look at mass-movie going public opnions and box office.
But the point of my post was, you said he WANTED to alienate half the audience, and that is crazy.
That old video of Rian has him saying he’d rather half the audience hate his film than be unintersted. As a filmmaker, you can’t play it safe. If you want to make a movie that truly is remembered and spoken about, you have to make bold choices and do the unexpected. Ask anybody creative in any field and they will tell you playing it safe and doing what has been done before is not rewarding, nor will it have an impact.
His point is, as a filmmaker you need to take chances, swing for the fences, and not worry that you may alienate half your audience. Especially when we’re talking about something with giant fandom. There is literally no way to please everyone. Every thread on this site proves that. So don’t shoot for ther lowest common denominator.
Now, was his risk worth it? Probably not, because he didn’t pull it off. I fully understand why he chose to deconstruct Luke, and I maintain it would have worked had he made Luke return to himself at the midpoint instead of the very end.
It was a risk he took to try and make a movie that would be different and stand out and be remembered, especially in the wake of TFA, of which the biggest criticism was it was too much like ANH.
The fact he said what he said fresh out of film school with no relation to Star Wars makes it clear— he’s talking about making bold movies. That’s a far cry from sitting down with Kennedy and them laughing and wringing their hands and saying “OMG let’s totally RUIN this franchise!”
Exactly. The point is that you can make boring, "safe" films which are ultimately forgettable and bland, or you can take risks and try to make films that people
may really really enjoy...or they may strongly dislike it. Basically, he's saying that he'd rather that you either love or hate his film, but that he never wants you to "nothing" his film. Like, I "nothing" a ton of films. I can count on one hand the number of times since seeing it that I've bothered to think about, say, Jupiter Rising. I "nothing" that film. I don't hate it. I don't love it. It was...you know...fine for the 2-ish hours I spent watching it, but I mostly don't remember it and I largely don't care about it one way or another. I thought the visual weirdness and the kind of strangeness of the core ideas was interesting and risky, but at the end of the day....meh. Whatevs.
That's what Johnson
doesn't want people to do with his films. Loathe it or love it, but don't "nothing" it. And to do that, you have to make films that are...interesting. Challenging. Different from what's expected, or at least different in important ways.
Making a movie for the fans is such a deep deep pit.
Let's say they were to sit down and make a film for the fans. It sounds great on paper. But which fans do they make the film for? Fans of the OT? Fans of the PT? What one Star Wars fan dislikes another likes. So who should they make the film for?
Or would it be a better idea to simply make the best film they know how. If one group of fans doesn't like it, that's to bad. If one group likes it, great! Let's move one to the next project.
For that matter, let's suppose they even settle on which era of fans. Let's say they want to make films for OT fans. Great! What's that mean? Well, for most OT fans it means endlessly reiterating the OT, hitting the same beats, making the same callbacks, etc. Except, wait, that's
not what fans want. They want it to be different. But the same. But, like, new. But also familiar.
This is, in my opinion, a nearly impossible task. It's why remakes are so often either an IP glaze on an otherwise very different product, or an "embiggening" of the popular elements from the previous films. Similar story with sequels.
I see Star Wars fans who complained about how TFA was just a boring rehash of ANH with a gender-flipped protagonist. I think there's more to it than that, but it definitely felt like it played things too safe. I accepted a lot of that as just setting the stage for future films, but I was personally hoping we'd move beyond the confines of the OT instead of reheating a bunch of elements from it.
To my way of thinking, the only way to break the cycle of just repeating what happened in the other films is to firmly plant your flag and go in a different direction. Johnson did that. Might have pissed off a lot of fans, but I'm hoping that JJ doesn't/can't just whip a re-do of ROTJ on us for the next film after the state of affairs at the end of Ep. VIII.
Exactly.
Whether Rian made the right choices or not will be debated for at least another 30 years, and there's plenty to be critical of. But his intent was noble enough. I never want a movie to play it safe.
I think it's the right choice if only because it's the only one I really ee that offers a respite from endless iterations of what came before. And no, I don't think that's the point or that "they should rhyme" is the be-all/end-all of storytelling. Certain elements may be common in the stories, but that doesn't mean we should just repeat everything ad infinitum.
I dunno. I think TLJ sank on tone issues as much as anything.
When people don't like the tone of a movie they still mostly bring up specific things to complain about. But if the tone had been better they would have been less bothered by the specific rough spots.
I don't think it's "tone" exactly. I mean, I get what you're saying -- when people generally like a movie, they gloss over the stuff they didn't like, and when they dislike it, they start to pick it apart. But I'm not sure if "tone" is exactly the right word for what was different here.
You missed the part about him and Harve Bennett wanting Spock to stay dead, but people were so bummed after the test screenings that they quickly did reshoots to include the photon tube scene at the end of the film....
Nick Meyer also watched every single episode of TOS and wrote his screen play based on his summation that the best episodes always revolved around the triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and McCoy and stayed true to the core of each character - logic (Spock), emotion (McCoy) and the brashness of youth (Kirk).
He just turned it on its head a bit with Kirk grappling with getting old.
The main problem I personally have have with the new trilogy - aside from whether or not the films themselves are good/enjoyable/etc. or not - all stem from TFA and was carried through in TLJ is that all of the heroes that we grew up watching all became epic failures after ROTJ.
I think that's more of a function of the business decision of bringing back the old heroes at all. Like, imagine if they'd set the film 200 years after the battle of Endor. The Republic is re-formed, it's stood for this whole time, and now a new threat (whatever it is) rises. Our new heroes might look back to the heroes of an earlier age for examples, but the old heroes aren't in the film as active characters except maybe Luke as a blue glowie. Would fans have liked it? I dunno. It would have preserved the old heroes as having ridden off into the sunset, living happily ever after...but you wouldn't have gotten to see them again at all.
If you actually give them their happy ending, then you don't set up a ton of conflict for the story, or you have to spend your entire first film
building the conflict to the point where the war actually breaks out. Or at least the first half of your first film. Instead, JJ decided to drop everyone in the middle of everything, provide very little context, and just let you kinda muddle through it as you go along except for the LOOK HERE IS A MYSTERY hints he leaves for you to manufacture faux engagement with the story. At that point...what can ya do? Where do you go? You can't un-ring that bell if you're Rian Johnson. Debate his take on Luke all you want, but he couldn't have Luke turn out to be a perfectly happy guy who has no idea what Jedi temple massacre you're talking about and just decided to come to Ach-To because he heard it was great fishin'.