Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
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LordHorusNL
While that may be a factor, this man also realized what Star Wars became shortly after its original release (I touch on this in another post). I'll quickly summarize it here, Lucas realized then that Star Wars had become a brand and people will/have expect certain things from it. Any slight deviation from it is going to be met poorly. Though it presents itself as vast and full of endless imagination, Star Wars is actually very small and limiting. You try and take Star Wars someplace new, people hate it; you give them what they recognize, and people say it's derivative and empty. There's just no winning in this current system. You can have the most competent people making your stuff but when there's a bunch of fingers in the pie, and everyone's got something to say, you're not going to have a clear and concise vision.
The broad strokes of the EU were just ideas Lucas let writers toy with to satiate an audience still wanting Star Wars, even after it was over (I'm sure some people liked some of the stories it had to offer but I found much of it to be terrible), but even then the EU had the same issues now of just regurgitating the same old things. Hell, they also recycled original cut story ideas, which were cut for good reason, just---
because! RotJ still gets flack today because it really started then, with bringing back the Death Star.
I'm not saying Star Wars is dead, but, let's face it---who honestly cares anymore, beyond a small group of people? If it hadn't been impressed on the two generations of people that it did, I don't think kids today would honestly care about Star Wars. There are plenty of things that came after it that have filled the void for them. The Marvel movies are the prime example. Kids, I think, only have any interest in Star Wars because their folks show it to them and they like it through them, more than recognizing and sharing why we like these old movies. They just enjoy the time they're spending with their folks. I tried this with my nephews when they were young and they tried really hard to like them for my sake but, frankly, they wanted more Iron Man, Transformers, and Spider-Man. It wasn't my place to try and impress on them what I liked. I learned the same lesson their father did and came to know why he didn't bother with it.
Honestly, I think the only way to make a decent Star Wars is one that just won't happen in the current studio system. One man comes up with the story, focus on making sympathetic characters with ideas of the Force and grand galactic conflict sprinkled in, and he makes the movie to his vision. Forget about making it "for kids," say "screw the fans, they don't know what they want", and makes the movie(s) as he intends them to be made. However, that's just not going to happen now.