The Five Stages of Processing a New Star Wars Announcement | The Backdrop

It's been said for a while that Disney's bloated c-suite has been very likely a major source of problems with Star Wars and elsewhere, the movies reek of having a bunch of out of touch weirdo suits descending on them demanding to make their 'contribution' and resulting in an incoherent mess. And a pattern with the spinoffs that the best ones tend to be the ones that clearly flew under corporate radar, and then end up with the c-suite, no longer distracted by the movies, descending on the successful ones to grind them into bloated incoherence too.

A lot of this can also be applied to video games as well too

My method is a three step process. 1. Ignore it 2. Forget about it. 3. Eventually remember when video essays about why the latest Disney Wars attempt was an utter dumpster fire appear.

It's interesting that both shows and films go through the same phases. They choose the "creative talent" either because of "artistic" success with critics, because of financial success, or because they need somebody to save them when the first two didn't work out. After Solo and Rise, I think a lot of the directors/creators were still meant to be either artistically or financially "interesting". Kinberg almost feels like a novelty in the roster because he's neither an "artist" nor a "prestige mainstream" creator. He didn't make waves with something akin to Logan or Wonder Woman. He's not beloved for an indie gem or a hot Netflix show. And unlike Filoni and Favreau (as well as Abrams for Ep9/Gilroy for Andor), he's not made a name for himself with his SW (Rebels) contributions. I wonder if Kinberg means "the brand" is essentially where it was in 2018, when safe hands Howard and Abrams were substituting for "interesting choices" who didn't produce the results the brand wanted, and when Filoni brought The Clone Wars back. And basically, I wonder if there's some similarities in backlash towards The Last Jedi and The Acolyte that resulted in a move towards less freedom of creativity and a more conservative approach.

I'm not really on board with the idea that the "sun is setting" on Star Wars as an IP. It has achieved the same kind of permanent presence in the human psyche -- at least in the West -- as IPs like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond have. (For similar Eastern properties, I would point to Journey to the West. How many versions of Sun Wukong have we seen?) In each of these cases, the IP has iterations that are high quality, and those that are not. When the IP is being poorly handled, it usually goes into dormancy for a while until some new creators take an interest in it. For example, the extremely "meh" Bond film, Die Another Day, spurred the shift to Daniel Craig's introduction as "James Blond" in Casino Royale four years later, which took the franchise in a new and very successful direction. Once an IP achieves this sort of iconic status, I don't think it dies easily. Even in the current Star Wars era, we still got Andor, and Andor is amazing. Perhaps it's just that an IP that is struggling needs to lie fallow for a while, like an over-farmed field, until the soil recovers and becomes productive again.

Love your essays Darren. However, I do feel like this could have just been a link to "Too Many Cooks..."