Welcome to Thunderdome

Vince wrote: First, ditch Abrams.

Vince wrote: Ditch both Ep VII and VIII.

Vince wrote: Hire a Kevin Feige type that is steeped in the Star Wars EU (now known as Star War Legends) to produce.

Leisher wrote: That can't happen. First, they made them, so they have to count. You're asking a giant corporation to publicly say "we fucked up", and that's not happening. Second, they would get blasted by liberals and the MSM for giving in to racism and bigotry. Why? Because a lot of the shills for the Kathleen Kennedy crowd have tried to paint the picture that TLJ was hated because of misogyny and racism, not because it was bad storytelling. Disney is NOT going to put themselves through that.

Leisher wrote: Ep9 should start with Rey waking up in a cold sweat. She should leave her hut and the audience will see she's back on that island training with Luke. He says to her "Did you have a vision?"
Rey - "Yes, I saw the fate of the rebellion, you, Snoke, Leia...but none of it made any sense."
Luke - "This island is a link to the force and causes visions. You simply saw one possibility."

And from there a real SW story could be told.

Leisher wrote: Ep9 should start with Rey waking up in a cold sweat. She should leave her hut and the audience will see she's back on that island training with Luke. He says to her "Did you have a vision?"
Rey - "Yes, I saw the fate of the rebellion, you, Snoke, Leia...but none of it made any sense."
Luke - "This island is a link to the force and causes visions. You simply saw one possibility."

And from there a real SW story could be told.

Vince wrote: It'll still be the end for the franchise. Rey can leave her hut and find Luke and Bobby Ewing alive and in the shower together. It will go from a bad turn for the series to a colossal joke.

Vince wrote: My suspicion is that Disney will either slash budgeting and accept that the Star Wars property is just not going to be the ongoing money machine that it used to be, or they'll shelve the movie making side of the property for 5-10 years and attempt to reboot the entire thing.

Vince wrote: I'm suggesting that if IX doesn't make a profit and get good reviews from the fan base, then they'll probably stop making the live action films for a time.

Vince wrote: There are a good number of fans that passionately want TLJ gone, but the reality is that it can't just be erased. With the fever dream/vision scenario, Disney is telling ALL the audience that they'd wasted their time and money with that last movie. No one is going to be particularly "happy" about that. Maybe less unhappy than with TLJ left for many, but the audience that wasn't particularly unhappy with TLJ has no reason to invest any more into the SW universe.

Leisher wrote: GoT in space? I have to believe that even core fans might give that a shot, particularly if reviews are good.

Leisher wrote: Correct, but nobody is happy right now. What's really killing Disney is that the core audience is unhappy. Nobody is seeing the movies anymore. The merchandise isn't selling. Casual fans spend, but they don't carry franchises. End of the day, if they retcon ep8 any upset casual fans won't swear off the franchise. They might be upset, but who gives a shit? They'll get over it. The core fans HAVE sworn off the franchise. That's who Disney needs back. That's whose absence actually hurts.

Vince wrote: JJ Abrams already said that a lot of the fans didn't like Ep8 because they are uncomfortable with strong women, so I'm sure he has the right formula to fix things.

Disney staged a big "secret" conference call with ranking people in the Star Wars division. Security guards were posted outside the doors at offices to prevent eavesdropping. Pixar and Marvel representatives were able to listen in on the call, but not speak on it. Apparently this was allowed to get feedback, I guess at a later point, about the Star Wars situation.

Disney's head Bob Iger wants to fire Kathleen Kennedy, but there's a problem: No one they're willing to offer the job to is willing to take it. JJ Abrams (Randolph reports) was offered the job, but turned it down flat. "Several" were approached.

One person that's brought up as a possible replacement for Kennedy, Dave Filloni, isn't being considered for the job by Iger, I guess because he hasn't run anything big like a studio.

Randolph says (speculating, I think) that no one wants the job because the Lucasfilm team is divided between old-guard Star Wars people and Kennedy's handpicked loyalists.

I would speculate myself that, assuming this claim that no one wants the job is true, it's because the brand is broken, and people know that, and it's a no-win situation: Everyone seems to think that Star Wars is supposed to make money automatically. That's no longer true post-Solo, but people still think that, so any head of Lucasfilm is in a situation where the best they can do is meet expectations (make money), and the worst they can do is fail spectacularly.

There's no upside. Well, except a huge pile of money, but I imagine the people being approached are already getting huge piles of money from other ventures with more of an upside as far as their reputations.

So no big-name person would want to walk into that situation. Smaller names would take that chance, but apparently Disney hasn't gotten desperate enough to offer it to a smaller name. Yet.

Randolph says that Disney feels that Star Wars is too targeted to "older SJWs," instead of its traditional fan base of men, and this is also hurting Star Wars in its merchandise sales, as "older SJWs" don't really buy movie tickets and certainly don't spend a lot of money on Milennium Falcon playsets.

She also reports that all the Star Wars "anthology" movies are indeed on hold as Disney tries to figure this out, except maybe for one: The Obi-Wan movie, which Disney thinks it should have made instead of Star Wars. However, while this movie is not officially on hold, it's also not on the front-burner, either.

Lastly, while "Episode IX" is still on (it's already started filming), it's "too late for any major course corrections." Kathleen Kennedy has ceded all creative control to director J.J. Abrams, maybe to spare herself further blame, maybe because she wants to just sit this one out, or who knows, maybe because Disney wants the ball in someone else's hands.

One point she alludes to, which she made before: She thinks that Star Wars never appealed to Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy didn't like the franchise, because it was, indeed, a boys' adventure franchise.

Instead of making a boys' adventure franchise she didn't get and didn't like, she made it into something she could like: a girls' empowerment fantasy.

This kind of sums up the problem with Social Justice Warriors taking over male-skewing sections of pop culture: They just don't like it. They never did like it. Some of them even feel that these parts of pop culture encourage "toxic masculinity," and therefore are evil.

And therefore must be subverted and remade into something they never were before.

So you... put multimillion dollar companies into the hands of people who don't like the product those companies sell and in fact might even hate?

Well, good luck with that, I guess.

Vince wrote: A chunk of the core audience is unhappy.

Vince wrote: I think of the Highlander movie. Surprise hit and a huge budget for the sequel, and then they shit the bed with that one. They tried to come back and just pretend that the second one never happened, but you can't really unsee it. And you can pretend like the producers did that it never happened, but you always carried some resentment for their wasting your time. That series never really recovered.

GORDON wrote: So yeah, Ep8's problems have very, very little to do with sexism. That's just the excuse the leadership uses to keep their jobs.

Vince wrote: Therefore any issue with the movie is not in any part the fault of Disney, its properties, or its hires. Therefore it is the fault of their customers.