Jay G.

People say they had this "forty years of lore," but aside from the films, which they had to adhere to, the other spin-off stuff was mostly not usable, because it was focused on the wrong era for the ST. The "Legends" EU was set immediately after ROTJ initially, and then built out from there. So it would've been interesting stuff to pull from.... if the original cast was 30 years younger. Don't get me wrong, some of that stuff was compelling, like creating the New Republic, fighting the last vestiges of the Empire, Luke starting to train new Jedi, but just from a practical matter none of that would work in 2015 with the cast they had, and it would've been too much to try and keep that all as canon that happened offscreen.

One thing Marvel had was not only a depth of lore to pull from, but also a whole new continuity to play in. The MCU was not tied to any films that came before it, so it wasn't beholden to anything, and the main thing it's done is new origin stories for every character it introduces. And once those characters are established, it can borrow the bones of a story like Civil War or Infinity War, and it can make sense for those characters at that place in the MCU's story. It didn't have to worry about including a 70 year old Iron Man from the 1980s and somehow continuing that story.

I mean, can you think of an EU story that would fit the practical requirements that it be 30+ years after ROTJ, because the original cast is 30+ years older, Han is only in the first movie, because that's all Harrison Ford will agree to, oh, and Han has to die, and the rest of the original cast is in supporting roles, symbolically passing the torch to the new cast?

Mike86

tanman

Calculated risks are way different. Letting a production go almost to completion THEN scrapping everything for another director is way more than a risk.

Yes I should have clarified that's the original and the sequel. Marvel took a C or D list character (that talks to ants) and made a 1.1 billion dollar (so far) franchise out of him. Meanwhile, at Lucasfilm, where's the news about that Solo sequel?

You're just making my point. You've got almost the worst performer of the Marvel franchises and it still made three times what Solo did.

We're both agreeing with the process but with different outcomes. It's like a vacation. Can you have a great vacation without planning a thing? Absolutely. Does planning a vacation mean that its guaranteed that it will turn out great? Not necessarily. Would you go on a once in a lifetime $4 billion dollar vacation without planning it? Probably not. The difference is you're enjoying the vacation. I thought the last destination sucked. Too much salt.

Sorry

That's it for Ant Man. Promise.

Jay G.

Such as? What could they have drawn inspiration from? If the stories/plots weren't usable, what would they be pulling as inspiration? What specific characters?

And yet, it's what happened with Justice League. Still, firing a director outright after production has started is very, very rare. Even if there were issues after the first week of production, trying to work things out is still considered the smart thing to do. After all, there's always reshoots. Lord and Miller appeared to give a lot of pushback over anyone else having any oversight or control over the shoot though, so they didn't appear likely to play ball even in reshoots, which is why the firing. Yes, it was a bad situation. Yes, in hindsight, not firing them earlier looks like a mistake. Hell, knowing what we know now, they should never had been hired in the first place. But the decisions weren't made with the benefit of hindsight, they were made trying to make the best decision for the film at the time, and were part of a constant barrage of tiny, incremental decisions that come with the day-to-day of a production.

I feel you've lost track of the argument. My point about BO was that Ant-Man wasn't the "surprise success" you tried to characterize it, but, at best, a moderate success that sits near the bottom of performers for Marvel films. Marvel saw potential in the newly established to film character and greenlit a sequel though, which also did moderately well for a Marvel film. They're not "surprise successes."

Ant-Man made $519 million worldwide, Solo $392 million. That's 32% better, not 3x. Are you trying to compare the performance of two films to one to artificially inflate the difference?

It depends on when the vacation starts. In a few months? Sure, let's plan. Oh, I have to start the vacation now? Well, instead of wasting half the vacation time in the hotel room planning, let's figure it out as we go along. And have you ever been on a vacation where the plans didn't have to change because of something?

But Lucasfilm wasn't on vacation. They were assigned a project, with deadlines. Keep in mind TFA got pushed back 6 months because of the time it was taking to write a script for just one movie. They hired Rian Johnson to start writing the sequel while TFA was still filming. They were under a massive time crunch. Would Lucasfilm have liked to have been able to plan it all out in advance? Probably, but George Lucas had done that for them, and nobody liked that plan. Making it up as you go isn't a guarantee of disaster, and at the time it was really the only viable option. You don't like how it's turned out so far, I'm fine with it, but neither of us have the full picture yet.

JeremyM

They did use a few ideas from the EU like calling it the "New Republic" and having Han and Leia's son become a Sith-wannabe. They probably should've just gone ahead and used Thrawn somehow since they did use him on Rebels and could've got more mileage out of him in the sequels I think.

While I personally enjoy the sequel films quite a bit, at the end of the day they're basically glorified fan fiction to me. The only Star Wars I really need is the Star Wars I grew up with--the original trilogy. The Rebels saved the Galaxy, the end. I enjoyed the original Zahn/Thrawn trilogy as well and it's completely compatible with sticking to the originals, but beyond that the EU was pretty rough, and I read far too much of it.

I really enjoyed the points made earlier about Star Wars working so wonderfully as a stand alone. Being that I was born in 1980, I never really had that perspective, but it's a great way to look at it.

All that said, I'm looking forward to Episode IX. I do wish my kids had interest in it, but they're not into Star Wars at all.

Josh-da-man

When the OT was made, the idea of having a pre-planned story spread across several movies was unheard of. It just wasn't how the entertainment industry worked. If a movie was successful, then it might get a sequel of some kind greenlit and pushed into production.

And another thing to consider about the OT is that it had a single creative force behind it, where George Lucas was guiding the saga, and wasn't just being handed off to someone. Sometimes you'll get a sequel like Aliens, but most of the time you end up with shit like Robocop 3 and Rise of the Machines.

Now, four decades later, we're living in a very different climate. There is, especially with genre entertainment, a sort of expectation that there's a long-term gameplan and that they aren't just flying by the seat of their pants like they did in the past.

But constantly bringing up the OT when the ST is criticized seems more like a rhetorical trick to force the people criticizing the ST into defending the OT, thus deflecting criticism of the ST.

Brack

Jay G.

Well, yes and no. Maybe there's an expecation there, but there's plenty of film franchises taking the movies one at a time, like Mission Impossible and The Fast and Furious series of films. Even when a film franchise has a "game plan," the bulk of those are only because it's based on a book series, and the studios still don't greenlight more than one film off the bat. The Sequel Trilogy joins LOTR and the PT as the only film trilogies that were greenlit as a trilogy (The Hobbit was initially greenlit as two films, then expanded to 3). Certain fans may have had certain expectations, but I don't think those were necessarily realistic based on how movies typically work.

Also, the complaints about "planning ahead" only seemed to have come up after said person experienced something they didn't like in the new Star Wars films. Prior to that, it didn't seem like a concern. To that end, it looks more like people are using it as a scapegoat, something they can point to and say "because I didn't like the results, it was a mistake to do it that way, and they should've known that."

I bring up the OT not to make people have to defend it; I love it. Rather, its to point out that what they think of as something that "obviously" is ruinous to attempt was already done, with good results, within the franchise itself.

Mike86

Josh-da-man

Which is weird, because all four Disney Star Wars films we've gotten so far have all been "safe" corporate films.

TFA was a carbon copy of ANH.
RO was a pretty basic prequel to ANH, well-crafted by disposable.
TLJ was a carbon copy of ESB with a scene from ROTJ tossed into it And, no, just arbitrarily doing the opposite of what you think the audience was expecting doesn't make you clever or edgy.
SOLO was basically a wookiepidia article put to film. Again, watchable and well-crafted, but kind of forgettable.

Josh-da-man

And, by the by, if anyone is hungering for actual news on TROS and not just the dog on a merry-go-round, makingstarwars.net has some possible spoilers about how the film opens and ends that build upon the previously released set of alleged spoilers...

https://makingstarwars.net/2019/09/r...walker-begins/
https://makingstarwars.net/2019/09/r...-of-skywalker/

Still ambivalent about these "spoilers" -- I don't love it, but I don't hate it either.

Brack

Draven

Yep, only made over a billion dollars on The Last Jedi. What a nightmare!

Mike86

Draven

Brack

Again with the Solo nonsense. Where is the proof that TLJ had ANYTHING to do with the performance of Solo? If people really didn’t care for TLJ, it wouldn’t have made over a billion dollars. It would have dropped like a rock at the box office. But it didn’t. If anything it supports the notion that, hey, the segment that didn’t like TLJ isn’t that large.

brayzie

Jay G.

Disney didn't put anyone in charge at either Marvel or Lucasfilm; they left the management staff largely unchanged after their purchases. Fiege was already in place in Marvel, and Kathleen Kennedy was hired by George Lucas to be his successor, just a month before the sale to Disney.

Also, keep in mind the differences in the studios at the time of purchase. Marvel had already released 3 MCU films, had 3 more in production, and a deal with Paramount for 2 more, so was already firing on all cylinders. Lucasfilm, meanwhile, hadn't produced a Star Wars live action moving in 8 years, and had only released 2 other live action films in that time period. The new Star Wars films were announced almost immediately after the purchase, and since George's gameplan for the ST were thrown out, the studio was launching production from a cold start.

I feel like the ending of Rogue One is very risky for a blockbuster film.

I like to say Solo was like the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but stretched out to feature length.

Or, you know, from having just seen a Star Wars movie four months earlier. I know Disney was getting frustrated every Star Wars movie was getting bumped from May to December due to delays in pre-production, but moving Solo to December as well, and away from Avengers Infinity War, may have helped it a lot.

Rob V

Anybody who argues that movies grossing big money = good movie is nuts. Furious 7 and Jurassic World are proof of that. Star Wars is the preeminent franchise in film history... NOT making a Billion dollars is the exception, not the rule.

Draven

story

coli

The Phantom Menace (at the time in 1999) was one of the biggest grossing movies of all-time, you don't think that did damage to franchise in the longrun as I know many friends (who were casual fans) who didn't bother with Clones and Sith because that thought it was an awful movie. Attack of the Clones definitely suffered some Phantom Menace backlash (just like Solo) as it was the 1st Star Wars movie not to finish #1 for they year (until Solo in 2018). Coincidence?

nando820

This thread has more merry-go-round than the political forum

Mike86

stvn1974

Britney Spears has sold over 150 million albums world wide so...

Michael Bay's Transformers films made billions of dollars too, doesn't mean they are good films.

TLJ's total just shows that fans didn't like it enough to go see it 12 times like they did The Force Awakens.