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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Disney pretty much killed the Star Wars franchise by making "best of" remixes and putting people in charge who seem to be tone deaf and/or actually despise the originals. Several fans I know have sworn off seeing another one after seeing The Last Jedi. It's gotten so bad that even Disney has noticed and they've paused production of future installments.

This is exactly the kind of movies you would expect to be created by a vast entertainment conglomerate that is too big to fail.

The industry is greatly in need of a shake up.

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IMO anyone that was going to make a set of Star Wars sequels was doomed to fail. The originals hold such a specific place in people's childhood memories that any resurrection will always be considered sacrilege.

I didn't see any of the Star Wars movies until I was in my twenties, and I think the new movies are absolutely fine. Nothing earth shattering, but neither were the originals.

The two arguments I've seen laid against the sequels are either vague rants about "SJW propaganda" or that they're disgracing the originals, especially the characters, by deconstructing and recontextualizing them.

And it's unfortunate because what they seem to object to is taking risks with the material. They only want the EU on screen, nothing else. I'm as old as the franchise and I want to see something new done with the universe. Don't pander to the old guard, challenge them and undermine their expectations.

I'd rather see something new.

It's a big problem with Star Trek. It uses up all the oxygen available for the genre and so we get more Star Trek, even to the point where Spock crosses universes on a regular basis.

The new content seems to be coming from video game franchises and Netflix.

Guardians of the Galaxy was a surprise, though, but even that was a rebuild of an existing property.

I didn't mind the first season of Discovery, but I'm baffled as to why the movies and new show are set in the "past". At one point there was a pitch for a show set in Trek's future where the Federation is falling apart. That would have been fascinating. Instead we have a show that's using tech that belongs in the distant future, and a movie series that's rehashing old stories. Bah.

Andromeda was (obviously loosely) based on that pitch.

One studio (CBS) owns the rights to the televised Star Trek universe, and another (Paramount) to the movie Star Trek universe. But to make it even more complicated, the movie rights trump the TV rights, so elements that were in both (such as TOS and TNG) can't be in any new series without Paramount's permission.

Both studios used to be owned by the same company, but they split a few years ago, around the time Enterprise was ending its run on TV. A rumored merger of CBS and Paramount vis-a-vi the Viacom merger would have reunited the rights, but it looks like that is permanently off the table (see the Redstone litigation).

TLJ is an objectively bad movie, politics and nostalgia aside. It’s absolutely littered with plot problems.

The originals are full of plot holes too, and I'd argue Return of the Jedi is still the worst of the non-prequel movies. But it gets a pass because everyone saw it in their youth.

The OT had plenty of plot problems[0,1]:

[0]https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-of-the-plot-holes-in-the-...

[1]https://uproxx.com/movies/what-was-lukes-plan-star-wars-retu...

Face it, none of the Star Wars movies are particularly well written.

TLJ is not an "objectively bad movie". It's currently sitting at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, which means that objectively speaking, 91% of people paid to watch movies for a living thought it was worth watching, compared to all the other movies that they have to sit through.

There are certainly plotting issues, like the entire detour to the gambling planet. But there aren't any major plot holes. (The hyperdrive kamikaze attack is brought up as a big one--but closer examination shows why it isn't a plot problem and why hyperdrive torpedoes aren't a thing in SW. The attack actually fails to destroy its target--it merely slices through it. It only succeeds in causing any sort of meaningful damage because the NR's ship is so massive, which rules it out as a weapon of general use.)

The originals may not have been earth shattering when you first saw them, but when they were first released in '77-'83, they were earth shattering. They demolished box office records and made sci-fi/fantasy a mainstream cinematic success.

Wouldn't it be so fantastic if the IP rights had expired/waned and multiple studios could create sequels? Some fan stuff is amazing, to have copyright/trademarks work such that fan produced/inspired movies could be legitimised regardless of the original producers notions ... that would stimulate creation of novel and interesting artistic works IMO.

I'd love an EmpireDidNothingWrong movie or two.

It's especially funny because South Park predicted exactly this in 2012.

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