It seems to me that all these large corporations are more concerned with following ESG than with their own customers. What happens if you don’t follow “the message” we saw with Tesla some months ago.
So yes, they're making money.
(I have no opinion on these films btw; I haven't seen them, and only dimly remember the old ones – I never cared much for them.)
The new films are just milking every ounce of life out of the franchise. The money they're making is indeed peanuts to what a talented crew could have made.
At any rate, the message I originally replied to was "do these movies make money though?", and the answer to that is "absolutely yes!" I don't really have an opinion on Star Wars as I didn't care all that much even for the older films. They probably could have been better (and made more money!), but it's the difference between "making a fuckton of money" vs. "making a shitton of money", so to speak. You don't need to make "the best" to actually make money; "good enough" is, well, good enough.
I'm not saying make a product for only the fans. But stay honest to source or previous material.
The point is that vocal fans who demonstrate their wrath or joy online are a very minor part of what makes a production succesful or unsuccessful.
For a modern Hollywood director, if you put in just a little obnoxiously "woke" stuff, just a pointless gender or race swap, or maybe make someone gay or trans who wasn't in the source material... Now if it fails just for being bad, you can claim it failed because of those handful of people who complained about it online.
So it's not that the "woke lobby" has that much power to force directors to "cast diversely" or something, it's just that it's a convenient excuse for everyone involved. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, and nobody ever got fired for making a film look a bit more like affluent modern America.
Most media today looks the same, over-reliant on digital postprod and fuck all practical effects.
It also tends to just keep recycling the same properties ad nauseum, getting worse each time.
People are, frankly, bored of it.
Take Squid Game for example. I don't speak Korean and know next to nothing about Korean society, yet its core story about a group of people in desperate circumstances being forced to constantly reevaluate what they're willing to do to survive resonates with me just as well as if the show had been set in any other country.
Compare that with The Rings of Power, where Galadriel is portrayed as a perfect warrior woman whose biggest source of antagonism is the weak and unprincipled men around her. Or She-Hulk, who has to explain to Bruce Banner that men telling her how to do her job makes her a better Hulk than him.
Young progressives lap this stuff up but it leaves everyone else cold, including many women. In years to come, these stories are not going to be loved. These films and TV shows are not going to top any polls. The characters are rotten, unlikable and will not live on in anyone's hearts.
If those people aren't the core audience, why did they pay out of the nose to use that name in the first place? They could do a fantasy story written all in-house, and save themselves the money. If you're right, the audience should be almost as big, and they get to skip the part where they're accused of grave-robbing.
Like me, I enjoyed the trilogy. I don't care if this new show isn't in "the spirit" of Tolkien (judged by someone far after his death, how much does that even mean?), I'm gonna watch it because I've heard of the IP before and want to try it out.
What a weird way to dismiss my points..?
Every casual viewer I've spoken to is very meh on the show.
(a) Creative leaders (producer, director, writer) hired for these projects chafe at having anyone tell them what to do (and this especially includes the source material!).
(b) Creative leaders hired for these projects are typically not themselves fans, and do not elevate anyone who is a fan to a position of authority, and so lack even an awareness of the material. And critically, an awareness of what current fans enjoyed in it. Which is sometimes a feeling or deeper than just "these specific characters or places."
(c) As big budget projects, and costly rights acquisitions to start with, there are powerful committees put in place to keep creative on the rails, who are even more (a) & (b) themselves.
As a result, there is literally no one in the room with a powerful voice who understands why so many people liked this thing.
Say what you want about recent Marvel & Star Wars, but Feige/Favreau/Filoni seem to have a better sense and balance of "Why did people like this thing originally?" and "What will attract people who aren't fans?"
In the former, you could argue your own creative vision might be "better" (in the loose sense), given the lack of popular success of the source.
In the later, it'd be a fair amount of hubris to assume you can make something more beloved than Tolkien's works.
Hubris, arragance, etc. You're coming back to words that mean the same thing. Just because it's a work you personally are not familiar does not make it more/less egregious that someone has taken the material in their own direction from the original. It's just that you have a personal connection to the orginal and may or may not like the reworked version.
That's why Amazon paid $$$$ for the rights.
It's unreasonable to ignore that and claim that taking the same amount of artistic license with Tolkien is the same as taking it with something else.
It is objectively different to adapt a more popular and well-known work.
Sometimes it really is best to minimize the artistic license and let the masters work shine through.
We know the big operators purchase these franchises (economic wrappers around fictional universes) to pursue profit. They modify the stories and characters to optimize profit, they've been doing it for about a century, and they're very good at it.