When did Star Wars become a bad franchise?
 

I'm sure this topic will have a fair consensus and that most people will agree.

Most would say beginning with Last Jedi, but I say it was right out of the gate with Force Awakens. It didn't kill the franchise but it showed us exactly what to expect right out of the gate: a big fat return and recreation of ANH, except shi**y.

The only Star Wars I liked are the first 6 movies from 1977 - 2005 and the Ewok Adventure with the dreaded Gorax. The sequels and TV series and video games can blow chunks for all I care.

Empire Strikes Back....ok not really but people tend to overlook that almost every mainline Star Wars movie was hated by the fans at the time of release and portrayed as the thing that was going end the franchise. When I said Empire I wasn't entirely joking, it was so divisive at the time the Star Wars Fan Club shut down because of all the negativity. The original and Revenge of the Sith are the only ones that were both well received upon release and have remained popular.

I love A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. I felt like the Ewoks sort of ruined Return of the Jedi a bit, the movie still had it's moments though. Palpatine was the best part of the movie, I think about that scene a lot where he is killing Luke with his force lightning and Darth Vader saving Luke from Palpatine. The Phantom Menace was ok, I loved that lightsaber battle at the end with Darth Maul though. Can't remember all of Attack of the Clones, I'll get round to watching that again soon. Loved Revenge of the Sith. Don't really care much for the Disney Star Wars movies.

Easy when Kathleen Kennedy rose to power

"I wonder what would happen with Luke, Leia and Han one day in Episode VII, VIII, and IX!" was like a magical thing to wonder about for so long. Made more magical still because it sounded like for so long it was something we were never, ever going to get. And then the sale to Disney and we got the VII, VIII and IX that we did and just totally, radioactively popped that balloon and scorched the earth around it.

I guarantee you, the "idea" in the heads of almost ANY fans of what a sequel trilogy could be like would be infinitely better than what Kathleen Kennedy presided over.

I still like Star Wars.

Mandalorian is fine, but it is hardly "Saving" Star Wars. It just sometimes helps us take our minds off of where the franchise is everywhere else.

Boba Fett was fundamentally flawed from the launch and now they won't even go back and fix it with a season 2.

Obi-Wan was bad. Packed with too much Kathleen Kennedy stuff. Nobody is even talking about it or thinking about it anymore and it should have been epic.

Andor's boring. I know a lot of people seem to like it but I've tried on three different occasions to binge the first season but I can't make it past 2 or 3.

The only plus side for me is that saving ALL the Clone Wars cartoons and Rebels and watching them all only recently, I definitely felt a good "Star Wars fix." And the thing about it is through those shows and then the Ahsoka show, a thread of "real Star Wars" is being knitted to new stuff that we're getting now. So that's kind of cool.

I'd say Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. The Phantom Menace was flawed but it has a lot of fun moments to it.

A few years ago I rewatched Episode 2 after not seeing it in like 15 years or something, and it was just as boring as I remembered it being. Like it flat out killed the prequel trilogy. That was basically the beginning of the end, even though Episode 3 was much better and also a lot of fun.

modern Star Wars has creatives working on it that are putting lots and lots and LOTS of effort towards courting a new, very small and niche audience, at the expense of their "legacy" audience who they don't give two ***** about. I still engage with the property but it's becoming a lot harder in recent years.

I'm sorry but women aren't going to start loving star wars. You are burning money trying. You're always going to snag a few but it's a very small potential audience from that pool.

It jumped the shark with the Last Jedi and..... ugh I don't even want to discuss it. :lol:

I just want to see Kathleen Kennedy gone and as destitute as Kevin Spacey.

Also how was most of the old EU? As far as I remember the Thrawn trilogy and Shadows of the Empire were well liked, but there was what...hundreds of comic books, novels and old videogame stories? Did anyone even follow all of that?

Star Wars likely jumped the shark ages ago it's just that most people never read any of the comics or novels so they don't know about it.

He became a bad franchise in the exact moment we realized the sequel trilogy was finally happening, with Ford, Hamill and Fisher but it wasn't as we expected and there was no coming back.

The moment George Lucas sold his baby into corporate slavery.

Since the Holiday Special:)

it's always been "bad". I love Star Wars, but its not great. It officially became "bad" with the Holiday Special and the Ewok movies, but the prequels did it in as far as perceived quality. There's some revisionist history going on right now where people think the prequels are good, but I'm certain it's just people born after having some nostalgia for them.

The original trilogy are timeless movies that people have watched them in any decade and they are still great.

Always? I love the original films and universe, but it was the poster child for selling out right from the start. Lucas found a way to make it worse by committing the franchise to corporate Hell, but it's not like he was safeguarding its legacy before. The fall of LotR (and many others) is far more tragic.

I think the books did a solid job of exploring that question. I only ever read a few of them myself, but there are so many great ideas in there that were completely ignored in favor of... whatever those movies were. If I had to give one reason not to adapt the books into a sequel trilogy (and series, and spin-off films...), it'd be the fact that so much of the legacy, so much of the passing of the torch, lies with the old heroes and their kids. Or at least, Han and Leia's kids. You don't get the separation that made TNG so great, that made the original SW so great, the idea that this is their story, it belongs to these characters, who have their own lives and have to endear themselves to audiences on their own merits. No one really wants to see Han's kid when we can have Han. We want something fresh, and it's hard for Junior to bring that to the table.

Honestly I think what harms Star Wars is once you remove Luke/Han/Leia and Darth Vader from the picture, it just becomes generic sci-fi. No matter how many new characters, other Jedi they focus on, bounty hunters, etc...it's really not all that interesting. The original films were carried by the original roles of the characters.

I'm not gonna use the word "bad". But I'm kind of on overload with the franchise. The original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the first Clone Wars show/movies (ive always watched the two as movies, the second Clone Wars cartoon, and the Rebels cartoon are more than enough to last me for years.

I never even completed the sequel trilogy or the Mandelorian series. I have no interest in checking out the Ahsoka, the Bad Batch, or Acolyte series. I did watch the Tales of the Jedi and the Obi-Wan Kenobi limited series(es). But Like I said, I don't need any more, I've had my fill.

They did until they didn't. Somewhere around after the Young Jedi Knights books, everything during the Yuuzhung Vong invasion and them suddenly pumping out prequel books... it quickly became way, way too much. They should have stuck to one book a year, tops.

If you are looking at a specific point?

When Disney announced that the Extended Universe was not canon anymore. Decades of stories, comics and video games roasted that the hardcore fans were invested in.

Well, they did it to themselves. It was way too much, too convoluted and too ridiculous to even try and keep up with anymore. It had a good 10 year run or so, but that was it.

Now, do I think anything that Disney has done new SINCE then is in any way BETTER than than the EU? Not at all. But the wipe always had to happen.

Literally 90% of people had no idea the EU even existed. How many people can honestly name Han/Leia's children? Or Luke's child or Mara Jade? Most people have no idea who any of these characters are. Outside of very hardcore Star Wars fans or people who followed the franchise heavily in the 90's, most people were not even aware they existed or just vaguely aware.

I knew there were Star Wars comics/novels and played a lot of the videogames at the time but there was no way for me to get into them (I never bought any comics back then), so I didn't really care.

It's just ridiculous. There's Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin II... and by the end of it all, two of them became Sith Lords and had to be killed (and apparently Lucasfilm forced the writers to kill off Anakin II for some stupid reason?), and the Emperor was resurrected twice and defeated both times. It's a mess. And anyone honestly expected an Episode VII taking place in the aftermath of all that stuff? There was never any chance of that.

Honestly a lot of that really does sound like bad fanfiction. I know there are many good stories there, but a lot of it just sounds like....what some teenager would come up with in their fanfics.

As said what we have now "officially" in the sequel trilogy isn't really any better, or even half the spinoff shows they have on Disney+. I guess that Star Wars is really just hard to continue for a long period of time without the core cast or continuing the story. Even the Mandalorian show fell off in the third season.

First Galactic Republic = Weimar Republic

Galactic Empire = Nazi Germany

Second Galactic Republic = West Germany

That's why I think the 2010's Star Wars sequels should be set in a Cold War-like era in the Star Wars Galaxy (it is actually called the Sky River Galaxy). A Soviet and GDR-like state should be the villains, and control half of that galaxy for a long time.

There should be some fighting and two military alliances, but also some spies, as both sides have developed Death Star-like space battle stations, ready to strike against each other. Massive forcefields, surrounding planets controlled by the bad guys and girls, should play the same role as the Berlin Wall once did on Earth. At the end, the good guys and girls shut down the forcefields and unite the galaxy.

It hasn’t been interesting since it was on the cutting edge of technology.

Dont get me wrong, I am in the same boat that I never really got into EU. The way that I remember them doing it, just unceremoniously dumping it and all but telling long time hardcore fans to eff off, just told me how they were going to treat those fans and the property in general.

At most, I'd love to see the Thrawn trilogy novels adapted into a CG/cartoon similar to the Clone Wars cartoons, as an "elseworlds" tale just to let us see how that would play out in a series of short episodes/specials or however they want to do it. Considering they brought Thrawn back in Rebels and now Ahsoka, they clearly know people like the character.

As of right now there's no new Star Wars cartoon. What ended:

- Star Wars Clone Wars
- Star Wars Rebels
- Star Wars Bad Batch
- Star Wars Tales of the Jedi and Empire (shorts)

There was also Star Wars Visions which were shorts done in anime style from various artists, and the original cartoon version of Star Wars Clone Wars that aired on Cartoon Network.

Strangely enough they haven't announced any new Star Wars cartoon so far. I wonder if they're going to.

The same can be said about the new movies.

Han and Leia's son ended up turning evil and was killed, the Emperor was resurrected and defeated. So what was the point of making it non-canon it they were going to end up copying it anyway?

It's all just published fanfiction.

This pretty much sums up how I feel.
Nearly all the EU stuff I ever read or heard about just didn't pass the "feels like Star Wars" test.
Yuzhong Vong? Thrown? Xizor?
Han and Leia's kids?


I should point out I'm talking about the setting of the original movies here.

So does the Acolyte cancellation give us an answer to whether or not Disney themselves think this franchise has rotted beyond repair?

Cancelled already? :lol: I was planning on giving it a watch this weekend, see how bad it is :lol:

December 15, 2017.

I don’t know man. It was definitely objectively a bad script, but it had some interesting concepts and world building (although NOTHING like what I imagine a post-Return galaxy to look like), as well as some emotional beats that hit. Rey, Finn and Poe all had potential and the nostalgia factor worked on some level.

But now it’s unwatchable because Last Jedi just takes a frothing sticky piss all over the emotional cliff hanger. In its first 10 minutes.

I can’t even get into it all again… but I randomly get so pissed when I remember how they had Rose jeopardize the entire Resistance over a PETA public service announcement and then again for her bull **** “We won’t win by killing those we hate!” Yes you will. That’s how wars are won.


God damn.

Yup. 100%.

I haven't seen anyone talk about how beyond the screen-based stuff, to me the franchise died when this happened because it somehow kept continuity between books, and comics, and any other media. It was a real achievement.

I still feel bad that Dark Horse got screwed by this since Marvel got the comic rights, and for what?

More like world deconstructing. Literally, everything Luke, Leia and Han fought for was all for nothing. The OT trilogy no longer matters. The Empire just came back and within thirty minutes the New Republic was suddenly "the Rebels" again and they didn't even bother to have it make sense. Han is a smuggler again, there's a new Death Star, nobody even had any kids in the 30 years between trilogies except Han and Leia had 1 kid (and we know what happens to him), etc., etc.. It's all pretty terrible.