Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by ray245 »

I think one of Lucas' biggest mistake was to appoint Kennedy to be his successor at Lucasfilm. While Kennedy's CV might make her appear at first glance that she is a capable person to lead a film studio, I think she is not the kind of producer that ought to be managing a franchise like Star Wars.

Kennedy is an old-school producer, and one that has no experience as a story-telling (AKA directing a film or someone who actually writes a script). Producing a movie, managing the budget, making sure it is a financial success is a completely different set of skills from trying to establish a cohesive story-universe with a clear idea on what you want it to be about. Lucasfilm's success was built upon the ability of George Lucas to combine both business skills and creative vision. Kennedy has good business skills, but not creative vision.

Under her leadership, Lucasfilm had been utterly rudderless in terms of its creative roadmap and creative visions. Numerous directors were either fired, or effectively replaced either before or during the production of a film. Someone that fires so many directors is someone that did not understand or could communicate well with the directors on why they were hired in the first place. There is no clear idea on why certain directors were hired, aside from the fact that "they are the next big thing!"

If the directors you've hired did not know what you want, there is bound to be disagreement when the film is in production. Even talented directors like Rian Johnson is misused by her because she did not know how to make good use of his talents ( making a director known to be subversive in his filmmaking to take over the 2nd film of the franchise is a misuse of his abilities).

ROS showed there is no clear vision for the sequel trilogy, and she ended up with a situation with two directors basically stabbing each other in the back creatively. She has lost control of her directors, approved of films no one was interested in ( Solo), tried to make films that even less fans cared about ( Boba Fett movie), cancelled films that fans are hyped up about ( Obi-Wan), and gave in to fanboys at almost every opportunity.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by Ace Pace »

How do you intend a discussion on this topic to happen? Are there good articles that are factual on her performance and attitude compared to her equivalents? Are there equivalents besides the guy producing the Marvel films?

You're throwing an opinion at the wall that can't be argued with or debated effectively without information that doesn't seem to be in the public domain.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Ace Pace wrote: 2019-12-21 05:05pm How do you intend a discussion on this topic to happen? Are there good articles that are factual on her performance and attitude compared to her equivalents? Are there equivalents besides the guy producing the Marvel films?

You're throwing an opinion at the wall that can't be argued with or debated effectively without information that doesn't seem to be in the public domain.
You can judge her performance by the declining box office performance of the movies, numerous production issues? You can judge her by whether the sequels had a cohesive story and ideas?

Are there equivalent? You have directors and producers that managed to tell a story across three movies with a cohesive stories and theme. Pixar's producers did pretty well in creating a nice cohesive story across multiple franchise like Toy-Story and etc. John Wick is produced and told well across multiple movies. Nolan did pretty well with his Dark Knight movies. The people who did the new Jumanjii movies manage to do pretty well. The people who made the multiple Planet of the Apes movies did well as well.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by Galvatron »

My positive reaction to TROS notwithstanding, I bet she's out soon. The reception is too mixed at a time when Disney deemed it too big to fail. I think the only thing that could possibly save her now is a significantly bigger-than-expected box office haul.

I could be wrong, but I'd say the future of LFL is in the hands of people like Feige, Favreau and Filoni.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Galvatron wrote: 2019-12-21 11:20pm My positive reaction to TROS notwithstanding, I bet she's out soon. The reception is too mixed at a time when Disney deemed it too big to fail. I think the only thing that could possibly save her now is a significantly bigger-than-expected box office haul.

I could be wrong, but I'd say the future of LFL is in the hands of people like Feige, Favreau and Filoni.

The box office isn't doing too well. It might actually make less than a billion worldwide at the box office.

They'll still make a profit, but investors will be right to ask why a film that supposedly end the saga is likely to earn less money than the previous installments.

The worse thing than making a small profit is an increasing trend of apathy amongst the general audience. Franchise depends heavily on audience being invested and crazy to see the next big SW. If audience don't care, you have a serious problem.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by The Romulan Republic »

Galvatron wrote: 2019-12-21 11:20pm My positive reaction to TROS notwithstanding, I bet she's out soon. The reception is too mixed at a time when Disney deemed it too big to fail. I think the only thing that could possibly save her now is a significantly bigger-than-expected box office haul.

I could be wrong, but I'd say the future of LFL is in the hands of people like Feige, Favreau and Filoni.
Notably, all white men who have cred with traditional (ie, predominantly white male) geekdom. That's not their fault, really- as far as I know they've never particularly pandered to bigots, and they do have talent. But I can't help but see a pattern, again, in terms of which audience Disney feels is worth catering to. And I can't help but feel that Kennedy is being made the fall guy for problems that are bigger than her alone because she's a woman and she pissed off a lot of male fans by wearing that "the Force is female" shirt once.

There is a (perhaps somewhat unintended) subtext here of "We put a woman in charge and she screwed everything up, so now we're going to bring some white men in to fix the mess she made."
ray245 wrote: 2019-12-22 02:32pm
Galvatron wrote: 2019-12-21 11:20pm My positive reaction to TROS notwithstanding, I bet she's out soon. The reception is too mixed at a time when Disney deemed it too big to fail. I think the only thing that could possibly save her now is a significantly bigger-than-expected box office haul.

I could be wrong, but I'd say the future of LFL is in the hands of people like Feige, Favreau and Filoni.

The box office isn't doing too well. It might actually make less than a billion worldwide at the box office.

They'll still make a profit, but investors will be right to ask why a film that supposedly end the saga is likely to earn less money than the previous installments.

The worse thing than making a small profit is an increasing trend of apathy amongst the general audience. Franchise depends heavily on audience being invested and crazy to see the next big SW. If audience don't care, you have a serious problem.
:roll:

Every Star Wars trilogy has followed this pattern. First film has massive box office, second film is lower, third is higher than the second but not as high as the first (which also goes against the notion of "an increasing trend of apaathy amongst the general audience."

This was a bullshit argument against TLJ, and its a bullshit argument now. By this measure, Empire Strikes Back was an abject failure.

And you know I'm not defending ROS, and I'm not defending the overall management by Disney. But let's be honest, and not pretend that "ROS has lower box office numbers than TFA" means anything meaningful at all about the film's quality or the overall health and long-term viability of the franchise.

I do get the feeling though that Disney had unrealistic expectations though, and expected every film to have TFA's numbers. Which, I repeat, was never going to happen.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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The Romulan Republic wrote: 2019-12-23 04:40am Notably, all white men who have cred with traditional (ie, predominantly white male) geekdom. That's not their fault, really- as far as I know they've never particularly pandered to bigots, and they do have talent. But I can't help but see a pattern, again, in terms of which audience Disney feels is worth catering to. And I can't help but feel that Kennedy is being made the fall guy for problems that are bigger than her alone because she's a woman and she pissed off a lot of male fans by wearing that "the Force is female" shirt once.

There is a (perhaps somewhat unintended) subtext here of "We put a woman in charge and she screwed everything up, so now we're going to bring some white men in to fix the mess she made."
I'll say it's partly less to do with the white-male geekdom, but Kennedy shooting herself in the foot by refusing to have an interest in any story-telling aspects of the franchise. She immediately created this story-group, with no actual power to say no to a big name director. There are plenty of female producers in Hollywood, including those with story-telling experience. How the sexists treated her is horrible, but that does not mean she didn't mismanage the franchise imo.

It's not like the sequels are doing well in making SW more appealing to the non-white male demographics either. A breakdown of the audience in ROS showed once again, male over 35 audience outnumbers women in the audience.


:roll:

Every Star Wars trilogy has followed this pattern. First film has massive box office, second film is lower, third is higher than the second but not as high as the first (which also goes against the notion of "an increasing trend of apaathy amongst the general audience."

This was a bullshit argument against TLJ, and its a bullshit argument now. By this measure, Empire Strikes Back was an abject failure.

And you know I'm not defending ROS, and I'm not defending the overall management by Disney. But let's be honest, and not pretend that "ROS has lower box office numbers than TFA" means anything meaningful at all about the film's quality or the overall health and long-term viability of the franchise.

I do get the feeling though that Disney had unrealistic expectations though, and expected every film to have TFA's numbers. Which, I repeat, was never going to happen.
Look at the box office number of ROS. The opening weekend looks to be LOWER than TLJ. That's the main concern.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Well, we'll see. If it ends below TLJ's numbers, then yes that would be cause for concern, as it would actually be performing worse in comparison to the previous trend.

Edit: I should add that while I'd like to see more diversity in who's running the franchise, I don't actually have a problem with Feige himself. If I have a critique of him running the show, its that I'm worried that having him overseeing both Star Wars and the MCU will lead to him spreading himself too thin.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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The Romulan Republic wrote: 2019-12-23 05:02am Well, we'll see. If it ends below TLJ's numbers, then yes that would be cause for concern, as it would actually be performing worse in comparison to the previous trend.
There is a small chance ROS might not even break a billion based on the box office tracking data. It might surprise us with very good legs, but the fact that it had a much smaller weekend opening suggest audience are increasingly losing interest in the franchise.
Edit: I should add that while I'd like to see more diversity in who's running the franchise, I don't actually have a problem with Feige himself. If I have a critique of him running the show, its that I'm worried that having him overseeing both Star Wars and the MCU will lead to him spreading himself too thin.
You don't need Feige as much as you need a person who is interested in running a franchise with a clear creative vision. As a producer of a "cinematic universe", you need to make sure your directors know what exactly are they supposed to be making.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Movie maths time. :lol:

Ok, as much as I did not particularly care for TLJ, at the end of the day, its the box office that tells. AFAIK, aside from Solo, every other Star Wars film she has greenlighted made a profit. The next question is, could someone else (or a lot of other people) do a better job than her. That's a bit harder to answer. I am going to compare with the original trilogy.

Does it have a better box office index to inflation compared to the original trilogy. I think a good case can be made yes, because there are more people in the world, people are richer, new markets etc.

https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office- ... n-adjusted

These are the all time box office hits for the domestic market (ie US + Canada, + Peurto Rico and Guam).

Lets take the much panned TLJ by critics. Its domestic was $628,253,896. Compare to say, ROTJ who had $847,248,129 index to inflation. So the domestic market ROTJ did better than TLJ. However we now need to look at the foreign market.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Star- ... ab=summary
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Star- ... ab=summary

Basically for ROTJ, the foreign take was around 35% of its total revenue, so extrapolate from the domestic market value (indexed to inflation) and the total is $1,301,831,201.6

Now without even adjusting for inflation for the foreign total, the total amount for TLJ was already greater than ROTJ. Index to inflation it comes out 1.34 billion slightly more.

So its comparable to what the OT was getting. You could argue this is due to more money being brought in from the foreign market, and you will be right. If we use a rough rule of thumb and say that if ROTJ was screened today, it would have similar ratio of foreign earnings vs domestic then it will come out more than TLJ. (The TLJ foreign earnings was 14% more vs domestic, so you can use $847 million domestic index to inflation from ROTJ, put that in the foreign market part and come up with a total of 1.813 billion, which would give it slightly under $500 million more than the Last Jedi.

She is certainly less successful box office wise than other producers, eg Kevin Feige. You could also argue someone else running things as good as George Lucas did would earn more money if Lucas also had a similar large foreign market. However I would still argue her record is serviceable. Certainly so far, not as bad as some haters have said that she "killed star wars."

And I am someone who didn't like some of her creative choices. I am also not going to go into some subjective criteria like "alienating some of the fan base" which is harder to quantify in deciding whether she is good enough to run Star Wars.

On the box office figures though, you could make a case that she would be good enough to run some middling brand, but not necessarily a top brand like star wars.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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mr friendly guy wrote: 2019-12-23 07:54am Movie maths time. :lol:

Ok, as much as I did not particularly care for TLJ, at the end of the day, its the box office that tells. AFAIK, aside from Solo, every other Star Wars film she has greenlighted made a profit. The next question is, could someone else (or a lot of other people) do a better job than her. That's a bit harder to answer. I am going to compare with the original trilogy.

Does it have a better box office index to inflation compared to the original trilogy. I think a good case can be made yes, because there are more people in the world, people are richer, new markets etc.

https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office- ... n-adjusted

These are the all time box office hits for the domestic market (ie US + Canada, + Peurto Rico and Guam).

Lets take the much panned TLJ by critics. Its domestic was $628,253,896. Compare to say, ROTJ who had $847,248,129 index to inflation. So the domestic market ROTJ did better than TLJ. However we now need to look at the foreign market.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Star- ... ab=summary
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Star- ... ab=summary

Basically for ROTJ, the foreign take was around 35% of its total revenue, so extrapolate from the domestic market value (indexed to inflation) and the total is $1,301,831,201.6

Now without even adjusting for inflation for the foreign total, the total amount for TLJ was already greater than ROTJ. Index to inflation it comes out 1.34 billion slightly more.

So its comparable to what the OT was getting. You could argue this is due to more money being brought in from the foreign market, and you will be right. If we use a rough rule of thumb and say that if ROTJ was screened today, it would have similar ratio of foreign earnings vs domestic then it will come out more than TLJ. (The TLJ foreign earnings was 14% more vs domestic, so you can use $847 million domestic index to inflation from ROTJ, put that in the foreign market part and come up with a total of 1.813 billion, which would give it slightly under $500 million more than the Last Jedi.

She is certainly less successful box office wise than other producers, eg Kevin Feige. You could also argue someone else running things as good as George Lucas did would earn more money if Lucas also had a similar large foreign market. However I would still argue her record is serviceable. Certainly so far, not as bad as some haters have said that she "killed star wars."

And I am someone who didn't like some of her creative choices. I am also not going to go into some subjective criteria like "alienating some of the fan base" which is harder to quantify in deciding whether she is good enough to run Star Wars.

On the box office figures though, you could make a case that she would be good enough to run some middling brand, but not necessarily a top brand like star wars.
My counter argument is any of the main trilogy of movies will make big bucks no matter what, because they are seen as must-see events that'll generate conversation amongst your social circle.

The problem is the declining box office that's a cause of concern, and the utter failure to bring new markets (China) and new demographics (non white male over 35) to the franchise.

That's long term lasting harm to the franchise. SW cannot survive as a blockbuster franchise if it only appeals to that demographic.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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To put it simply, she didn't kill SW as a franchise. She killed the chance of SW being THE major franchise to the next generation.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by The Romulan Republic »

ray245 wrote: 2019-12-23 10:07am To put it simply, she didn't kill SW as a franchise. She killed the chance of SW being THE major franchise to the next generation.
I think Marvel already had a lock on that for this decade.

Next decade... Marvel might keep it going, but I expect next decade will be some franchise which hasn't emerged as a clear leader yet (since Marvel is starting to loose steam and Game of Thrones and DC shit the bed).
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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ray245 wrote:She immediately created this story-group, with no actual power to say no to a big name director.
This is the key thing. Are we allowed to bring ROS spoilers into this thread? :?:
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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MKSheppard wrote: 2019-12-25 07:04am
ray245 wrote:She immediately created this story-group, with no actual power to say no to a big name director.
This is the key thing. Are we allowed to bring ROS spoilers into this thread? :?:
I don't see any reasons you can't.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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ray245 wrote: 2019-12-23 10:07am To put it simply, she didn't kill SW as a franchise. She killed the chance of SW being THE major franchise to the next generation.
I don’t think it ever had a chance of that.

It did well when it was the only game in town, but there are too many other franchise monsters now that can all release much more frequently. Since Revenge of the Sith there’ve been six Harry Potter films about as many Transformers films, Hunger Games, Twilight. and half a billion Marvel films. All chasing markers Star Wars didn’t want to serve.

Meanwhile Star Wars has been stuck on a trilogy that came out 40 years ago and has a fan base that thoroughly rejected the biggest mainstream attempt to broaden it beyond that point 40 years ago.

If anything will turn out to have “killed” Star Wars it will be the reflexive response to pander as hard as possible to OT fans instead of ignoring their petty mewling and reaching out to new audiences that every other major franchise has figured out how to appeal to.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by Darth Yan »

It's not dead. But it's not king anymore. It'll have to face competition and as you said many fans don't want to broaden their horizons. Though twilight's even deader and the other franchises are also still figuring things out.

Disney chose to wait three years for the next movie. Smart move on their part
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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ray245 wrote: 2019-12-25 09:17amI don't see any reasons you can't.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by Solauren »

Just remember, the sequel trilogy has had numerous issues beyond Ms. Kennedy's control.

Including things like.....
#1: The original selected director leaving after the first film, and then being brought back for the third. Thus killing any coherent vision.
#2: The second director (The Last Jedi) being relatively crappy at Sci-Fi.
#3: Carrie Fisher dying. That's going to have a negative emotional impact on how people see the trilogy.

So, there has been a certain degree of bad-luck with the sequel trilogy.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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Vendetta wrote: 2019-12-25 11:36amIt did well when it was the only game in town, but there are too many other franchise monsters now that can all release much more frequently. Since Revenge of the Sith there’ve been six Harry Potter films about as many Transformers films, Hunger Games, Twilight. and half a billion Marvel films. All chasing markers Star Wars didn’t want to serve.
Hunger Games and Twitlight are done; as are most of the Potter Films; the only thing they got going is the "Fantastic Beasts" line and that's, meh.
If anything will turn out to have “killed” Star Wars it will be the reflexive response to pander as hard as possible to OT fans instead of ignoring their petty mewling and reaching out to new audiences that every other major franchise has figured out how to appeal to.
What crippled Star Wars this generation was:

1.) They nuked the EU....while most of the EU deserved a nuking; due to LFL's attempt to make EVERY SINGLE LICENSED SW product fit into it -- even super-juvenile fiction for pre-teens -- and shitty spin off games. They had to twist themselves into contortions to come up with explanations for why there was fighting on Kamino in Battlefront II (pre EA).

2.) They then fell into bad habits in the new Disney EU:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Phasma%27s_armor

Phasma had the armor polished in chromium, which had been salvaged from a Naboo yacht that had once belonged to Emperor Palpatine of the Galactic Empire, the First Order's precursor

Hell, just look at Phasma's entry:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Phasma

It's the equivalent of a fat man having liposuction and bariatric surgery, only to keep eating a cake every night.

A clean nuking, followed by a rationalized new EU with a strong story group to keep obvious bullshit out would have worked wonders.

But with the path Disney-LFL chose; they basically pissed off a lot of older fans and semi-younger fans who remembered the shared universe the EU was -- basically it was "Grand Admiral Thrawn got de-canonized for this?" (yes, he came back into canon, but it took years).

3.) Rebooting the trilogy with JJ Abrams (TFA as ANH and ROS as ROTJ) with an incoherent film (TLJ) in the middle.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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The biggest question I got for JJ Abrams is this:

How did Han Solo lose the falcon and it remain lost for decades?

I know there's some convoluted bullshit that got pooped out by the new Disney/Marvel comics on how Han lost it, but let's get fucking serious.

It's the equivalent of the Spirit of St Louis, the Apollo 11 Command Module, etc all rolled together for the SW universe; due to so many events in history taking place on the Falcon.

It's the equivalent of the Mona Lisa. Sure, you can boost the Mona Lisa, but you can't do anything with it.

Mass Effect 2 did it right with Donovan Hock's secret museum of highly illegal stolen artifacts that he kept under a mountain for his own private viewing.

Instead, JJ Abrams has the Falcon sit in a junkyard in the open for decades, nobody not going "Hey..." checking it, and seeing that the VIN numbers on parts match the Millennium Fucking Falcon and notifying the New Republic for a hefty reward fee.

EDIT: More to the point, since HAN SOLO was a smuggler, shouldn't the falcon have lockouts and interlocks to prevent people from stealing it? So how do Rey and Finn jump into the Falcon and take off without a care in the world?

It's little things like this that make people realize that the director and writer don't give a fuck about the universe, and they're just mashing together crap like a 5 year old playing with his new action figure sets.
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Vendetta
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by Vendetta »

MKSheppard wrote: 2019-12-25 02:38pm
1.) They nuked the EU....while most of the EU deserved a nuking; due to LFL's attempt to make EVERY SINGLE LICENSED SW product fit into it -- even super-juvenile fiction for pre-teens -- and shitty spin off games. They had to twist themselves into contortions to come up with explanations for why there was fighting on Kamino in Battlefront II (pre EA).
Let’s not pretend that a statistically significant number of moviegoers are even aware there was an EU to nuke.

The problem wasn’t throwing out the EU the problem was immediately making all the exact same mistakes, to the point that they might as well not have bothered.

The biggest of those has always been having the whole damn galaxy revolve around the same half dozen people and their kids. In order to have a chance now, Star Wars needed to grow beyond the damn Skywalker family drama.

To make that point obvious compare the “everyone turns up to help” scene from RoS to the same one in Endgame. In RoS it’s just a mess of random unknowns, but in Endgame the audience has familiarity with all the characters and armies that showed up because the franchise had worked on having breadth of characters to broaden its audience.

The sequel trilogy should have dialed the original characters back to a much more minimal role and not have had anyone related to them. The only hope now is The Mandalorian that seems to be actually doing what the sequels should have and building new characters and a wider galaxy.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by MKSheppard »

Vendy, if you hadn't cut off my post; you'll see that I also made the point you were making; i.e. "Thrawn was decanonized for this?"

Essentially, for the last 5 years LucasFilm's Story Group has been freebasing meth and cocaine to keep up with dumbass movie directors, to try and rationalize the hot messes left behind, in addition to trying to retcon their own fuckups.

If I was a LFL Story Group guy, I'd be resigning effective 1 JAN 2020, it's too fucked up to fix; because even though I've not yet seen MANDALORIAN; it sounds great from all the hype........it still has to exist in the same fucked up universe that LFL SG allows to exist.
"If scientists and inventors who develop disease cures and useful technologies don't get lifetime royalties, I'd like to know what fucking rationale you have for some guy getting lifetime royalties for writing an episode of Full House." - Mike Wong

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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

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It’s pretty clear that whatever the Lucasfilm Story Group do they follow the lead of the films not the other way around.

And that’s because you can assume that the vast majority of the audience will only ever see the films, so they are not going to be constrained by media nobody even knows exists.

They don’t have any actual power when it comes to the movies. They’re there to make sure the comics and cartoons don’t step on what the movies are doing.
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Re: Kathleen Kennedy's management of the franchise

Post by GuppyShark »

I wonder if whatever's going on behind closed doors at Disney is more about office politics and personal grudges than one person making objectively bad calls. I've heard enough hints of that sort of shit from Hollywood creatives on other projects and seen enough examples of it in my (not-Hollywood) professional life to see how it could be possible. Kathleen could be the decision maker, a peacemaker making compromises between rival factions, a mouthpiece, or a rubber stamp. If you don't work there, how can you really know?
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