Anghus Houvouras on the Star Wars franchise and news that Disney and Lucasfilm are mapping out its future through to 2035…
Franchises, reboots, and sequels. It’s the cinematic world we’re living in. Studios like easy bets. Your average ticket buying movie-goer isn’t that discerning. Case closed.
But there are still uncharted waters as we enter into this age of the ‘Frequel’ i.e. the frequent sequel. Studios have once again raised the stakes when it comes to the world of franchises by shortening the length of time between releasing a new installment. This paradigm is relatively new. It hasn’t even been ten years since Marvel first started releasing multiple movies per year and drastically changing long held studio strategies.
Once Disney purchased Lucasfilm, they made it abundantly clear that this was a well they would frequently return to. It was just reported that the ‘House of the Mouse’ is plotting out 15 years of new Star Wars movies. That’s not just returning to the well, it’s draining it dry and then fracking the earth beneath it and creating a sinkhole that swallows up everything around it.
Fifteen freakin’ years of Star Wars movies. Are there people genuinely excited by this? I was already skeptical of what a world swimming in Star Wars looked like given that both The Force Awakens and Rogue One were kind of terrible. But even in a world where every new Star Wars movie was better than average and not a fan service, reference heavy piece of deep fried nostalgia, the novelty will eventually wear off.
The creative economy of this is fairly simple: When we only had three Star Wars films, they were cherished. These were the foundation for an extended universe of comics, books, video games, action figures, and semi-realistic lightsaber sex toys. Star Wars was everywhere, but the movies that spawned it all were few and far between. They were special because of their limited availability.
Even when the terrible prequels were expelled onto audiences like a cinematic convulsion, the movies were still a very small part of a very large universe. The poor quality and dense storytelling didn’t necessarily help Star Wars, but it didn’t completely devalue the brand.
What will eventually kill Star Wars is a far-too-frequent release schedule that mines every corner of our collective nostalgia until we become incapable caring. Rogue One felt like proof positive of that. A movie that claimed to be something new while being nothing more than another gap once filled in by our imagination, now committed to film. The opening of A New Hope was so thrilling. Darth Vader and his vastly superior Star Destroyer chasing down Leia’s ship. The daunting monolithic starship swallowing it whole.
As a kid I wondered how long Darth Vader had been hunting them down. How close was Leia to getting away with the plan? Maybe she had spent weeks stealthily evading Vader in a game of intergalactic cat and mouse. Thanks to Rogue One, we now have that answer: It was a span of eight seconds between the plans being stolen and the opening scene of A New Hope. And the final Rogue One scene also kind of takes a nice long piss all over that scene. All the dialogue between Leia and Vader feels weird. Leia tells Vader she’s on a diplomatic mission, something that would make total sense if the Empire chased them down after a prolonged search. But Vader literally just watched the plans get handed off and the ship escape.
This is the problem when your creative compass charts a course only through the known elements of the Star Wars Universe: All you’re ever going to do is fill in the gaps, and the gaps are sometimes more interesting when we have them laboriously explained to us with two-hour fan service circle jerks.
Eventually, this perpetual stream of Star Wars is going to wear painfully thin. Flooding the market with like product only reduces the overall value of the cinematic installments. And I’m not talking about the financials because I doubt people will stop buying tickets. Creatively, however, these annual jaunts through familiar avenues will stop being novel.
For me, they already have.
Anghus Houvouras
Originally published March 25, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
