Nice break... This is absolutely true: "So that’s my first piece of advice for franchises. Don’t fill in the world. Expand the world." ... two of the most interesting prequels were Better Call Saul and Young Sheldon... did exactly that. In Better Call Saul, the most interesting characters are Kim, Nacho, Lalo ... the Breaking Bad characters provide structure, but the compelling story is with the other characters. Same with Young Sheldon... sheldon is actually boring.... his brother, father, sister are much more interesting.
I agree that Better Call Saul is the gold standard for prequels. Noah's explanation makes sense to me:
>>>
Prequels that feature younger versions of our beloved characters are fine. The reason is that most fans can’t really imagine good backstories for characters — they need professional writers to fill in those details. Character backstory doesn’t constrain the imagination — it’s more like a flashback.
>>>
Overarching theme is how Jimmy turned into Saul.
But so many wonderful details - large and small - from Breaking Bad were fleshed out. Like how Hector ended up in a wheelchair, and where his bell came from.
It was all so cleverly written and extremely satisfying.
I mean, the Lalo character was a thrown out bit of lore from Breaking Bad, when Saul was confronted in the desert by a masked Jesse and Walt. Its a testament to Vince Gilligan's writing that the Lalo character turned out as interesting as he did - he just as easily could have become the Clone Wars equivalent in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.
yup.... same with the characters in Young Sheldon... they were all minor characters which got a significant arc. Maybe that's the key... use the minor characters to build a stronger thread in the subsequent series.
I agree that Better Call Saul is the gold standard for prequels. Noah's explanation makes sense to me:
>>>
Prequels that feature younger versions of our beloved characters are fine. The reason is that most fans can’t really imagine good backstories for characters — they need professional writers to fill in those details. Character backstory doesn’t constrain the imagination — it’s more like a flashback.
>>>
Overarching theme is how Jimmy turned into Saul.
But so many wonderful details - large and small - from Breaking Bad were fleshed out. Like how Hector ended up in a wheelchair, and where his bell came from.
It was all so cleverly written and extremely satisfying.
I mean, the Lalo character was a thrown out bit of lore from Breaking Bad, when Saul was confronted in the desert by a masked Jesse and Walt. Its a testament to Vince Gilligan's writing that the Lalo character turned out as interesting as he did - he just as easily could have become the Clone Wars equivalent in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.
I think you’re over complicating things. The Star Wars prequel trilogy (to start with your first example) was a good story ruined by awful writing. George Lucas was never a good writer of dialogue which hampered the whole exercise. He also made some bad choices, like making Anakin too young in Phantom Menace, and not giving Padme enough to do in general, which weakened the story. But the story itself is a necessary corrective to the original: clearly the Jedi screwed up pretty bad! Otherwise why would they be in exile?
The reason why spinoffs succeed or fail is entirely due to a simple question: can we write a good story and make fans care? The execution and the idea matter in equal measure. House of the Dragon is an adaption of existing material (there’s a whole book on it) and it does an amazing job because it’s well written and makes me pity Viserys, makes me feel the misogyny at the heart of Westeros, and turns a meh plot into a tragedy. I’d argue House of the Dragon is superior to Game of Thrones.
There isn’t any secret sauce. It’s just writing and execution. Same as any other TV show, movie or book project.
I really struggle with the (very common) idea that the prequels were, somehow, a good story sabotaged by bad writing. The prequels were poorly paced, poorly acted and poorly directed, in addition to being poorly written. That's most of the criteria on which we judge movies. Sure, we can probably imagine an alternate version of the prequels telling the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker in a manner that didn't suck. But it's not like that version of the story is hiding in the actually existing prequels.
I liked Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith. There’s plenty to like about them, but some parts didn’t work. The Padme-Anakin dynamic was bad. The actors lacked chemistry, the writing was awful, and it’s a crucial part of the story.
But I don’t agree that the movies were all bad. I don’t agree with Noah that the Kenobi-Skywalker dynamic is bad; I think it’s one of the better parts of the prequels. I think they directed and edited them well. It really was bad writing
One thing on which I think we agree, based on your earlier comment: the decision to spend 1/3 of the trilogy with an 8 year-old Anakin was a real blunder. It makes Phantom Menace feel like more of a prologue to the trilogy rather than a part of the story itself, and it led to the Anakin/Padme and Anakin/Palpatine storylines feeling unnecessarily rushed and abrupt. It also introduced the wholly unnecessary ick factor of Padme falling in love with a kid she first met when she was a teenager and he was 8. All of the 8 year-old Anakin stuff should've been confined to the first half of Phantom Menace, if not eliminated altogether; and Padme shouldn't have met Anakin until he was already a teen played by Hayden Christiansen.
I think the more general point is Anakin should have been a teenager when we met him. His emotions would have felt more real, the acting would have been better (child actors have a tough job) and the relationship hints could have started earlier.
I actually think that Padme falling for the kid she met at 8 years old could work...but it needs to be earned. Earning your moments requires execution.
This is Episode 2 as much as anything but the wonder of the prequels is that the absolutely best special effects money could buy could not exceed a competent Hollywood director who simply knew how to tell a story.
I really struggle with it for the opposite reason: it is a good story with good writing, and its dialogues are only wooden where they should be wooden. Anakin was _supposed_ to be wooden and inept in flirting, that's part of the lesson.
I think they're really good, highly resonant films, that only get better as the years go by. They're neither badly written nor acted, aside from some of the romantic stuff in the second film, which definitely did misfire. The acting style is more in tune with much older films, and I believe that was an artistic choice. Their crime is to confound conventional expectations of what a blockbuster movie is supposed to be. In my opinion they're better than the original trilogy in certain respects.
Bingo. Everything it tries to do it executes either to either mediocre or poor standards. And the story? I guess it could be good in the hands of someone who understood how to milk it for its drama. Kid in over his head, too immature, gets too much power and reacts very negatively to being thwarted and losing the things he cares about most? A little cliche, but well-executed, it could be a good movie. That's that's not the story they told; they told a different story and the story they told didn't ring true not just because of poor acting; I just never felt like it earned any of its characters' actions. Even the basic plotting in the prequels was mediocre at best.
See I disagree. The point of the prequels is that the past wasn’t as good as people thought it was: Anakin was meant to be a tragic figure who was trying to do the right thing by his wife and was hamstrung by the stuck up Jedi Order who don’t allow their pawns to feel.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether the prequels had a 'good story' but I think your basic point is a good one that these derivative stories mostly tend to succeed or fail on their own merits. Like the rules Noah is trying to make may apply to *him* but I'm not sure they apply generally. For instance while the star wars prequels aren't well-rememberef the two clone wars cartoons generally are and they focused on nothing *but* filling in the clone wars. Also prior to Andor the best of the disney-era star wars was Rogue One which focused entirely on fleshing out a single sentence from the first opening crawl and had only brief cameos from any of the original characters. It isn't a coincidence that the two best disney star wars shows had the same writer.
I agree this is a large part of it. Most of the reason why sequels and prequels are bad is simple regression to the mean. Sturgeon's Law is 90% of everything is garbage. Every time you make a new piece of media, there's a 90% chance it'll be bad.
But I think Noah also touches on something true. If writers followed a few simple principles, they can raise their odds above 10% a lot. With better writing, I think a show can be good despite filling in instead of expanding lore, and can absolutely try a new genre style that's also a hit. But it's a lot more reliable to not bother focusing on filling in lore, and to ease fans into the new genre.
I think many modern franchises make a mistake of thinking they can rely on "fan service" to carry the day. Maybe that's fine for something that's always been really formulaic, like Dragonball Z, where you CAN have nearly 300 episodes where 7 minutes of the episode is just smack talk and flashing screen effects and hair flapping as everyone powers up, and kids eat their afterschool snack while only half watching.
I heard an interview recently, I think it was with James Patterson, who kind of boiled down his recipe for success was to leave just enough unresolved tension or mystery in his books to allow readers to feel both satisfied with the conclusion, but still have a sense that there are threads of the narrative for them to continue to stew on.
I think smart writing puts the audience in a position of "wanting more" more often, while lazy/simple writing is just leading you down a narrative path where you kind of already know what the outcomes are going to be, and if they do try to throw in a twist, it's often not that compelling. Lore can fall into this trap more easily, as writers feel compelled to stay true to the established historical material, and are afraid to push the community outside it's comfort zone or draw the ire of the ubergeeks for some perceived sin against the universe.
When I think about shows like "Bodkin" or "The Tourist" you can definitely point to individual scenes where the dialogue feels a little awkward or pretentious (perhaps intentionally so), but the overall arc of the narrative has enough intrigue, red herrings, character missteps, and general calamity that you don't know how it's all going to come together until the end, and they stick the landing.
I think the biggest problem with the Star Wars sequels is that the films were clearly at war with each other. The most obvious example is Rey, the first film sets up "Who is Rey, why does she have force powers?" as a question, the second says "She's anyone, she's no-one, no special lineage", and then the third film says "No, she's the daughter of a clone of the Emperor", but that's far from the only one. When a film set something up to be resolved in the next film, the next film knocked it down.
Compare how Empire Strikes Back tells Luke that his father is Vader, he rejects it, and then comes to terms with it in Return of the Jedi. If that had been the sequels, they'd have told him he was right to reject it and would have made "No, I am your father" from one of the iconic scenes of all of film, into just a lie told by the evil Darth Vader.
So that makes for a good and useful rule: make sure all your creative team are on the same page and not fighting each other.
The "at war with themselves" aspect of the sequels became an issue only with Rise of Skywalker, I think, and then only because Lucasfilm overreacted to the tantrum that some fans threw over the Last Jedi. The people who hated TLJ often complain, for example, that it completely trashed Luke's character. But... in Force Awakens, we were already told, by Han Solo himself, that Luke had basically run away and hid after Ben turned into Kylo. Which makes Luke's early hostility to Rey--flipping the lightsaber over his shoulder, "did you think I came to the most remote corner of the galaxy because I wanted to be found?", "did you think I was going to pick up a laser sword and take on the whole First Order?"--the only way TLJ could've gone with Luke's character if it took Force Awakens seriously. At yet the fans flipped out at what a "betrayal" of Luke's character it was. Plus, there's nothing wrong with showing a middle-aged guy bitter at how his life has gone off the road and into a ditch!
Similarly, a lot of the other big fan complaints boiled down to head canon about how Star Wars trilogies "must" play out (Snoke had to be Darth Plageus or someone else from the prequels! And you can't kill him in the second movie! And the star of the trilogy has to be genetic force royalty!). The problem with Rise of Skywalker wasn't just that it was inconsistent with TLJ (although that was a huge problem), it was that it showed Lucasfilm had so little idea of what it wanted to do with Star Wars that it basically caved to the online rantings of Millennial fans who thought the prequels were great movies held back only by bad dialogue.
>Snoke had to be Darth Plageus or someone else from the prequels! And you can't kill him in the second movie! And the star of the trilogy has to be genetic force royalty!
Contra Noah's tastes, the diehard fans – the ones that hate the sequels and the spinoff series – are absolutely obsessed with "lore." The people losing their shit over The Acolyte, for example, are hating on it for damaging the "lore," disrespecting the "lore," showing insufficient obeisance to the "lore." It's the same thing with Snoke, as if the thing that would make him a good character would have been to turn him into a walking Wookiepedia article.
Clearly would not know anything about that. (Spouse watched every episode of Picard even though understood that some fans would be upset that it messed with/subverted canon)
That probably was a major problem in the end. This was also kind of a problem with the originals. It's clear that Lucas didn't originally write Leia and Luke to be siblings since the first film has a subplot with a romantic interest between them which is retroactively kind of jarring, and I'm not sure he even intended Darth Vader to be Luke's father from the beginning, but it still followed an overall vision from one writer. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson almost seemed to have diametrically opposed visions of how the franchise was supposed to work so there's a weird boomerang watching the three films where they don't really feel coherent as a group, and it probably would have been better if they had just stuck with either of the visions than switching back and forth.
I think Lucas now claims that he always knew Vader was Luke's father, but I'll never believe it. I'm old enough to have seen the original trilogy during its initial release, and the whole "I am your father" thing came so out of left field that a lot of fans spent the time between ESB and ROTJ assuming that Vader was, in fact, lying to Luke. I remember being mildly disappointed during ROTJ when Obi Wan did his whole "when I said Vader betrayed and killed your father, I meant he METAPHORICALLY betrayed and killed him" routine, which has always felt like a very strange retcon.
My headcanon is that Obi Won was lying about Vader out of fear that Luke might turn out like Vader. Then he came up with an excuse why what he said was technically not lying when called on it.
Yeah, I've thought something similar, and think it's utterly bizarre that Lucas did his "certain point of view" nonsense instead of just having Obi-Wan admit that he lied to Luke because he didn't think Luke was ready for the truth.
Yeah I remember thinking that when rewatching the series a few years ago. There are no hints at all in the first film that Luke's dad turned out to be a bad guy at all, and if that was the point it seems like it would have been something he'd want to drop a few actual breadcrumbs for. I'm fairly sure that A New Hope was written to really just be an entirely standalone sci-fi film. It has a full three act structure and a happy ending, and would have been fine ending there. The original title was even just "Star Wars", no subtitle or episode number. Then after its enormous success, probably ESB and ROTJ were commissioned as a pair and Lucas started writing it as a bigger story.
Some people also like to point out that "Vader" is similar the German word "Vater", meaning "father", but even that feels like a real stretch. They don't pronounce it a similar way, and nobody else has German-coded names. I always took it as just being inspired by "invader".
ESB and ROTJ were not commissioned as a pair. That wouldn't start until the Back to the Future sequels in 1990.
Relative to today, sequels were far, far more rare. In Hollywood, all movies were commissioned individually until 1978's Superman fell backwards into splitting into two parts. Sequels became more palatable once people could watch a previously released movie whenever they want.
That wasn't true in 1977 - practically no one had a VCR at the time. I remember the theatrical re-release of Star Wars in 1980, and it was pandemonium. People were lined up around the block - again! After seeing this upon arrival at the cinema, I ended up getting a ticket for 'Going Ape' instead (not my choice). The only thing memorable about that film was not getting to see Star Wars.
Still, I can imagine that Lucas at least was writing the story for Empire with a thought that after the success of the first film, it would probably be enough of a hit for him to have a good chance at getting a third film greenlit. The story really ends on a cliffhanger so from a narrative point of view it would have been a very unsatisfying ending, and I'd have to imagine that he at least had some outline for a third film.
ANH was undoubtedly filmed to *work* as a stand alone film, but the whole, "gEoRGe lUCaS NevEr hAd aNY iDEa of MAkiNg oThEr SW fiLMs uNTiL aFtEr ANH," is clearly bullshit because you can find all the major iterations of Lucas' draft scripts on-line (e.g., "Luke Starkiller" etc.) and there is a huge amount of stuff that didn't make it into the original film as shot.
I haven't read those, but I'd expect almost any script to have multiple re-writes with different ideas for a story, especially for something as high-concept as the first Star Wars film. It wouldn't surprise me if there were plenty of loose ideas that he brainstormed and put in at some point, but then took out later because he didn't think they'd work in the story. It also wouldn't surprise me if later on, when he was pitching a sequel, he returned to some ideas that he thought of but couldn't fit into the first movie. Like, it wouldn't be surprising if a previous version of the story had Luke doing a lightsaber fight with Darth Vader, or getting training from an alien, and that turned into Yoda in a sequel, or even if he just came up with some strange character or place names and then decided to use them later on, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was planned out like that from the start, unless you're saying those earlier drafts had pretty good approximations of the later three-film narrative arc.
I suppose it was left with an ending open enough that he was giving himself room to write further (since the Empire and particularly Darth Vader remain decidedly undefeated by the end), but I still find it hard to believe that the general arc of the trilogy was mapped out by the time the first one was released, especially with stuff like Vader being Luke's father or Leia being his sister.
From everything I've read about the production, the huge success of the film came as a surprise to most people too. This is before my time, but my understanding in the context it was made, this kind of sci-fi was generally considered pretty schlocky and confined to being a genre film sold to to weird nerds and pre-pubescent boys. Lucas had a hard time getting the idea financed and was turned down by several studios, even with his recent big success with American Graffiti (which was what eventually convinced the president of Fox to take a chance on it). Production was infamously difficult and ran way over budget too and the studio threatened to cut their losses and can the production at one point due to the costs, and Lucas suffered pretty severe stress during production. It wouldn't surprise me if Lucas thought it was very likely that no studio would ever let him attempt something like this again.
I think it’s rather obvious that Lucas was planning a good old tale of revenge when he made the first film. Vader killed Luke’s father, Vader got away at the end of the film, and there’s no where that story is going that doesn’t end in Vader’s death at Luke’s hands. While future films were always a bit of a long shot, I can believe that he had his trilogy roughly mapped out, as well as some ideas for a prequel trilogy. But the first sequel took an planned twist, and the most popular film of all time morphed into a story that would linger in the culture for generations.
I do wonder what Lucas originally had in mind for his sequel trilogy.
> I'm not sure he even intended Darth Vader to be Luke's father from the beginning
He didn't; the idea that Vader was Luke's father wasn't even in early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back, it didn't come about till later. (And if Lucas always intended Vader to be Luke's father, why does he seemingly have no particular reaction to Luke in the first movie like he does in the second?) You can read "The Secret History of Star Wars" by Michael Kaminski for a detailed examination of this (he has a whole appendix specifically about this question).
"When a film set something up to be resolved in the next film, the next film knocked it down."
The problem is that JJ Abrams is extremely well known for the schtick of "Introduce mysterious thing, vaguely imply it will be important later, but don't actually have any idea or plan for whatever the hell that is". It was his running gag on Lost, Alias, and Fringe.
And presumably Johnson knew this, and said "OK, fuck it, I'll just resolve that little tidbit for him"
And it's hilarious that a) the studio and b) the fans latched onto THIS as the thing that is wrong with TLJ, and not the fact that Johnson decided to:
- completely sideline Finn, sending him off on to Casino Disney World on an unimportant side quest that pounds its "message" hamfistedly on the viewer
- turn Poe into a moron who has no agency, and who ends up screwing over everyone. Like.... we GET it. Characters like Poe or Solo would never be given this kind of latitude or treatment in a real military... but that whole plot line would only make sense if you wanted TLJ to actually be SciFi Military Fiction, but you clearly didn't. so you injected some "realism" into a film in a way that ruins the character, but doesn't actually make the film any more realistic (or entertaining)
- saved Leia in a really stupid way, when the entire audience knows that Carrie is dead, and you could have given her character a hero's death with a tiny bit of editing
- introduced a "redemption arc" for Kylo/Ben, an asinine idea after having him kill Han. I actually thought him killing Han in TFA was one of better scenes, it seemed like they were saying "Ok, we aren't going to copy EVERYTHING from the original trilogy, this guy isn't redeemable". It is also a running joke with everyone that Vader's redemption was silly (How many essays have you read with the "He killed billions, but OH, he saved his own son, he's cool now!" joke?). Repeating that theme just honestly felt like they were trolling.
I mean... there is just soooo much wrong with that movie, and so the studio "fixes" it in the stupidest imaginable ways.
“Yes, and…” doesn’t just apply to improv! (Of course, when you’re writing slowly, you can sometimes say “no”, but it takes a lot of planning and structure to make that make sense, rather than just be disjointed.)
I'm going to stand up for The Last Jedi (and also despair about the state of media discourse in your part of the internet if nobody ever explained why subverting tropes is useful).
Subverting tropes isn't a good thing per se, but it's a tool that lets you launch the story in a new and interesting direction. It can build tension (you thought you knew how the story was "supposed to go," and now you dont know what happens next), and it can let you look at familiar patterns in a new light and freshen them up for a modern audience. Which is a really good thing when you're writing for the most familiar franchise on the planet!
Like, what was the big problem everyone had with Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens? It's that he was basically a shitty version of Darth Vader. He's copying Vader's appearance, he's got a little shrine to Vader's helmet, he's working as the enforcer to a shitty version of Palpatine, but he's just not as cool as Vader and we all know it. Then in The Force Awakens, he's like "okay, this isn't working for me, I'm going to stop pretending to be Darth Vader and start being my own man." That's not just a subversion for the sake of tropes, it's character growth. Kylo Ren's new nihilistic philosophy makes him a different sort of villain who does different things from Vader and Palpatine.
And Rey is going through a similar journey - she wants to become a Jedi, but she can't do it by learning from Luke Skywalker, because Luke is mired in his past failures and she needs to find her own path. (Yoda basically spells this out with his little speech about how every master sees their students grow beyond them.) Both her and Kylo Ren want to make a break from the past, which is why they have that connection and why Kylo thinks she'll join him.
By pointedly refusing to copy the original trilogy's storyline, they get both a solid character arc for this movie and the setup for an interesting sequel. You can see the broad strokes of a redemption arc getting set up between Rey and Kylo, but it's putting its own twist on it instead of just rehashing Luke vs Vader.
The fact that Rey doesn't have noble birth isn't relevant to her on a personal level, but it's *symbolic*, it's another indication that the past is dead and the main characters need to fight their own battles. There's no ancient legacy that Rey can call on to win, she has to deal with Kylo on her own.
I really like The Last Jedi. It doesn't so much subvert expectations as it destroys lore, which... well, had to happen after several decades of compounding and conflicting canon. Star Wars has always been, essentially, the family drama of the Skywalkers and the Last Jedi is the first movie installment to broaden the scope. The scene at the end where the stable boy calls the broom to his hand is the key: anyone can have the Force, not just this one family. It also reduces the rebellion to a small handful... they can rebuild it any which way we like. what was so depressing about the final movie was, finally freed from the weight of canon, Star Wars ran right back to it because it had no ideas.
But I also like that it changes the definition of heroism. Finn is willing to die for the cause and the movie sets up his noble sacrifice, only for Rose to stop him so he can do the harder thing: living. It's a movie about hope and the simple power of surviving. You can't kill an idea.
I also enjoy the climax, that Luke saves the day through Jedi jujitsu. He uses their strength against them, and instead of fighting back, he gives until they break. Luke, much like Yoda in empire, is broken by his prior failures, and he steps up in the end, but really the next generation have to save themselves. He can only provide the path, or buy them time.
But I'm also not a huge Star Wars guy. I didn't feel any betrayal because I couldn't be betrayed. I liked The Last Jedi because it was a really good movie with themes I enjoyed. I don't really care if it worked as a "Star Wars movie", which... I'm pretty sure it didn't, based on fan reactions.
I mean, but we already knew anyone could have the force from the original trilogy. Unless Yoda was supposed to be some gnarled old great great grandfather of Luke. The trilogy just happened to focus on the Skywalkers because it was dramatically compelling to have the family dynamic.
The Rey - Kylo Ren was the least objectionable part of the story. That was underwhelming in execution, but otherwise fine.
It was literally everything else that was awful. Finn was turned into a joke, everything Rose did was awful (writing problem, not the actress), the slow space chase, ignomiously killing of Ackbar and having unknown admiral do a new hyperspace kamikaze (why didn't they do that to the death star?), and the entire B plot.
The frustrating thing is that Disney *can* do good star wars...just see Rogue One and Andor.
I think Andor is the best of the Star Wars universe, but it's also a very obvious divergence from the core franchise in giving us a "hero" who we are left to wonder through almost the entirety of the series... is he really a good guy?
A pretty complicated character, navigating a complicated series of events as best as he can figure, and often doing unheroic things, is a lot more relatable I think to a modern audience than the classic hero tropes Lucas leaned on for the original series. In classic Star Wars we know who the badies are from the moment they walk on screen, via John Williams' score telling you "oh shit.. this guy is bad news."
Andor is shades of gray and nuance and imperfect people, but you still want Cassian to turn out to be noble enough in the end.
But because it is the back story of the character from Rogue One we know that he does turn out to be noble enough. We also know that Mon Mothma turns out to be a good enough character. We are interested in these characters having actually to make moral choices to get there.
That's true enough I guess. But as a casual fan who only watched Rogue One once, I guess I hadn't already filed away in my memory that "Andor is a good guy."
So, I guess maybe in that sense I got to enjoy the show even more, from a baseline of relative ignorance. :D
I kind of had the same sense with the Mandalorian. Boba Fett is of course a "known entity" in one sense, and has probably gotten his fair share of story telling in the novels and The Clone Wars... but unless you've deep dove that material, he's still quite mysterious. Seeing him "exposed" from heartless bounty hunter to basically a version of my Dad (claiming he hates cats, while being the one person in the house feeding the cat slices of bologna from the fridge) is a surprising but also relatable turn.
>The fact that Rey doesn't have noble birth isn't relevant to her on a personal level,
I would say it is. What Rey wants is for her parents' abandonment to mean something, for being an orphan to not hurt. She spends the first act of TFA waiting around for them to return, the assumption being they had a good reason to leave and so will some day some back. In TLJ she seeks knowledge of her parents in order to understand herself, and to understand her symbolic parents, Luke and the Jedi, who she similarly holds out hope will return.
Her parents being nobodies who "sold you off for drinking money" is the worst thing she could hear. It means there was no point to it, no noble intention behind them leaving her. They were just shitty people who abandoned her and she's truly alone. She's going to have to figure out all this Jedi stuff by herself.
The real crime of TROS making her Palpatine 's granddaughter is that it switches her parents back to decent people who left her for noble reasons. It"s typical of Abrams to grasp the surface-level attribute of something but misunderstand or plain ignore the subtext.
I agree with the point on subverting expectations. There was a real backlash to the idea when TLJ came out, because so many who liked it praised that aspect of it, and it started as an annoying, pretentious, anti-fun type of thing. But it's generally more interesting to twist some kind of cliché or trope in an unexpected way than it is to just run it again. I get that there's also a comforting aspect to watching something and pretty much knowing where it's all going, it's partly why people often have some movies or TV shows that they will watch repeatedly, but it does get a bit dull too sometimes and really lowers the stakes when you can easily predict where everything is going from the start of a story.
I think Game of Thrones, for example, would never have become so popular if it wasn't for the fact that in the earlier seasons, it sometimes just killed off major characters without warning. Normally in TV series, we expect deaths to only befall either minor characters, or secondary characters who's time has come and who's death's are pretty well-telegraphed, and the climax of some kind of arc, or else we might expect fakeout deaths where the person actually comes back. Early seasons of GOT ditched that template and just offed characters right in what looked like the middle or beginning of their narrative arcs. It kept people on their toes, nobody felt safe, and people were eager to find out where it was going.
Part of why I think the later seasons didn't hit the same way is that this just didn't feel like it happened as much. There became a core set of characters who were too safe, and as a result were just kind of going through the motions.
But Benioff and Weiss overdid this. They killed off characters who are still very much alive in the books for the sake of keeping the plot manageable. I also will not forgive that it is Sansa who is raped when in the books it is an entirely different character and I don't think the Hugo voters did either.
I wanted to get HBO in order to watch this show but I knew it was going to be too TV-MA in subject matter for spouse. So I have seen the Hugo-nominated episodes and nothing else. They were all well done.
Well, in the books we know Jeyne Poole a little bit and know that she is very innocent and very silly so what happens to her is sickening even if we have not caught up with her for a book or two. The show could simply have reintroduced her as Sansa's friend in a few lines of dialogue. My point is that even George R. R. Martin so far has wanted to protect Sansa more than the showrunners.
The Last Jedi, which came out right in the middle of our period of social unrest and in the early Trump years, was Ground Zero for a kind of tiring culture war you see today.
To Last Jedi supporters, you had to like it if you wanna be a good progressive, otherwise you're one of *them* (aka MAGA, anti-woke YouTubers, etc.). And the other side didn't do themselves any favors by relentlessly harassing poor Kelly Marie Tran.
If you're just a normal person who had issues with the movie from a filmmaking/story perspective, it was a lonely time.
It's interesting to compare the American approach to Japan, which also has a lot of long-running franchises (Macross, Gundam, Dragon Ball and Naruto and ONE PIECE, and the big granddaddy of them all, Godzilla.) My sense is that while there's a huge reliance on existing IP there's a lot more acceptance of taking it in new directions. Many of the Gundam series are set in alternate timelines/realities, for instance. The Japanese versus American approaches to Godzilla are instructive in this regard, with the last three or so US releases increasingly incoherent and lore-laden, and the most recent two Japanese ones (Shin Gojira and Gojira Minus One) being totally unrelated -- yet incredibly critically and financially successful.
I kind of wonder how much of that though is just that these are lower-value productions in the first place, so the financial risks of doing something new aren't as high. In American comics, even with established characters, there are often various reboots or crossovers or re-interpretations that can be a bit more creative or inventive, but they get away with that because the money in the comic series is nowhere near as big, or the audience as broad, as for the franchise films with the same characters. If everyone hates a run of a comic, or an anime series that cost relatively little money to make and produce, not that big a deal. If everyone hates or just doesn't care about your $200m blockbuster film, that's much bigger catastrophe.
Yes, this seems absolutely correct. Budget expansion is accompanied by a lot of efforts to derisk.
In the days when franchises weren't as big, in addition to the fact that more movies made it to theaters on comparatively small budgets, I think having a star actor or director was one way of derisking. "Spielberg" is a sort of franchise unto himself.
After they had a movie bomb, they weren't seen as being as useful for derisking and they didn't get the budgets. E.g. John Carpenter catapulted to success with "Halloween" on a shoestring budget, and then started to get progressively larger budgets. After he had (cult classic!) "Big Trouble in Little China" bomb with a ~$20MM budget, his next few movies ended up with ~$3MM budgets.
A director’s contract is basically that they must provide 90 minutes of usable footage…I find that funny especially after watching Tropic Thunder. I know someone that spent time with a very famous director and two very famous screenwriters…the screenwriters are generally the most important people in the collaborative process and they generally don’t have much to do with sequels. And Solo was the product of a weak script by a famous screenwriter that was greenlit and then the producer took the screenwriter’s side over the directors. That is a classic “Concorde Fallacy” in which the script was weak even though the characters were strong and so you stop throwing good money after bad. The director she knew ended up in movie jail because his comeback movie was a $40 million horror film when Blumhouse makes profitable horror films for $5 million…so his management team set him up for failure as far as I’m concerned.
Japanese anime productions tend to rely on production committees, which spread the risk over a number of stakeholders (traditionally, TV stations, record companies, publishers, toy companies, etc.) But it also forces them to share profits, which has prevented any studio in Japan from growing to the size of a Disney or Pixar or what have you. Netflix money changed this to a degree but it's still really hard for an anime studio to truly grow.
It also helps that a lot of the Japanese IP continuations are made by people who aren’t embarrassed by the source material. For example, Godzilla Minus One subverted the ending of the original Godzilla in a *good* way.
The Japanese approach you describe also makes me think of the original understanding of Legend of Zelda, and how I still prefer to understand it: a series of very distinct but thematically-related retellings of the same basic story (or legend, if you will).
Nintendo later came up with background lore that connects all the games, for people who NEED this, but it's very subtle, there's very little in the games directing you towards it, and I don't think Nintendo lets it dictate any of their design decisions for new games.
Now you're making me wonder if this interest/ability to start over again in thematically similar but different worlds laid the groundwork for Japan's pop-culture fad of the moment, "isekai" content, where the protagonist slips out of the real world into one better suited to their personality.
I know this is just anecdotal and I assume the people Noah talks to about Star Wars are probably mostly other fans of science fiction in general, but most people I know or hear about thought the Star Wars sequels were generally fine. Obviously they had detractors, the last film in particular seemed to get a pretty tepid response and I don't recall it even making that much of a splash, and The Last Jedi was very contentious, but the general appraisal seems to be that they were not as great as the originals, but decent enough and better than the prequels with their clumsy dialogue and tedious pacing (although there is now a subculture of people who seem to genuinely like the kitcshy sloppiness of the prequels which overlaps a lot with the haters of the prequels).
I don't think many people think they were landmark films that will have a legacy for decades like The Empire Strikes Back, more that they were just fine entertaining franchise films, in a similar way to a later-series Fast and Furious, a pre-covid Marvel movie, or the Star Trek 2009 reboot film series.
I agree with all of this, and it certainly suggests a pattern whereby everyone loves the Star Wars of their youth and hates the Star Wars of their adulthood. So, Gen X loved the original trilogy but hated the prequels; Millennials love the prequels but hate the sequels; and, perhaps, in 10-15 years, Gen Z will be passionately defending the sequels.
I'm especially curious to see if we get a big reappraisal of Last Jedi in the coming decade, simply because it's so visually distinctive in so many places. While his writing can be spotty, Rian Johnson really knows how to frame a shot, in a way that hasn't been seen in a Star Wars movie since Empire.
The Last Jedi is half the best Star Wars movie because of Rian Johnson’s visuals (the sword fight in Sokes throne room! The ramming speed scene!) , half one of the least of the series because every character except from Luke, Ray, and Kilo Ren act like idiots.
I think Johnson fell victim to the idea that Rey, Poe, Finn and Ren all had to have their own character arcs that resulted in cognizable character growth. This worked well enough for Rey and Ren, but with both Poe and Finn, Johnson took too ham-fisted an approach in which they achieved their growth by being either punished (Poe) or tutored (Finn) by characters who really didn't serve any other dramatic purpose than to show that they were acting stupidly. The fact that both of those "mentor" characters were women came at an... unfortunate time in the culture wars.
RotS is the second best of the "Saga" films, IMO, third best overall ("Rogue One" is second best overall; TESB is #1). To summarize my view of it, I agree with a review I read years ago that said RotS starts out with all the weaknesses of the other prequel films (slapstick comedy, terrible dialogue, etc.) and then halfway through turns into the best SW film of all time.
There probably is some part of that. We definitely tend to like the things we saw as kids and look back on them more fondly than things we only see as adults. I think that the originals benefitted also from being a fresh new series, so people didn't have a prevoius entry to compare it to (obviously Episodes 5 and 6 were compared to the original, but it didn't have the time to become so universally ingrained into culture), and by several different generations of kids growing up seeing them on VHS before any other movies or TV shows came out.
Tbh though for the prequels, I'm the age where the prequels came out when I was a kid. I got my dad to take me to each one in the cinema, and while I didn't *dislike* them, I also wouldn't say they made a huge impression or I remember a lot of other kids talking about them. I think the story was really too confusing for a young audience, and I remember even then being aware that adults who liked Star Wars considered them very disappointing. As an adult when I watched them again, it was pretty obvious why these were not as popular the whole time. My impression is that a lot of the modern fans of the prequels are people who weren't yet born (or old enough to see them) when they came out and grew up only knowing them as being generally panned, so liking them is sort of a cheeky rebellious thing. Another element is a sort of The Room-esque "so bad it's good" fandom. There's a reasonably large reddit community called r/PrequelMemes which originally poked fun at them by making memes using the awkward dialogue and delivery of lines from the films, but over time kind of morphed into people actually just liking the movies.
I think that was probably also bolstered by the general anti-woke backlash to the sequel series. A lot of the early positive reception to the sequels, especially The Force Awakens, praised it for being more like the originals than the prequels, with a faster pace, more action, simpler plot, more quippy lines, more practical costumes and effects, and being more "polished" overall. For people who hated it, a lot became open to re-examining the prequels in this light and praising them for the opposite. Stuff like "yeah it was very different to what people expect from Star Wars, but at least it was trying to do something new instead of just trying to imitate the original" or "sure the writing is clunky, but at least it represents the vision and intentions of an auteur director and not some overly-polished and focus-grouped film that was designed by committee".
"Stuff like "yeah it was very different to what people expect from Star Wars, but at least it was trying to do something new instead of just trying to imitate the original" or "sure the writing is clunky, but at least it represents the vision and intentions of an auteur director and not some overly-polished and focus-grouped film that was designed by committee"."
It seems pretty clear to me that the prequels were very much trying to imitate the originals. They were simply executed so poorly that they seemed like a different thing.
How can TLJ get a positive "big reappraisal" when film critics overwhelmingly praised it in the first place? (It's basically the inverse of "Fight Club" getting no negative "big reappraisal" for its 20th anniversary in 2019 because film critics hated it when it originally came out anyway, so there was nothing to reappraise.)
I was thinking of a reappraisal by Star Wars fans rather than critics. To the extent you can speak about "the fans" as a group, they currently seem to really loathe TLJ; in a decade or so, perhaps a younger cohort of fans will speak more kindly of it.
I think this is close to the opposite point of what you are making actually. Made-up worlds that last for decades and get continuous new infusions of content that don't suck tend to be extremely "lore" driven or rather "world" driven. Basically, the key to a believable fantasy or sci-fi world is a to build a world people live in and not to create some characters and build a world around them. Gotham City is an example of a world that exists for no reason except to have Batman in it. Now, Batman is fine but he gets *really* old really fast unless you have an extremely high tolerance for redundancy, incessant reboots, and gimmicks like cross-overs. Something like the Forgotten Realms works precisely because it's a giant world full of lore that people can build stories out of for D&D obviously but also for many successful games & books that have nothing directly to do with each other except the setting. (Aware many D&D books are garbage but there is plenty of D&D stuff that isn't).
The problem with the Clone Wars prequels is not that they go off and explore more of the world that was just mentioned in the first movies. The problem is that they are about the same people in the first movies. It's the Batman problem. The center of the universe isn't a super giant black hole or Coruscant or even the Force. It's somebody whose last name is Skywalker. It's extremely constraining. The Mandalorian was great *until* it brought in a bunch of recognized names. Something like the games in the Knights of the Old Republic series go way off into left field abandoning anyone from the movies and those are some of the best told Star Wars stories.
Forget Batman. What else is going on in Gotham? If the universe instantly becomes uninteresting when you say "Forget Batman" you have created a poor setting for expansion. If your universe can't sustain stories absent your original main characters, you've made a crap universe.
(To be clear, if all you intend to do is write one story, you can create Batman/Gotham and it's fine).
Noah writes, "if you’re in a hit-driven business, the only thing you can really do is make a bunch of stuff and hope people like it. But this is inherently a risky business. If the cost of producing a new franchise increases — as it has in television, where the shift to “prestige TV” has raised the bar for production values — then the risk is even greater."
I think that the big economic change is the splintering of the entertainment market (https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/splinter-groups). A truly original movie stands less of a chance of getting the attention of large numbers of people than was the case 50 years ago. Even the franchises only get the attention of a small fraction of consumers. The percentage of people who see a popular franchise movie today is much smaller than the percentage who saw "Gone with the Wind" or "Love Story" or "Titanic."
I am generally behind what you are saying in this piece, except for the adaptions part. Some of the greatest films in history are an adaption of a book or a play (for example, "The Godfather"), so I don't see where the problem lies, exactly. Also, your adaption examples are not very appropriate, in my opinion.
"Foundation" is the first adaption of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and the issue there is that it is just not a Foundation story, but rather using the IP as a rocket booster. I think it is obvious that the creators had an original story but couldn't find financing for it, which is why they adapted it to Asimov's novels to get a network endorsement. Meanwhile, "Shogun" is only the second adaption of James Clavell's novel, and the first one was almost 45 years ago (and didn't do as well as the new one), so not so many remember it. I noticed that even people in their mid-30s had no idea about what the story was about when the show premiered. Thus, I'd say it was worth doing it, as long as it was done well, which is very much the case.
Other than that, I fully agree, we are swamped by mediocre sequels that do not have much point artistically, but only financially, reducing risk for film studios (which I suppose is a thing). I do think there is a point of exhaustion for all this, and viewers will eventually stop watching these, making studios return to original programming. It is the same reason why I strongly dislike superhero comics - they tend to rehash the same characters over and over again. Sure, there are some interesting takes occasionally, but I much more wished they had opted for original characters, rather than a new look at old ones.
And of course, there are always exceptions, as some remakes are much better than the original - the early 2000s Battlestar Galactica TV series is a good example, in my opinion. Yet, these are usually rare, only confirming what we are seeing now - a bet on low financial risk to th expense of creativity.
One good move of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings franchise is they never tried to bring the lore of the Silmarillion to the screen. They let it remain legend and tradition—a fuzzy memory— instead of turning it into a "video at 11" moment. Even the brief flashback where Elrond describes his argument with Isildur 2000 years previously is a mistake in my opinion.
BTW, almost all of the literature of the Middle Ages is a rehash of old plots— King Arthur, Charlemagne, Robin Hood, etc.
One of my most steaming hot takes is that Peter Jackson isn’t actually all that great - he just made a few very good choices (basically just: follow the books very closely and to use a lot of landscape shots). Whenever he decided to deviate from the books (the Elrond/Isildur scene, the eye of Sauron, waterfalls of skulls, etc.) it was for the worse. As further evidence, I offer stories about choices he was stopped from making (eg, Sauron and Aragon fighting at the Black Gate) and what he did on the Hobbit.
I agree that his own ideas were not worth filming, but if you think it's a walk in the park to create a faithful and successful adaptation, you obviously have not tried.
Strong disagree on the implication that making a faithful adaptation that is enjoyable to watch is some kind of easy paint-by-numbers thing to do on any film, ESPECIALLY one with the scale and visual imagination of the LOTR trilogy. The series had infamously been stuck in development hell for decades because it was considered so difficult to adapt into anything that would be watchable, or that could gain a mainstream audience.
Aside from that, the fact that he managed to put those films out so consistently on schedule and under budget (which was not an enormous budget) without any playbook to follow or real hiccups is a testament to some pretty incredible professionalism. Also, I don't think even Peter Jackson would try to argue that the Hobbot trilogy was a success in his eyes. Everything I've heard about the production was that he was brought in late in the project and had to frantically improvise a lot of stuff on the fly to get it out in time, and that he was also cajoled by the studio into stretching it to a trilogy. That was the complete opposite of how LOTR was made where he spent years planning it out on a smaller scale so everything was ready to go when production finally started.
Definitely didn’t intend to suggest it’s paint-by-the-numbers! My claim would be something more like: Peter Jackson had a good but not great interpretation of LOTR. For what it’s worth, that’s a more generous assessment than Christopher Tolkien had!
Yeah, whoever decided to force "The Hobbit" to be a trilogy made a big mistake in artistic terms. (It's entirely possible that doing it that way would make more money for the studio, though, even if the movies themselves were worse.) Jackson did end up with enough material for two movies by showing other things that were going on in Middle-Earth during Bilbo's adventure, but the third movie, "The Battle of the Five Armies", really didn't need to exist at all. :/
Nice break... This is absolutely true: "So that’s my first piece of advice for franchises. Don’t fill in the world. Expand the world." ... two of the most interesting prequels were Better Call Saul and Young Sheldon... did exactly that. In Better Call Saul, the most interesting characters are Kim, Nacho, Lalo ... the Breaking Bad characters provide structure, but the compelling story is with the other characters. Same with Young Sheldon... sheldon is actually boring.... his brother, father, sister are much more interesting.
I agree that Better Call Saul is the gold standard for prequels. Noah's explanation makes sense to me:
>>>
Prequels that feature younger versions of our beloved characters are fine. The reason is that most fans can’t really imagine good backstories for characters — they need professional writers to fill in those details. Character backstory doesn’t constrain the imagination — it’s more like a flashback.
>>>
Overarching theme is how Jimmy turned into Saul.
But so many wonderful details - large and small - from Breaking Bad were fleshed out. Like how Hector ended up in a wheelchair, and where his bell came from.
It was all so cleverly written and extremely satisfying.
I mean, the Lalo character was a thrown out bit of lore from Breaking Bad, when Saul was confronted in the desert by a masked Jesse and Walt. Its a testament to Vince Gilligan's writing that the Lalo character turned out as interesting as he did - he just as easily could have become the Clone Wars equivalent in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.
yup.... same with the characters in Young Sheldon... they were all minor characters which got a significant arc. Maybe that's the key... use the minor characters to build a stronger thread in the subsequent series.
I agree that Better Call Saul is the gold standard for prequels. Noah's explanation makes sense to me:
>>>
Prequels that feature younger versions of our beloved characters are fine. The reason is that most fans can’t really imagine good backstories for characters — they need professional writers to fill in those details. Character backstory doesn’t constrain the imagination — it’s more like a flashback.
>>>
Overarching theme is how Jimmy turned into Saul.
But so many wonderful details - large and small - from Breaking Bad were fleshed out. Like how Hector ended up in a wheelchair, and where his bell came from.
It was all so cleverly written and extremely satisfying.
I mean, the Lalo character was a thrown out bit of lore from Breaking Bad, when Saul was confronted in the desert by a masked Jesse and Walt. Its a testament to Vince Gilligan's writing that the Lalo character turned out as interesting as he did - he just as easily could have become the Clone Wars equivalent in Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul.
I think you’re over complicating things. The Star Wars prequel trilogy (to start with your first example) was a good story ruined by awful writing. George Lucas was never a good writer of dialogue which hampered the whole exercise. He also made some bad choices, like making Anakin too young in Phantom Menace, and not giving Padme enough to do in general, which weakened the story. But the story itself is a necessary corrective to the original: clearly the Jedi screwed up pretty bad! Otherwise why would they be in exile?
The reason why spinoffs succeed or fail is entirely due to a simple question: can we write a good story and make fans care? The execution and the idea matter in equal measure. House of the Dragon is an adaption of existing material (there’s a whole book on it) and it does an amazing job because it’s well written and makes me pity Viserys, makes me feel the misogyny at the heart of Westeros, and turns a meh plot into a tragedy. I’d argue House of the Dragon is superior to Game of Thrones.
There isn’t any secret sauce. It’s just writing and execution. Same as any other TV show, movie or book project.
I really struggle with the (very common) idea that the prequels were, somehow, a good story sabotaged by bad writing. The prequels were poorly paced, poorly acted and poorly directed, in addition to being poorly written. That's most of the criteria on which we judge movies. Sure, we can probably imagine an alternate version of the prequels telling the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker in a manner that didn't suck. But it's not like that version of the story is hiding in the actually existing prequels.
I liked Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith. There’s plenty to like about them, but some parts didn’t work. The Padme-Anakin dynamic was bad. The actors lacked chemistry, the writing was awful, and it’s a crucial part of the story.
But I don’t agree that the movies were all bad. I don’t agree with Noah that the Kenobi-Skywalker dynamic is bad; I think it’s one of the better parts of the prequels. I think they directed and edited them well. It really was bad writing
One thing on which I think we agree, based on your earlier comment: the decision to spend 1/3 of the trilogy with an 8 year-old Anakin was a real blunder. It makes Phantom Menace feel like more of a prologue to the trilogy rather than a part of the story itself, and it led to the Anakin/Padme and Anakin/Palpatine storylines feeling unnecessarily rushed and abrupt. It also introduced the wholly unnecessary ick factor of Padme falling in love with a kid she first met when she was a teenager and he was 8. All of the 8 year-old Anakin stuff should've been confined to the first half of Phantom Menace, if not eliminated altogether; and Padme shouldn't have met Anakin until he was already a teen played by Hayden Christiansen.
I think the more general point is Anakin should have been a teenager when we met him. His emotions would have felt more real, the acting would have been better (child actors have a tough job) and the relationship hints could have started earlier.
I actually think that Padme falling for the kid she met at 8 years old could work...but it needs to be earned. Earning your moments requires execution.
And this story called for a good political thriller which we absolutely did not get.
This is Episode 2 as much as anything but the wonder of the prequels is that the absolutely best special effects money could buy could not exceed a competent Hollywood director who simply knew how to tell a story.
I really struggle with it for the opposite reason: it is a good story with good writing, and its dialogues are only wooden where they should be wooden. Anakin was _supposed_ to be wooden and inept in flirting, that's part of the lesson.
I think they're really good, highly resonant films, that only get better as the years go by. They're neither badly written nor acted, aside from some of the romantic stuff in the second film, which definitely did misfire. The acting style is more in tune with much older films, and I believe that was an artistic choice. Their crime is to confound conventional expectations of what a blockbuster movie is supposed to be. In my opinion they're better than the original trilogy in certain respects.
Yes. Episode 2 Anakin isn't in love, he's an obsessed stalker.
Like the dog
Bingo. Everything it tries to do it executes either to either mediocre or poor standards. And the story? I guess it could be good in the hands of someone who understood how to milk it for its drama. Kid in over his head, too immature, gets too much power and reacts very negatively to being thwarted and losing the things he cares about most? A little cliche, but well-executed, it could be a good movie. That's that's not the story they told; they told a different story and the story they told didn't ring true not just because of poor acting; I just never felt like it earned any of its characters' actions. Even the basic plotting in the prequels was mediocre at best.
See I disagree. The point of the prequels is that the past wasn’t as good as people thought it was: Anakin was meant to be a tragic figure who was trying to do the right thing by his wife and was hamstrung by the stuck up Jedi Order who don’t allow their pawns to feel.
Fair enough. I'd still argue it was all so poorly executed that it ultimately didn't matter what the overarching story was.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether the prequels had a 'good story' but I think your basic point is a good one that these derivative stories mostly tend to succeed or fail on their own merits. Like the rules Noah is trying to make may apply to *him* but I'm not sure they apply generally. For instance while the star wars prequels aren't well-rememberef the two clone wars cartoons generally are and they focused on nothing *but* filling in the clone wars. Also prior to Andor the best of the disney-era star wars was Rogue One which focused entirely on fleshing out a single sentence from the first opening crawl and had only brief cameos from any of the original characters. It isn't a coincidence that the two best disney star wars shows had the same writer.
I agree this is a large part of it. Most of the reason why sequels and prequels are bad is simple regression to the mean. Sturgeon's Law is 90% of everything is garbage. Every time you make a new piece of media, there's a 90% chance it'll be bad.
But I think Noah also touches on something true. If writers followed a few simple principles, they can raise their odds above 10% a lot. With better writing, I think a show can be good despite filling in instead of expanding lore, and can absolutely try a new genre style that's also a hit. But it's a lot more reliable to not bother focusing on filling in lore, and to ease fans into the new genre.
I think many modern franchises make a mistake of thinking they can rely on "fan service" to carry the day. Maybe that's fine for something that's always been really formulaic, like Dragonball Z, where you CAN have nearly 300 episodes where 7 minutes of the episode is just smack talk and flashing screen effects and hair flapping as everyone powers up, and kids eat their afterschool snack while only half watching.
I heard an interview recently, I think it was with James Patterson, who kind of boiled down his recipe for success was to leave just enough unresolved tension or mystery in his books to allow readers to feel both satisfied with the conclusion, but still have a sense that there are threads of the narrative for them to continue to stew on.
I think smart writing puts the audience in a position of "wanting more" more often, while lazy/simple writing is just leading you down a narrative path where you kind of already know what the outcomes are going to be, and if they do try to throw in a twist, it's often not that compelling. Lore can fall into this trap more easily, as writers feel compelled to stay true to the established historical material, and are afraid to push the community outside it's comfort zone or draw the ire of the ubergeeks for some perceived sin against the universe.
When I think about shows like "Bodkin" or "The Tourist" you can definitely point to individual scenes where the dialogue feels a little awkward or pretentious (perhaps intentionally so), but the overall arc of the narrative has enough intrigue, red herrings, character missteps, and general calamity that you don't know how it's all going to come together until the end, and they stick the landing.
Thank you, I wish I had written that.
If what George RR Martin writes is fantasy…why do characters say “good morrow” like it takes place in medieval times??
The father that Leia was talking about Obi-Wan "serving" was her adoptive father, Bail Organa. She didn't know Anakin was her father at that point.
Bail Organa / Jimmy Smits erasure
I think the biggest problem with the Star Wars sequels is that the films were clearly at war with each other. The most obvious example is Rey, the first film sets up "Who is Rey, why does she have force powers?" as a question, the second says "She's anyone, she's no-one, no special lineage", and then the third film says "No, she's the daughter of a clone of the Emperor", but that's far from the only one. When a film set something up to be resolved in the next film, the next film knocked it down.
Compare how Empire Strikes Back tells Luke that his father is Vader, he rejects it, and then comes to terms with it in Return of the Jedi. If that had been the sequels, they'd have told him he was right to reject it and would have made "No, I am your father" from one of the iconic scenes of all of film, into just a lie told by the evil Darth Vader.
So that makes for a good and useful rule: make sure all your creative team are on the same page and not fighting each other.
The "at war with themselves" aspect of the sequels became an issue only with Rise of Skywalker, I think, and then only because Lucasfilm overreacted to the tantrum that some fans threw over the Last Jedi. The people who hated TLJ often complain, for example, that it completely trashed Luke's character. But... in Force Awakens, we were already told, by Han Solo himself, that Luke had basically run away and hid after Ben turned into Kylo. Which makes Luke's early hostility to Rey--flipping the lightsaber over his shoulder, "did you think I came to the most remote corner of the galaxy because I wanted to be found?", "did you think I was going to pick up a laser sword and take on the whole First Order?"--the only way TLJ could've gone with Luke's character if it took Force Awakens seriously. At yet the fans flipped out at what a "betrayal" of Luke's character it was. Plus, there's nothing wrong with showing a middle-aged guy bitter at how his life has gone off the road and into a ditch!
Similarly, a lot of the other big fan complaints boiled down to head canon about how Star Wars trilogies "must" play out (Snoke had to be Darth Plageus or someone else from the prequels! And you can't kill him in the second movie! And the star of the trilogy has to be genetic force royalty!). The problem with Rise of Skywalker wasn't just that it was inconsistent with TLJ (although that was a huge problem), it was that it showed Lucasfilm had so little idea of what it wanted to do with Star Wars that it basically caved to the online rantings of Millennial fans who thought the prequels were great movies held back only by bad dialogue.
>Snoke had to be Darth Plageus or someone else from the prequels! And you can't kill him in the second movie! And the star of the trilogy has to be genetic force royalty!
Contra Noah's tastes, the diehard fans – the ones that hate the sequels and the spinoff series – are absolutely obsessed with "lore." The people losing their shit over The Acolyte, for example, are hating on it for damaging the "lore," disrespecting the "lore," showing insufficient obeisance to the "lore." It's the same thing with Snoke, as if the thing that would make him a good character would have been to turn him into a walking Wookiepedia article.
Clearly would not know anything about that. (Spouse watched every episode of Picard even though understood that some fans would be upset that it messed with/subverted canon)
Eh? The Acolyte is a Star Wars series.
Comment was meant to say that Star Trek fans have their own problems with disrespect for canon even if Star Wars fans are more loud and obnoxious.
That probably was a major problem in the end. This was also kind of a problem with the originals. It's clear that Lucas didn't originally write Leia and Luke to be siblings since the first film has a subplot with a romantic interest between them which is retroactively kind of jarring, and I'm not sure he even intended Darth Vader to be Luke's father from the beginning, but it still followed an overall vision from one writer. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson almost seemed to have diametrically opposed visions of how the franchise was supposed to work so there's a weird boomerang watching the three films where they don't really feel coherent as a group, and it probably would have been better if they had just stuck with either of the visions than switching back and forth.
There was a great comment I saw somewhere: "The only interesting conflict in the sequels was the one between JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson".
Great one-liner
I think Lucas now claims that he always knew Vader was Luke's father, but I'll never believe it. I'm old enough to have seen the original trilogy during its initial release, and the whole "I am your father" thing came so out of left field that a lot of fans spent the time between ESB and ROTJ assuming that Vader was, in fact, lying to Luke. I remember being mildly disappointed during ROTJ when Obi Wan did his whole "when I said Vader betrayed and killed your father, I meant he METAPHORICALLY betrayed and killed him" routine, which has always felt like a very strange retcon.
My headcanon is that Obi Won was lying about Vader out of fear that Luke might turn out like Vader. Then he came up with an excuse why what he said was technically not lying when called on it.
Yeah, I've thought something similar, and think it's utterly bizarre that Lucas did his "certain point of view" nonsense instead of just having Obi-Wan admit that he lied to Luke because he didn't think Luke was ready for the truth.
Yes, that would make sense, except that Obi Wan would actually just say "Sorry, I was worried you would turn out like Anakin so I fudged the truth".
So I am guessing OP has it right, Lucas changed that for TESB
Yeah I remember thinking that when rewatching the series a few years ago. There are no hints at all in the first film that Luke's dad turned out to be a bad guy at all, and if that was the point it seems like it would have been something he'd want to drop a few actual breadcrumbs for. I'm fairly sure that A New Hope was written to really just be an entirely standalone sci-fi film. It has a full three act structure and a happy ending, and would have been fine ending there. The original title was even just "Star Wars", no subtitle or episode number. Then after its enormous success, probably ESB and ROTJ were commissioned as a pair and Lucas started writing it as a bigger story.
Some people also like to point out that "Vader" is similar the German word "Vater", meaning "father", but even that feels like a real stretch. They don't pronounce it a similar way, and nobody else has German-coded names. I always took it as just being inspired by "invader".
ESB and ROTJ were not commissioned as a pair. That wouldn't start until the Back to the Future sequels in 1990.
Relative to today, sequels were far, far more rare. In Hollywood, all movies were commissioned individually until 1978's Superman fell backwards into splitting into two parts. Sequels became more palatable once people could watch a previously released movie whenever they want.
That wasn't true in 1977 - practically no one had a VCR at the time. I remember the theatrical re-release of Star Wars in 1980, and it was pandemonium. People were lined up around the block - again! After seeing this upon arrival at the cinema, I ended up getting a ticket for 'Going Ape' instead (not my choice). The only thing memorable about that film was not getting to see Star Wars.
Still, I can imagine that Lucas at least was writing the story for Empire with a thought that after the success of the first film, it would probably be enough of a hit for him to have a good chance at getting a third film greenlit. The story really ends on a cliffhanger so from a narrative point of view it would have been a very unsatisfying ending, and I'd have to imagine that he at least had some outline for a third film.
As it happens, I recall as far back as 1980 claims by Lucas that he had 9 stories planned.
However, that's not what I was discussing. We were talking about commissioning (i.e. financing and backing a film).
ANH was undoubtedly filmed to *work* as a stand alone film, but the whole, "gEoRGe lUCaS NevEr hAd aNY iDEa of MAkiNg oThEr SW fiLMs uNTiL aFtEr ANH," is clearly bullshit because you can find all the major iterations of Lucas' draft scripts on-line (e.g., "Luke Starkiller" etc.) and there is a huge amount of stuff that didn't make it into the original film as shot.
I haven't read those, but I'd expect almost any script to have multiple re-writes with different ideas for a story, especially for something as high-concept as the first Star Wars film. It wouldn't surprise me if there were plenty of loose ideas that he brainstormed and put in at some point, but then took out later because he didn't think they'd work in the story. It also wouldn't surprise me if later on, when he was pitching a sequel, he returned to some ideas that he thought of but couldn't fit into the first movie. Like, it wouldn't be surprising if a previous version of the story had Luke doing a lightsaber fight with Darth Vader, or getting training from an alien, and that turned into Yoda in a sequel, or even if he just came up with some strange character or place names and then decided to use them later on, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was planned out like that from the start, unless you're saying those earlier drafts had pretty good approximations of the later three-film narrative arc.
I suppose it was left with an ending open enough that he was giving himself room to write further (since the Empire and particularly Darth Vader remain decidedly undefeated by the end), but I still find it hard to believe that the general arc of the trilogy was mapped out by the time the first one was released, especially with stuff like Vader being Luke's father or Leia being his sister.
From everything I've read about the production, the huge success of the film came as a surprise to most people too. This is before my time, but my understanding in the context it was made, this kind of sci-fi was generally considered pretty schlocky and confined to being a genre film sold to to weird nerds and pre-pubescent boys. Lucas had a hard time getting the idea financed and was turned down by several studios, even with his recent big success with American Graffiti (which was what eventually convinced the president of Fox to take a chance on it). Production was infamously difficult and ran way over budget too and the studio threatened to cut their losses and can the production at one point due to the costs, and Lucas suffered pretty severe stress during production. It wouldn't surprise me if Lucas thought it was very likely that no studio would ever let him attempt something like this again.
I think it’s rather obvious that Lucas was planning a good old tale of revenge when he made the first film. Vader killed Luke’s father, Vader got away at the end of the film, and there’s no where that story is going that doesn’t end in Vader’s death at Luke’s hands. While future films were always a bit of a long shot, I can believe that he had his trilogy roughly mapped out, as well as some ideas for a prequel trilogy. But the first sequel took an planned twist, and the most popular film of all time morphed into a story that would linger in the culture for generations.
I do wonder what Lucas originally had in mind for his sequel trilogy.
> I'm not sure he even intended Darth Vader to be Luke's father from the beginning
He didn't; the idea that Vader was Luke's father wasn't even in early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back, it didn't come about till later. (And if Lucas always intended Vader to be Luke's father, why does he seemingly have no particular reaction to Luke in the first movie like he does in the second?) You can read "The Secret History of Star Wars" by Michael Kaminski for a detailed examination of this (he has a whole appendix specifically about this question).
"When a film set something up to be resolved in the next film, the next film knocked it down."
The problem is that JJ Abrams is extremely well known for the schtick of "Introduce mysterious thing, vaguely imply it will be important later, but don't actually have any idea or plan for whatever the hell that is". It was his running gag on Lost, Alias, and Fringe.
And presumably Johnson knew this, and said "OK, fuck it, I'll just resolve that little tidbit for him"
And it's hilarious that a) the studio and b) the fans latched onto THIS as the thing that is wrong with TLJ, and not the fact that Johnson decided to:
- completely sideline Finn, sending him off on to Casino Disney World on an unimportant side quest that pounds its "message" hamfistedly on the viewer
- turn Poe into a moron who has no agency, and who ends up screwing over everyone. Like.... we GET it. Characters like Poe or Solo would never be given this kind of latitude or treatment in a real military... but that whole plot line would only make sense if you wanted TLJ to actually be SciFi Military Fiction, but you clearly didn't. so you injected some "realism" into a film in a way that ruins the character, but doesn't actually make the film any more realistic (or entertaining)
- saved Leia in a really stupid way, when the entire audience knows that Carrie is dead, and you could have given her character a hero's death with a tiny bit of editing
- introduced a "redemption arc" for Kylo/Ben, an asinine idea after having him kill Han. I actually thought him killing Han in TFA was one of better scenes, it seemed like they were saying "Ok, we aren't going to copy EVERYTHING from the original trilogy, this guy isn't redeemable". It is also a running joke with everyone that Vader's redemption was silly (How many essays have you read with the "He killed billions, but OH, he saved his own son, he's cool now!" joke?). Repeating that theme just honestly felt like they were trolling.
I mean... there is just soooo much wrong with that movie, and so the studio "fixes" it in the stupidest imaginable ways.
“Yes, and…” doesn’t just apply to improv! (Of course, when you’re writing slowly, you can sometimes say “no”, but it takes a lot of planning and structure to make that make sense, rather than just be disjointed.)
I'm going to stand up for The Last Jedi (and also despair about the state of media discourse in your part of the internet if nobody ever explained why subverting tropes is useful).
Subverting tropes isn't a good thing per se, but it's a tool that lets you launch the story in a new and interesting direction. It can build tension (you thought you knew how the story was "supposed to go," and now you dont know what happens next), and it can let you look at familiar patterns in a new light and freshen them up for a modern audience. Which is a really good thing when you're writing for the most familiar franchise on the planet!
Like, what was the big problem everyone had with Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens? It's that he was basically a shitty version of Darth Vader. He's copying Vader's appearance, he's got a little shrine to Vader's helmet, he's working as the enforcer to a shitty version of Palpatine, but he's just not as cool as Vader and we all know it. Then in The Force Awakens, he's like "okay, this isn't working for me, I'm going to stop pretending to be Darth Vader and start being my own man." That's not just a subversion for the sake of tropes, it's character growth. Kylo Ren's new nihilistic philosophy makes him a different sort of villain who does different things from Vader and Palpatine.
And Rey is going through a similar journey - she wants to become a Jedi, but she can't do it by learning from Luke Skywalker, because Luke is mired in his past failures and she needs to find her own path. (Yoda basically spells this out with his little speech about how every master sees their students grow beyond them.) Both her and Kylo Ren want to make a break from the past, which is why they have that connection and why Kylo thinks she'll join him.
By pointedly refusing to copy the original trilogy's storyline, they get both a solid character arc for this movie and the setup for an interesting sequel. You can see the broad strokes of a redemption arc getting set up between Rey and Kylo, but it's putting its own twist on it instead of just rehashing Luke vs Vader.
The fact that Rey doesn't have noble birth isn't relevant to her on a personal level, but it's *symbolic*, it's another indication that the past is dead and the main characters need to fight their own battles. There's no ancient legacy that Rey can call on to win, she has to deal with Kylo on her own.
I really like The Last Jedi. It doesn't so much subvert expectations as it destroys lore, which... well, had to happen after several decades of compounding and conflicting canon. Star Wars has always been, essentially, the family drama of the Skywalkers and the Last Jedi is the first movie installment to broaden the scope. The scene at the end where the stable boy calls the broom to his hand is the key: anyone can have the Force, not just this one family. It also reduces the rebellion to a small handful... they can rebuild it any which way we like. what was so depressing about the final movie was, finally freed from the weight of canon, Star Wars ran right back to it because it had no ideas.
But I also like that it changes the definition of heroism. Finn is willing to die for the cause and the movie sets up his noble sacrifice, only for Rose to stop him so he can do the harder thing: living. It's a movie about hope and the simple power of surviving. You can't kill an idea.
I also enjoy the climax, that Luke saves the day through Jedi jujitsu. He uses their strength against them, and instead of fighting back, he gives until they break. Luke, much like Yoda in empire, is broken by his prior failures, and he steps up in the end, but really the next generation have to save themselves. He can only provide the path, or buy them time.
But I'm also not a huge Star Wars guy. I didn't feel any betrayal because I couldn't be betrayed. I liked The Last Jedi because it was a really good movie with themes I enjoyed. I don't really care if it worked as a "Star Wars movie", which... I'm pretty sure it didn't, based on fan reactions.
I mean, but we already knew anyone could have the force from the original trilogy. Unless Yoda was supposed to be some gnarled old great great grandfather of Luke. The trilogy just happened to focus on the Skywalkers because it was dramatically compelling to have the family dynamic.
The Rey - Kylo Ren was the least objectionable part of the story. That was underwhelming in execution, but otherwise fine.
It was literally everything else that was awful. Finn was turned into a joke, everything Rose did was awful (writing problem, not the actress), the slow space chase, ignomiously killing of Ackbar and having unknown admiral do a new hyperspace kamikaze (why didn't they do that to the death star?), and the entire B plot.
The frustrating thing is that Disney *can* do good star wars...just see Rogue One and Andor.
I think Andor is the best of the Star Wars universe, but it's also a very obvious divergence from the core franchise in giving us a "hero" who we are left to wonder through almost the entirety of the series... is he really a good guy?
A pretty complicated character, navigating a complicated series of events as best as he can figure, and often doing unheroic things, is a lot more relatable I think to a modern audience than the classic hero tropes Lucas leaned on for the original series. In classic Star Wars we know who the badies are from the moment they walk on screen, via John Williams' score telling you "oh shit.. this guy is bad news."
Andor is shades of gray and nuance and imperfect people, but you still want Cassian to turn out to be noble enough in the end.
But because it is the back story of the character from Rogue One we know that he does turn out to be noble enough. We also know that Mon Mothma turns out to be a good enough character. We are interested in these characters having actually to make moral choices to get there.
That's true enough I guess. But as a casual fan who only watched Rogue One once, I guess I hadn't already filed away in my memory that "Andor is a good guy."
So, I guess maybe in that sense I got to enjoy the show even more, from a baseline of relative ignorance. :D
I kind of had the same sense with the Mandalorian. Boba Fett is of course a "known entity" in one sense, and has probably gotten his fair share of story telling in the novels and The Clone Wars... but unless you've deep dove that material, he's still quite mysterious. Seeing him "exposed" from heartless bounty hunter to basically a version of my Dad (claiming he hates cats, while being the one person in the house feeding the cat slices of bologna from the fridge) is a surprising but also relatable turn.
>The fact that Rey doesn't have noble birth isn't relevant to her on a personal level,
I would say it is. What Rey wants is for her parents' abandonment to mean something, for being an orphan to not hurt. She spends the first act of TFA waiting around for them to return, the assumption being they had a good reason to leave and so will some day some back. In TLJ she seeks knowledge of her parents in order to understand herself, and to understand her symbolic parents, Luke and the Jedi, who she similarly holds out hope will return.
Her parents being nobodies who "sold you off for drinking money" is the worst thing she could hear. It means there was no point to it, no noble intention behind them leaving her. They were just shitty people who abandoned her and she's truly alone. She's going to have to figure out all this Jedi stuff by herself.
The real crime of TROS making her Palpatine 's granddaughter is that it switches her parents back to decent people who left her for noble reasons. It"s typical of Abrams to grasp the surface-level attribute of something but misunderstand or plain ignore the subtext.
I agree with the point on subverting expectations. There was a real backlash to the idea when TLJ came out, because so many who liked it praised that aspect of it, and it started as an annoying, pretentious, anti-fun type of thing. But it's generally more interesting to twist some kind of cliché or trope in an unexpected way than it is to just run it again. I get that there's also a comforting aspect to watching something and pretty much knowing where it's all going, it's partly why people often have some movies or TV shows that they will watch repeatedly, but it does get a bit dull too sometimes and really lowers the stakes when you can easily predict where everything is going from the start of a story.
I think Game of Thrones, for example, would never have become so popular if it wasn't for the fact that in the earlier seasons, it sometimes just killed off major characters without warning. Normally in TV series, we expect deaths to only befall either minor characters, or secondary characters who's time has come and who's death's are pretty well-telegraphed, and the climax of some kind of arc, or else we might expect fakeout deaths where the person actually comes back. Early seasons of GOT ditched that template and just offed characters right in what looked like the middle or beginning of their narrative arcs. It kept people on their toes, nobody felt safe, and people were eager to find out where it was going.
Part of why I think the later seasons didn't hit the same way is that this just didn't feel like it happened as much. There became a core set of characters who were too safe, and as a result were just kind of going through the motions.
But Benioff and Weiss overdid this. They killed off characters who are still very much alive in the books for the sake of keeping the plot manageable. I also will not forgive that it is Sansa who is raped when in the books it is an entirely different character and I don't think the Hugo voters did either.
I wanted to get HBO in order to watch this show but I knew it was going to be too TV-MA in subject matter for spouse. So I have seen the Hugo-nominated episodes and nothing else. They were all well done.
Well, in the books we know Jeyne Poole a little bit and know that she is very innocent and very silly so what happens to her is sickening even if we have not caught up with her for a book or two. The show could simply have reintroduced her as Sansa's friend in a few lines of dialogue. My point is that even George R. R. Martin so far has wanted to protect Sansa more than the showrunners.
The Last Jedi, which came out right in the middle of our period of social unrest and in the early Trump years, was Ground Zero for a kind of tiring culture war you see today.
To Last Jedi supporters, you had to like it if you wanna be a good progressive, otherwise you're one of *them* (aka MAGA, anti-woke YouTubers, etc.). And the other side didn't do themselves any favors by relentlessly harassing poor Kelly Marie Tran.
If you're just a normal person who had issues with the movie from a filmmaking/story perspective, it was a lonely time.
Yeah, but that was but a moment in time as Rise of Skywalker overshadowed Last Jedi by being truly awful.
It's interesting to compare the American approach to Japan, which also has a lot of long-running franchises (Macross, Gundam, Dragon Ball and Naruto and ONE PIECE, and the big granddaddy of them all, Godzilla.) My sense is that while there's a huge reliance on existing IP there's a lot more acceptance of taking it in new directions. Many of the Gundam series are set in alternate timelines/realities, for instance. The Japanese versus American approaches to Godzilla are instructive in this regard, with the last three or so US releases increasingly incoherent and lore-laden, and the most recent two Japanese ones (Shin Gojira and Gojira Minus One) being totally unrelated -- yet incredibly critically and financially successful.
This is something I'd like to see Noah dig into given both his status as a nerd and a Japanophile!
I kind of wonder how much of that though is just that these are lower-value productions in the first place, so the financial risks of doing something new aren't as high. In American comics, even with established characters, there are often various reboots or crossovers or re-interpretations that can be a bit more creative or inventive, but they get away with that because the money in the comic series is nowhere near as big, or the audience as broad, as for the franchise films with the same characters. If everyone hates a run of a comic, or an anime series that cost relatively little money to make and produce, not that big a deal. If everyone hates or just doesn't care about your $200m blockbuster film, that's much bigger catastrophe.
Yes, this seems absolutely correct. Budget expansion is accompanied by a lot of efforts to derisk.
In the days when franchises weren't as big, in addition to the fact that more movies made it to theaters on comparatively small budgets, I think having a star actor or director was one way of derisking. "Spielberg" is a sort of franchise unto himself.
After they had a movie bomb, they weren't seen as being as useful for derisking and they didn't get the budgets. E.g. John Carpenter catapulted to success with "Halloween" on a shoestring budget, and then started to get progressively larger budgets. After he had (cult classic!) "Big Trouble in Little China" bomb with a ~$20MM budget, his next few movies ended up with ~$3MM budgets.
A director’s contract is basically that they must provide 90 minutes of usable footage…I find that funny especially after watching Tropic Thunder. I know someone that spent time with a very famous director and two very famous screenwriters…the screenwriters are generally the most important people in the collaborative process and they generally don’t have much to do with sequels. And Solo was the product of a weak script by a famous screenwriter that was greenlit and then the producer took the screenwriter’s side over the directors. That is a classic “Concorde Fallacy” in which the script was weak even though the characters were strong and so you stop throwing good money after bad. The director she knew ended up in movie jail because his comeback movie was a $40 million horror film when Blumhouse makes profitable horror films for $5 million…so his management team set him up for failure as far as I’m concerned.
Japanese anime productions tend to rely on production committees, which spread the risk over a number of stakeholders (traditionally, TV stations, record companies, publishers, toy companies, etc.) But it also forces them to share profits, which has prevented any studio in Japan from growing to the size of a Disney or Pixar or what have you. Netflix money changed this to a degree but it's still really hard for an anime studio to truly grow.
It also helps that a lot of the Japanese IP continuations are made by people who aren’t embarrassed by the source material. For example, Godzilla Minus One subverted the ending of the original Godzilla in a *good* way.
The Japanese approach you describe also makes me think of the original understanding of Legend of Zelda, and how I still prefer to understand it: a series of very distinct but thematically-related retellings of the same basic story (or legend, if you will).
Nintendo later came up with background lore that connects all the games, for people who NEED this, but it's very subtle, there's very little in the games directing you towards it, and I don't think Nintendo lets it dictate any of their design decisions for new games.
Now you're making me wonder if this interest/ability to start over again in thematically similar but different worlds laid the groundwork for Japan's pop-culture fad of the moment, "isekai" content, where the protagonist slips out of the real world into one better suited to their personality.
I opened this thinking it was gonna be about McDonalds and Burger King lol
I know this is just anecdotal and I assume the people Noah talks to about Star Wars are probably mostly other fans of science fiction in general, but most people I know or hear about thought the Star Wars sequels were generally fine. Obviously they had detractors, the last film in particular seemed to get a pretty tepid response and I don't recall it even making that much of a splash, and The Last Jedi was very contentious, but the general appraisal seems to be that they were not as great as the originals, but decent enough and better than the prequels with their clumsy dialogue and tedious pacing (although there is now a subculture of people who seem to genuinely like the kitcshy sloppiness of the prequels which overlaps a lot with the haters of the prequels).
I don't think many people think they were landmark films that will have a legacy for decades like The Empire Strikes Back, more that they were just fine entertaining franchise films, in a similar way to a later-series Fast and Furious, a pre-covid Marvel movie, or the Star Trek 2009 reboot film series.
I agree with all of this, and it certainly suggests a pattern whereby everyone loves the Star Wars of their youth and hates the Star Wars of their adulthood. So, Gen X loved the original trilogy but hated the prequels; Millennials love the prequels but hate the sequels; and, perhaps, in 10-15 years, Gen Z will be passionately defending the sequels.
I'm especially curious to see if we get a big reappraisal of Last Jedi in the coming decade, simply because it's so visually distinctive in so many places. While his writing can be spotty, Rian Johnson really knows how to frame a shot, in a way that hasn't been seen in a Star Wars movie since Empire.
The Last Jedi is half the best Star Wars movie because of Rian Johnson’s visuals (the sword fight in Sokes throne room! The ramming speed scene!) , half one of the least of the series because every character except from Luke, Ray, and Kilo Ren act like idiots.
I think Johnson fell victim to the idea that Rey, Poe, Finn and Ren all had to have their own character arcs that resulted in cognizable character growth. This worked well enough for Rey and Ren, but with both Poe and Finn, Johnson took too ham-fisted an approach in which they achieved their growth by being either punished (Poe) or tutored (Finn) by characters who really didn't serve any other dramatic purpose than to show that they were acting stupidly. The fact that both of those "mentor" characters were women came at an... unfortunate time in the culture wars.
Man, those were grim times for anyone who loved film or Television criticism on the internet.
Wait, do young millennials like the prequels? The (admittedly elder) millennials I know who camped out in line for a Wednesday opening hated them.
Every prequel fan I've ever met has been a younger Millennial; they've also been the most passionately anti-sequel.
Additional anecdotal evidence: all the Gen Z Star Wars fans who are my contemporaries hate the prequel trilogies
Yeah, I don't think I've ever met anyone who particularly likes the prequels, unless you count simply thinking ROTS is OK.
I am an old millennial and really not much of a Star Wars fan, though.
RotS is the second best of the "Saga" films, IMO, third best overall ("Rogue One" is second best overall; TESB is #1). To summarize my view of it, I agree with a review I read years ago that said RotS starts out with all the weaknesses of the other prequel films (slapstick comedy, terrible dialogue, etc.) and then halfway through turns into the best SW film of all time.
There probably is some part of that. We definitely tend to like the things we saw as kids and look back on them more fondly than things we only see as adults. I think that the originals benefitted also from being a fresh new series, so people didn't have a prevoius entry to compare it to (obviously Episodes 5 and 6 were compared to the original, but it didn't have the time to become so universally ingrained into culture), and by several different generations of kids growing up seeing them on VHS before any other movies or TV shows came out.
Tbh though for the prequels, I'm the age where the prequels came out when I was a kid. I got my dad to take me to each one in the cinema, and while I didn't *dislike* them, I also wouldn't say they made a huge impression or I remember a lot of other kids talking about them. I think the story was really too confusing for a young audience, and I remember even then being aware that adults who liked Star Wars considered them very disappointing. As an adult when I watched them again, it was pretty obvious why these were not as popular the whole time. My impression is that a lot of the modern fans of the prequels are people who weren't yet born (or old enough to see them) when they came out and grew up only knowing them as being generally panned, so liking them is sort of a cheeky rebellious thing. Another element is a sort of The Room-esque "so bad it's good" fandom. There's a reasonably large reddit community called r/PrequelMemes which originally poked fun at them by making memes using the awkward dialogue and delivery of lines from the films, but over time kind of morphed into people actually just liking the movies.
I think that was probably also bolstered by the general anti-woke backlash to the sequel series. A lot of the early positive reception to the sequels, especially The Force Awakens, praised it for being more like the originals than the prequels, with a faster pace, more action, simpler plot, more quippy lines, more practical costumes and effects, and being more "polished" overall. For people who hated it, a lot became open to re-examining the prequels in this light and praising them for the opposite. Stuff like "yeah it was very different to what people expect from Star Wars, but at least it was trying to do something new instead of just trying to imitate the original" or "sure the writing is clunky, but at least it represents the vision and intentions of an auteur director and not some overly-polished and focus-grouped film that was designed by committee".
"Stuff like "yeah it was very different to what people expect from Star Wars, but at least it was trying to do something new instead of just trying to imitate the original" or "sure the writing is clunky, but at least it represents the vision and intentions of an auteur director and not some overly-polished and focus-grouped film that was designed by committee"."
It seems pretty clear to me that the prequels were very much trying to imitate the originals. They were simply executed so poorly that they seemed like a different thing.
The prequels were very clearly *NOT* trying to imitate the originals.
If you look at a lot of the Lucas commentary, he talks about how they are supposed to "rhyme" -- he wanted to make them echoes of one another.
How can TLJ get a positive "big reappraisal" when film critics overwhelmingly praised it in the first place? (It's basically the inverse of "Fight Club" getting no negative "big reappraisal" for its 20th anniversary in 2019 because film critics hated it when it originally came out anyway, so there was nothing to reappraise.)
I was thinking of a reappraisal by Star Wars fans rather than critics. To the extent you can speak about "the fans" as a group, they currently seem to really loathe TLJ; in a decade or so, perhaps a younger cohort of fans will speak more kindly of it.
Kudos for the mention of Chronicles of Prydain. And for understanding what made TNG work so well.
I think this is close to the opposite point of what you are making actually. Made-up worlds that last for decades and get continuous new infusions of content that don't suck tend to be extremely "lore" driven or rather "world" driven. Basically, the key to a believable fantasy or sci-fi world is a to build a world people live in and not to create some characters and build a world around them. Gotham City is an example of a world that exists for no reason except to have Batman in it. Now, Batman is fine but he gets *really* old really fast unless you have an extremely high tolerance for redundancy, incessant reboots, and gimmicks like cross-overs. Something like the Forgotten Realms works precisely because it's a giant world full of lore that people can build stories out of for D&D obviously but also for many successful games & books that have nothing directly to do with each other except the setting. (Aware many D&D books are garbage but there is plenty of D&D stuff that isn't).
The problem with the Clone Wars prequels is not that they go off and explore more of the world that was just mentioned in the first movies. The problem is that they are about the same people in the first movies. It's the Batman problem. The center of the universe isn't a super giant black hole or Coruscant or even the Force. It's somebody whose last name is Skywalker. It's extremely constraining. The Mandalorian was great *until* it brought in a bunch of recognized names. Something like the games in the Knights of the Old Republic series go way off into left field abandoning anyone from the movies and those are some of the best told Star Wars stories.
Forget Batman. What else is going on in Gotham? If the universe instantly becomes uninteresting when you say "Forget Batman" you have created a poor setting for expansion. If your universe can't sustain stories absent your original main characters, you've made a crap universe.
(To be clear, if all you intend to do is write one story, you can create Batman/Gotham and it's fine).
This seems right to me.
Noah writes, "if you’re in a hit-driven business, the only thing you can really do is make a bunch of stuff and hope people like it. But this is inherently a risky business. If the cost of producing a new franchise increases — as it has in television, where the shift to “prestige TV” has raised the bar for production values — then the risk is even greater."
I think that the big economic change is the splintering of the entertainment market (https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/splinter-groups). A truly original movie stands less of a chance of getting the attention of large numbers of people than was the case 50 years ago. Even the franchises only get the attention of a small fraction of consumers. The percentage of people who see a popular franchise movie today is much smaller than the percentage who saw "Gone with the Wind" or "Love Story" or "Titanic."
I am generally behind what you are saying in this piece, except for the adaptions part. Some of the greatest films in history are an adaption of a book or a play (for example, "The Godfather"), so I don't see where the problem lies, exactly. Also, your adaption examples are not very appropriate, in my opinion.
"Foundation" is the first adaption of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and the issue there is that it is just not a Foundation story, but rather using the IP as a rocket booster. I think it is obvious that the creators had an original story but couldn't find financing for it, which is why they adapted it to Asimov's novels to get a network endorsement. Meanwhile, "Shogun" is only the second adaption of James Clavell's novel, and the first one was almost 45 years ago (and didn't do as well as the new one), so not so many remember it. I noticed that even people in their mid-30s had no idea about what the story was about when the show premiered. Thus, I'd say it was worth doing it, as long as it was done well, which is very much the case.
Other than that, I fully agree, we are swamped by mediocre sequels that do not have much point artistically, but only financially, reducing risk for film studios (which I suppose is a thing). I do think there is a point of exhaustion for all this, and viewers will eventually stop watching these, making studios return to original programming. It is the same reason why I strongly dislike superhero comics - they tend to rehash the same characters over and over again. Sure, there are some interesting takes occasionally, but I much more wished they had opted for original characters, rather than a new look at old ones.
And of course, there are always exceptions, as some remakes are much better than the original - the early 2000s Battlestar Galactica TV series is a good example, in my opinion. Yet, these are usually rare, only confirming what we are seeing now - a bet on low financial risk to th expense of creativity.
One good move of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings franchise is they never tried to bring the lore of the Silmarillion to the screen. They let it remain legend and tradition—a fuzzy memory— instead of turning it into a "video at 11" moment. Even the brief flashback where Elrond describes his argument with Isildur 2000 years previously is a mistake in my opinion.
BTW, almost all of the literature of the Middle Ages is a rehash of old plots— King Arthur, Charlemagne, Robin Hood, etc.
One of my most steaming hot takes is that Peter Jackson isn’t actually all that great - he just made a few very good choices (basically just: follow the books very closely and to use a lot of landscape shots). Whenever he decided to deviate from the books (the Elrond/Isildur scene, the eye of Sauron, waterfalls of skulls, etc.) it was for the worse. As further evidence, I offer stories about choices he was stopped from making (eg, Sauron and Aragon fighting at the Black Gate) and what he did on the Hobbit.
I agree that his own ideas were not worth filming, but if you think it's a walk in the park to create a faithful and successful adaptation, you obviously have not tried.
Strong disagree on the implication that making a faithful adaptation that is enjoyable to watch is some kind of easy paint-by-numbers thing to do on any film, ESPECIALLY one with the scale and visual imagination of the LOTR trilogy. The series had infamously been stuck in development hell for decades because it was considered so difficult to adapt into anything that would be watchable, or that could gain a mainstream audience.
Aside from that, the fact that he managed to put those films out so consistently on schedule and under budget (which was not an enormous budget) without any playbook to follow or real hiccups is a testament to some pretty incredible professionalism. Also, I don't think even Peter Jackson would try to argue that the Hobbot trilogy was a success in his eyes. Everything I've heard about the production was that he was brought in late in the project and had to frantically improvise a lot of stuff on the fly to get it out in time, and that he was also cajoled by the studio into stretching it to a trilogy. That was the complete opposite of how LOTR was made where he spent years planning it out on a smaller scale so everything was ready to go when production finally started.
Definitely didn’t intend to suggest it’s paint-by-the-numbers! My claim would be something more like: Peter Jackson had a good but not great interpretation of LOTR. For what it’s worth, that’s a more generous assessment than Christopher Tolkien had!
IIRC, Jackson wanted to make the Hobbit a single movie, but couldn't get it greenlit without it being a trilogy.
Yeah, whoever decided to force "The Hobbit" to be a trilogy made a big mistake in artistic terms. (It's entirely possible that doing it that way would make more money for the studio, though, even if the movies themselves were worse.) Jackson did end up with enough material for two movies by showing other things that were going on in Middle-Earth during Bilbo's adventure, but the third movie, "The Battle of the Five Armies", really didn't need to exist at all. :/
LOTR: The Rings Of Power does not have rights to The Silmarillion so it is possible that Peter Jackson did not either.
I am sick of Disney and their IP farm. I don’t have the time for their next derivative product.
"Obi-wan had to serve Anakin Skywalker in the prequels because the original movies said he had done that."
Minor point, the father Leia was referring to was Bail Organa, not Anakin. She didn't know she was adopted until later.