What are Your Thoughts on Disney's Ownership of the Marvel And Star Wars Franchises ?

[KGeo777]

Perhaps, but then again, the main characters started as children (or close to) and even in later films they were much younger than the original trilogy actors. All the goofy droids and goofier Jar Jar Binks stuff certainly weren't aimed at adults, and even the senate scenes were over-the-top CGI and silly acting.

Plus, considering he said the first trilogy was made for children even as it was receiving wild acclaim, does suggest the prequels would be as well, and that it wasn't an excuse.

I think the original film was truly aimed at 12 and up not little kids specifically despite the toys. Buck Rogers wasn't aimed at little kids either and they also had toys. Logan's Run too.
Kids were taken along for the ride.
But after Gary Kurtz was gone, the childish humor and focus were ramped up. Lucas just has a bizarre sense of humor and it comes through without anyone to discourage it.
He said in 1999 that JarJar Binks would be a major character and people would have to get used to him but he dropped him quick for the sequel.

Exsqueeze me.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I think part of the issue with Phantom Menace especially was that it wasn't sure what demographic it was aiming at. Was it fans of the original movies who were now adults, their children, or the whole family.

I suppose that the perfect answer would have been to make the movie for children of all ages, but this didn't quite come across with what we saw on screen. As someone whose only experience with SW was the 3 movies and some of the videogames (Tie Fighter, X-Wing) political shenanigans with a trade dispute and the discussion around midi-chlorians really went over my head, and were totally at odds with the first 3 movies. In fact t was only on second or third viewing that this made any sense.

But the whole back trilogy of movies was so poorly put together. The actors just didn't have the same chemistry of the original trilogy, the onscreen story didn't make sense, the dialogue was unimaginative and the humour was more Spaceballs than Star Wars.

 

[KGeo777]

I regret seeing the first two prequels in theaters. Most disappointing theater movie experience I have had.
After about 5 minutes of the Phantom Menace the mind starts to go..uh oh...something is wrong here..
Even the opening crawl text is poorly written.
I did like R2D2 being on board the spaceship--that reminded me of 1930s sailing ship movies where he is being recognized for courage by the queen but having C3P0 made by Luke's father on Tatooine is incestuously lazy. How hard would it have been to have him serving on the same ship with R2D2?
Darth Maul was a neat character design (I can see the logic to it--Darth Vader was a mechanized skull, Maul is an organic devil face).
And Williams' score--I didn't know on the original films he had a score arranger or two--they are the ones who shaped the score for the movies--and it sure makes a difference.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

I remember a video somewhere that mounted a spirited defence of the Prequels as a new kind of film making - how the clunky dialogue and wooden acting was a genuinely worthy form of the medium, albeit one that sets itself apart from what we normally think of as good. They have a mythic style that has an intelligence at work that isn't someone who doesn't know what they're doing - but that has pioneered a unique voice that should be appreciated.

I don't really agree with that but it made me think of them in a new light. I'll agree that the tone of the stories, the content set around a war and Lucas' intention to kiddy them up a bit do make for unwelcome bedfellows. I don't really believe Lucas made SW1 (4) for anyone other than himself. I think he just went with his gut to make a homage to flash gordon, hidden fortress and adventure serials of his youth. Much of the weirdness is his own artistic expression, rather than a commercial decision or chasing after audiences. All the toys and commerce came after the fact almost by accident. He was so guided by his own intuition that he doesn't really understand what made Star Wars work, questionable decisions like Jar Jar or an allegory for the death of democracy or the bad comedy are emblematic of how out of touch with his audience he is.

Star Wars is an auteur driven universe. There is Lucas's psychology in all of his SW work, from the fifties hot rods, to war movies to his concerns over politics to "Luke S" even being a Lucas self-insert. When you remove someone who is so integral to the universe from the picture you remove all substance and all you are left with is the aesthetics and the director's misunderstanding of the universe. Whether it works or not is down to the director.

Either way, Star Wars is personal to Lucas, and when you change that to a tent-pole committee that is concerned with hitting all four key audience segments and broadening the universe to tell a wide range of stories within a commercial franchise you water it down to the point of just being generic nostalgia (remember Bobba Fett! remember the Saarlac!).

To Disney's credit they did at least turn one movie over to a director and trusted them to provide their vision. The problem is, their vision was more concerned with tearing down the past than it was being part of a coherent trilogy. They thought they could Lucas it and create a Trilogy out of one movie, without realising that Lucas had a vision and attachment to the main character. Without one person at the helm to guide the direction they ended up at the end of the second movie with nowhere to go and too many story threads to conclude within one movie.

I enjoyed Rogue One at the time, it was a WWII movie and because of that it actually felt Star Wars, but I remember it being bloated and being bored in parts. None of the characters interested me in the slightest. They looked cool, but they were nothingy. Something I could never say about the original trilogy. Still, I enjoyed it far more than any of the new trilogy. The best bit of Rogue One was seeing Vader go ham.

Disney are not in the least concerned about the longevity of Star Wars. They want to milk it and get a return on their investment as soon as possible. That doesn't mean they aren't concerned with the product, but they are more concerned about it matching brand values and creating broad demographic interest than in their core audiences. If it brings in people to Disney + and to the rides they're fine. The only way they can do this is to make it about something other than the Skywalker family, and when they do that they lose the soul of Star Wars - see TLJ.

When I was a kid I watched Star Wars on repeat. I could watch it two, three times in a row, to the point that, as a 46 year old I can still recite some of the dialogue off by heart. Following the sequel trilogy I no longer have any interest in Star Wars at all and actively go out of my way to avoid it if I can. Is that a good thing?

 

[sule]

There's just too much too often. Disney either can't afford to or doesn't want to tone back on the amount of things they're shoveling out, to the point where shows (and movies) are released without actually being worth our time. With them releasing so much stuff all the time, none of it gets to feel special. But, they're all so ragged around the edges that it's a blessing that we don't have to think too long about them; however, if they cut down on the amount of content and focused on making the stuff they release better and more polished maybe we'd want to spend more time with them.

Book of Boba Fett was sloppy and slow, and needed what felt like an eleventh hour injection of Mandalorian to fill in the runtime. I didn't watch Kenobi, but it sounded like there were a huge amount of unforced errors with plotting, characters, and just basic things (even I've seen that awful moment of him attempting to sneak through Empire HQ with a child hiding under his coat and it looks bleedingly obvious). The trailers for Andor look good (more Stellan Skarsgard, please), but I'm pretty nervous that it just won't be as good as it should be, and that has everything to do with the last few outings from Star Wars and nothing to do with Andor itself. Do I trust them to make a good one this time? At this point, Season 1 of Mandalorian feels like a happy accident whose success isn't going to be repeated any time soon.

Meanwhile, the main problem with Marvel shows appears to be the CGI - it just looks bad, and apparently some effects workers and houses have begun to refuse Marvel contracts because they are a pain to work with. The stories with Marvel are hit-or-miss, often within the same series. WandaVision was incredible until the finale, Loki was alternately mind-blowing and mind-numbing, Falcon just didn't work, Hawkeye was sometimes fun...and I'll be honest: I haven't sat through Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel (and I'm going to skip She Hulk) because I'm just tired of sitting down to watch these shows. I've already fallen behind, and there's no point in catching up. To be honest, it doesn't feel like the shows matter. Strange 2 was, in theory, building off of WandaVision but Raimi (allegedly) didn't watch the entire show and it felt like you could understand the movie without seeing the show - so can we really expect any of the future movies to truly care about the shows that fed into them (like The Marvels)?

It's literally that there's just too much of it. Nothing feels special, and even if they do hit on something spectacular it doesn't get enough time in the spotlight before the next thing comes trundling down the tracks.

 

[BAYLOR]

I regret seeing the first two prequels in theaters. Most disappointing theater movie experience I have had.
After about 5 minutes of the Phantom Menace the mind starts to go..uh oh...something is wrong here..
Even the opening crawl text is poorly written.
I did like R2D2 being on board the spaceship--that reminded me of 1930s sailing ship movies where he is being recognized for courage by the queen but having C3P0 made by Luke's father on Tatooine is incestuously lazy. How hard would it have been to have him serving on the same ship with R2D2?
Darth Maul was a neat character design (I can see the logic to it--Darth Vader was a mechanized skull, Maul is an organic devil face).
And Williams' score--I didn't know on the original films he had a score arranger or two--they are the ones who shaped the score for the movies--and it sure makes a difference.

I think it would been a good thing for the Franchise had The Phantom menace flopped at the box office .

 

[BAYLOR]

Yea, I hated the prequels... but looking back now it's like yes, they were fun movies for little kids, and it was wrong to judge them by any other standard.

Ive tried watching them in the years since , They haven't improved with age , the awful writing , crapy acting , the goofy dumb dialogueand overblown special effects and Jar Jar Binks are all still there to remind me of why I find them to be such wretched films. Even the climatic lightsaber duel in the molten lava chamber between Anakin and Obi Wan is one the worst climatic battle ive ever seen. Surround by that much flowing hot liquid metal should have friend the both of them. And in then that speech that Obi wan gave to Anakin after hacking od his arm and two of his legs and lament " You were my brother Anakin." This is bad at som many levels.

What I find laughable is people people complain as much as thye do about the Abrams films , which are so much better those crappy prequels.

 

[.matthew.]

What I find laughable is people people complain as much as thye do about the Abrams films , which are so much better those crappy prequels.

Well... so much better than diarrhoea isn't saying much when the Abrams films are only a slightly more solid bowel movement.

At a certain point, I wish people would stop being so obsessed with franchises that the studios feel safe in releasing such terrible cash grabs

 

[BAYLOR]

Well... so much better than diarrhoea isn't saying much when the Abrams films are only a slightly more solid bowel movement.

At a certain point, I wish people would stop being so obsessed with franchises that the studios feel safe in releasing such terrible cash grabs

The thing of it is if fans have accepted the prequels , they'll come around to accepting the Abrams films. I did enjoy those films of the Disney films , my favorite is Rogue One and I do have soft spot for Solo and wish it had been a success at the box office.

 

[Le Panda du Mal]

The Abrams movies are, on the surface, much more competent productions but are shot through with soullessness. The prequel films are terrible, but in a way that is charming, almost naive, like watching a kid mash his action figures together in the most expensive sandbox in the world.

 

[BAYLOR]

The Abrams movies are, on the surface, much more competent productions but are shot through with soullessness. The prequel films are terrible, but in a way that is charming, almost naive, like watching a kid mash his action figures together in the most expensive sandbox in the world.

Lucas's first wife Marcia Lucas was the reason the earlier films were as good as they were , she had a knack for knowing what worked.and what didn't and could tell him no, this is a bad idea, don't do it and, he'd listen. The problem was , she wasn't there . I think had she been involved in the the prequels, they would have far been better . Jar Jar probably still would have happened but would have been far better conceived character than what we got. After Disney took over over Star Wars , Lucas offered ideas for films , Disney wasn't Interested. And I seriously doubt Lucas and J J Abrams could have worked together.

 

[Swank]

I don't think Abrams is a good director. Everything he does looks cheap.

 

[Le Panda du Mal]

Yeah, I think the big problem with the prequels is that Lucas had been surrounded for 20 years by fans and yes-men telling him what a genius he was. So the result was a very indulgent trilogy full of bad ideas and laughable dialogue. Still I find those movies more fun to watch than the very slick sequel trilogy that feels like it was written by an algorithm.

 

[BAYLOR]

Yeah, I think the big problem with the prequels is that Lucas had been surrounded for 20 years by fans and yes-men telling him what a genius he was. So the result was a very indulgent trilogy full of bad ideas and laughable dialogue. Still I find those movies more fun to watch than the very slick sequel trilogy that feels like it was written by an algorithm.

What they could've and should been was better then what we got.


What we got instead , isn't even fun to watch.

 

[Le Panda du Mal]

I don't know. I still love to croak out the line, "Around the survivors a perimeter create" at the flimsiest pretext.

 

[Rodders]

I don't have a problem with Abrams, my issue is with how the franchise has been managed since Disney took over.

 

[paranoid marvin]

If Lucas' prequels had been of the same quality as Disney's sequels, I would have been happy with that. The sequels aren't perfect, but they are perfectly watchable. The prequels aren't; the storyline, the dialogue, the acting is amateurish. That they come from a very experienced director with virtually unlimited amounts of cash and pretty much the entire range of Hollywood actors at his disposal makes them unforgivably poor.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've never come out of a cinema feeling so deflated as I did at the end of Phantom Menace (although Crystal Skull ran it pretty close).

 

[BAYLOR]

If Lucas' prequels had been of the same quality as Disney's sequels, I would have been happy with that. The sequels aren't perfect, but they are perfectly watchable. The prequels aren't; the storyline, the dialogue, the acting is amateurish. That they come from a very experienced director with virtually unlimited amounts of cash and pretty much the entire range of Hollywood actors at his disposal makes them unforgivably poor.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've never come out of a cinema feeling so deflated as I did at the end of Phantom Menace (although Crystal Skull ran it pretty close).

The climatic duel in Revenge of the Sith with Anakin and Obi Wan was laughably bad I waded through these three turgid films for this crappy poorly acted climax ?

And one thing has always bothered me. The very powerful edi Council has pa owerful Sith Lord in their midst and they were not aware of him? Even Yoda couldn't sense or figure out that it Palatine was Sith and the one pulling the strings ? Oh wait , Lucas came up with this bulishit on the fly convenient notion that the Sith could hide himself from detection by Jedi . I put that this same crud category as Midichlorians.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The climatic duel in Revenge of the Sith with Anakin and Obi Wan was laughably bad I waded through these three turgid films for this crappy poorly acted climax ?

And one thing has always bothered me. The very powerful edi Council has pa owerful Sith Lord in their midst and they were not aware of him? Even Yoda couldn't sense or figure out that it Palatine was Sith and the one pulling the strings ? Oh wait , Lucas came up with this bulishit on the fly convenient notion that the Sith could hide himself from detection by Jedi . I put that this same crud category as Midichlorians.

Discussing midichlorians, trade disputes etc. - and this was supposedly a film for kids to enjoy? Lucas really messed up big time. What probably annoyed me the most was when the 2 Jedi took on Darth Maul; you aren't meant to have 2 good guys taking on 1 bad guy, no matter how adept he is. 2 bad guys taking on 1 good guy, yes - but not the other way around.

 

[AllanR]

Pariah here, have not seen a Marvel or Star Wars movie in over twenty years, so I don't really think much of who owns them.