Disney has systematically dismantled the greatest cinematic money-printing franchise by turning the Star Wars brand into a woke, feminized version of the space fantasy series that George Lucas spawned back in the late 1970s.
Generations of boys and men have enjoyed the good/evil, dark/light, David/Goliath dualism that is as old as Thermopylae, the Odyssey and the Bible itself. But Disney (and Lucas himself) had to mess with the classic “apprentice becomes hero and wins the princess” and instead went with girl-boss saves the universe despite helpless and/or evil men.
Well, the response from the paying audiences has been souring over the last decade and now it’s bottomed out. And the latest symptom of this rejection is the cancellation after one season of “The Acolyte.”
This incredibly expensive television series was trashed by the fans and viewership plummeted by the season finale. And so it’s been cancelled. And the reason that the producers attribute the cancellation to is:
misogyny/homophobia.
Well, there you go. The misogynistic homophobes have voted with their feet. Now will Disney learn from this or do they need to lose some further hundreds of millions of dollars? Let’s see.
John Deere and Harley Davidson learned very quickly that when you “Go woke you go broke”.
Sadly, Bud Light and Disney have yet to figure it out.
I’ve heard that the Disney exec running the Marvel franchise has figured out that they need to make some changes. The Lucasfilm execs haven’t. Should give Bob Iger a good point of comparison for the two approaches.
I’ll be honest, for both franchises they are going to have to come up with something incredible to get me back in a theater.
For me Star Wars is already irreconcilably lost. The first movie was great. The second one was fun. The third one was ruined with Ewoks and after that I no longer cared. The latest stuff is just insult to injury. Marvel might be able to do some fun things if they just stick to likeable characters and interesting adventures. If they can’t do that then too bad.