In the late 1970s a movie studio green lit a modest science fiction\/fantasy film called Star Wars that made so much money that the studio and the creative team that owned the rights to it made billions of dollars from sequels, toys and every other monetizing scheme imaginable.<\/p>\n
And why did all this happen?\u00a0 Well, accidentally or on purpose the makers of that original movie tapped into the primal desire of young men (and it was almost exclusively boys and young men) to watch an exciting updating of the young apprentice\u2019s journey to becoming a hero.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone or the Marine recruit proving himself on the battlefield of Iwo Jima or the hot shot pilot in a Top Gun movie, every boy (and man) enjoys the visceral experience of seeing the hero prove himself in combat and if he\u2019s lucky enough win the heart of the princess (or in less monarchical times, some pretty girl in general).<\/p>\n
And 20th<\/sup> Century Fox and Lucasfilm rode that male archetypal fantasy to fame and fortune for almost forty years.\u00a0 But in 2015 Lucasfilm (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney) launched the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise, \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d and drove a stake right through the heart of that golden goose.\u00a0 With Kathleen Kennedy producing and J. J. Abrams directing all of that male-oriented story-telling was jettisoned and replaced with \u201cgirl-power.\u201d\u00a0 Kathleen Kennedy gleefully proclaimed that \u201cThe Force is estrogen.\u201d\u00a0 Well, \u201cThe Force Awakens\u201d made billions.\u00a0 Of course, it would have made billions even if it was just an empty screen for two hours.\u00a0 That\u2019s how much good will had been built up over the course of decades for the franchise.\u00a0 But the following two films and the various spin-offs like the recent television series \u201cThe Acolyte\u201d have completely dried up those wells of enthusiasm that had been produced previously.\u00a0 The last couple of movies have lost money, in fact hundreds of millions of dollars.\u00a0 And now the folks at Disney have cancelled a number of Star Wars productions and they\u2019re trying to figure out how to fix their dying franchise.<\/p>\n Well Bob Iger, I\u2019ve got an idea.\u00a0 First off fire Kathleen Kennedy and all the people who decided to create the monstrosities that caused all this damage.\u00a0 In fact, don\u2019t just fire them but publicly abuse them verbally and force them to apologize for their heinous sins.\u00a0 Then make a short trailer video for the next film.<\/p>\n It will consist of all the most egregious scenes from all of the horrible movies you released since 2015 in short snippets in a nightmare montage.\u00a0 Then we switch to Han Solo in bed waking up from a nightmare and expressing relief that the whole thing was a bad dream.\u00a0 He then gets up and joins his son, wife and brother-in-law at breakfast and he tells them some of the details of his nightmare and they all have a big laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.<\/p>\n Then you get some good writers to reread the Arthurian legends and the pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s and you start making money again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the late 1970s a movie studio green lit a modest science fiction\/fantasy film called Star Wars that made so much money that the studio<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,239,237,4,243],"tags":[999,628,43,44,265,626,1131],"class_list":["post-30541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews","tag-disney","tag-disney-converged","tag-movie-review","tag-sci-fi","tag-science-fiction","tag-star-wars","tag-star-wars-converged"],"yoast_head":"\n