Man....I don't know. I see the concern but I also kinda disagree, or at least I'd like it not to be the case. Andor was probably the most overtly political Disney Star Wars, yet it didn't really stir up culture war stuff. There was no exhausting discourse around it, at least that I was aware of. I think it's very possible to do it if you just let the quality of the work speak for itself. In this case with Obaid-Chinoy, it is what it is...she has the professional background that she has and Lucasfilm hired her for the job knowing that. I just think it's a PR mishap to have her out there making self-congratulatory statements at this point, because of the timing and what's at stake with this particular project. There's nothing known about the movie and fans are already generally nervous about what this movie will be. Even when I told my wife that they were making a Rey movie (she absolutely LOVES Rey, her favorite SW character), she was like..."Hmmm...ok?" There's a cloud hanging over this movie in terms that people are at worst fully cynical that it's happening, and at best unsure why it's happening and waiting to be given a reason to care. So I see it as mainly an issue of poor timing more than anything.
The backlash to Disney Star Wars (specifically the ST) is way more nuanced and complicated than trying to generalize that it's all mouth breathing, basement dwelling trolls, and I think the more Lucasfilm allows themselves to be blinded by that tempting idea, the more they're going to keep repeating the same mistakes. Anecdotally, all of my real life friends are pretty normal, well-adjusted (firmly left-leaning) guys with jobs, families etc. They're exactly the core demo that Disney was aiming for with these films in theory. Nearly all of them absolutely loathed TLJ. Some of their kids don't like it either, specifically because of the Luke characterization. I was the only one in my friend group willing to be open to what the movie was trying to do and defend it. Still am. It bums me out and I wish people weren't so close-minded about it, but I'm just trying to take a dispassionate look at the situation. It really pains me to say it, because I was arguing strongly against this for a while, but with enough time and perspective...I have to admit that TLJ did some damage to the brand. The $300 million dropoff with TROS points pretty convincingly to that. Similar to how Justice League's box office has to reflect in some way the damage that BvS did. I take no joy in saying that, because I think TLJ was ultimately a good movie that was making a pretty b*llsy attempt to infuse some depth and meaning into the copy/paste gibberish that was TFA. But most people don't care why it's broken, they just know that it's broken.
So, here's the thing though: if we're going for anecdotal experience because my social circle are entirely 20-30 something mostly queer/super lefty people who, if they pay attention to SW,
love TLJ. I do agree it probably did some brand damage but, tbh, I think the mainstream audiences taste in movies is so far removed from mine that I'm just not interested in it. Maybe the best embodiment of what I suspect the GA wants at this point is something like
Top Gun: Maverick which is a kind of filmmaking I literally could not be less interested in. What the GA wants out of SW is probably pretty close to just a less sloppy version of the Disney+ Filoni era content swill and I cannot imagine a bigger waste of time.
Not me saying anyone is dumb or their taste is bad, despite my strong language about it. Snobbery is a waste of time.
Lucasfilm cannot afford to pretend that the backlash they faced with the ST is as cut and dry as people wanting the movies to reflect their own political ideologies. Obviously, there are plenty of those dummies out there and plenty of influencers brainwashing susceptible people to those ideas. But I would argue that the majority of the audience still simply want Star Wars to be what it CAN be: a beautiful, entertaining, escapist fantasy, with powerful mythological storytelling and strong filmmaking as the backbone of it. They don't care who's behind the camera or the identity politics involved. I think people just want a reason to care, to be moved emotionally. That's really it.
Yeah, but mysteriously a lot of people's ideas about what is good classic escapist fare is super, super white and male and divorced from anything "political" in the sense conservative people define political. You cannot show people of colour, or queer people or contain any sort of meaningful statement in a Star Wars movie without it being a lightning rod of controversy. Because it's a rigged game, it's a tool for the right to use. A tool they're not going to let go. Nerd culture has become a massive front in the culture war and Star Wars is by far the worst of it, that is just a defining reality of what the franchise is now.
Even if you make the most apolitical movie ever (which is impossible and attempts at being apolitical in art are almost universally gigantic wastes of time) unless it is an overtly or covertly conservative narrative. The moment a Star Wars movie shows a woman with power and agency (who isn't Ahsoka I guess, were people mad about Ahsoka? The Filoni stuff sucks so hard I just tune it out) or the face of a person of colour it will now and forever more become a warzone. Everything is political and I don't see a lot of sense pretending like anything is able to escape that.
The audience cares about the politics of movies. Even if they don't realize they do.
I'm well-aware that there's always going to be some level of this culture war stuff floating around these IPs at this point in time. What I'm saying is I think there's a way that can drift more to the periphery if the quality is just THAT good and the majority of the audience embraces it. It gives the 'opposition' much less opportunity to control the narrative. I've seen the arguments out there that The Batman is 'woke', or Ghostbusters: Afterlife is nothing but cynical nostalgia-bait catering to manbabies, etc. Both are gross overgeneralizations that miss the mark IMO, and they don't ultimately end up overshadowing the movies themselves. End of the day, the wider audience embraced those films. Money talks. Especially in this day and age where people are being pickier about what they run out and spend their money on at the movies.
For sure, and I think that is a depressing state of affairs. A world where
The Last Jedi or
The Matrix Resurrections are rejected (to wildly different degrees, I'm not even entirely willing to concede the former was rejected) and
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is held up as an ideal legacy sequel sounds like a pure hellscape. The latter is the absolute nadir of franchise filmmaking to me.
