Star Wars and Disney: learning the ways of the Force

Disney has been treading on eggshells making new Star Wars movies.

Daisy Ridley as Rey in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Luke Skywalker was coming back to the big screen and executives at Walt Disney gathered to hear how. It was 2013, and months ear­lier Disney had paid $US4bn for Lucasfilm, the production company behind the space opera of Princess Leia, Darth Vader and the power of the Force.

From offices in Burbank, California, filmmakers began pitching Disney studio chief Alan Horn on the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, scheduled to hit cinemas two years later. They introduced Horn to a character that would become a fan favourite — a cream-coloured droid called BB-8. He loved it, and loved the merchandise sales this soccer-ball-size creation could generate.

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But Horn had a note for the filmmakers. While Disney wanted to sell millions of toys, fans could never sense that any character or plot point was conceived as a business decision, he said. Star Wars was different than any set of characters and storylines Disney had absorbed up until that point. Any whiff of marketing imperatives driving the creative decisions on the Star Wars franchise would ­immediately, in the eyes of devoted fans, cast Disney as the evil empire that had gobbled up their beloved modern-day myth.

Navigating that danger zone has proved to be the most difficult part of absorbing the blockbuster series: how to bring aboard a new generation of moviegoers while avoiding turning off the diehard fans who have an out-size voice in the success or failure of the films.

‘We’re gonna hit pause’

The Star Wars business so far has been good for Disney. The Force Awakens, the first of a new trilogy, grossed $US937m in the US, still the most of any film in box-office history.

Disney’s new streaming service launched last month with the Star Wars spin-off The Manda­lorian as a centrepiece offering that fans have embraced, turning the character fans call Baby Yoda into a celebrity. An immersive Star Wars-themed attraction called Galaxy’s Edge opened this year at two theme parks in California and Florida, and fans’ enthusiasm for custom-made lightsabres and Jedi Mind Trick cocktails has boosted revenue in Disney’s theme-park division.

Robert Iger, Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams, Kathleen Kennedy at a new Star Wars attraction at Disneyland

Still, worrying fissures have formed. The second episode of the new trilogy, the 2017 release The Last Jedi, collected 33 per cent less at the domestic box office than The Force Awakens. Spin-off film Solo, about the younger days of hero Han Solo, was poorly scheduled and underwhelmed audi­ences. Fans held off visiting the new theme park attraction while a promised second ride was behind schedule. A string of high-profile directors has been fired or left projects unexpectedly, and the creative plan for the films after the next release is unclear.

The final film of the present trilogy, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, is in cinemas this month. Disney has indicated it needs to take a moment after that to reassess its strategy. “We’re gonna hit pause,” Disney chief executive Robert Iger said last month.

Fan empire strikes back

With the 2012 Lucasfilm acquisition, Disney bought an established cinematic world that came with disciples of the original ­movies, who attend conferences dressed in painstakingly accurate regalia and endlessly debate the minutiae of the mystically binding energy known as the Force and other lore. Only after the purchase did Disney begin to fathom how avid a fan base it had on its hands, according to a consultant Disney hired.

The slightest tweak to Star Wars mythology can set fans off. So far, Disney has had mixed success appeasing these fans while pulling in younger moviegoers with different expectations of what a fable of good versus evil looks like in 2019.

The Last Jedi suffered a backlash after it seemed to contradict key elements of previous films, upsetting a legion of older fans who objected to what they felt were silly subplots and story decisions that dismissed or perverted a mythology they grew up with. Separately, some objected to the new generation of young characters, and Hollywood’s most family-friendly brand had to reckon with racist and misogynistic attacks from a subset of fans who said the films were bowing to political correctness by featuring women and minorities in lead roles.

Lucasfilm had been working to develop intensely loyal fans since its earliest days. In 1976, a year before the original Star Wars premiered, Lucasfilm sent repre­sentatives to science fiction fan conventions with photos from the forthcoming film, and long queues gathered outside cinemas as it became a phenomenon in the northern summer of 1977.

After buying Lucasfilm 35 years later, Disney was eager to tap into the strong appetite for new movies — and prove the worth of the $US4bn purchase to Wall Street. While fans once had to wait years for a new Star Wars movie, Disney has fast-tracked production by releasing a new film every year.

Disney used the strategy with Pixar Animation, which it bought in 2006, and Marvel Studios, which it bought in 2009. Pixar had released six films in the nine years before the acquisition. As part of Disney’s stable, it has churned out one movie every year except one — and released two features some years. At Marvel, producers have made two films most years since the Disney acquisition, accelerating the pace to three a year more recently.

Pixar alternates sequels with original films spanning several franchises, and Marvel has a large corps of characters to pull from decades of comics. For Star Wars, with a much smaller set of developed characters tied to a single cinematic storyline, Disney released The Force Awakens in 2015, then made four movies in the four years after that — with only five months separating The Last Jedi in December 2017 from Solo in May last year.

Lucasfilm executives, including president Kathleen Kennedy, lobbied Disney brass to postpone Solo until the Christmas season last year, worried it was oversaturating the market, current and former colleagues say. But Disney executives overruled the arguments. Solo premiered as scheduled and mostly fizzled with fans.

Star Wars fans wait outside the TCL Chinese Theatre before the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in Hollywood. Picture: Mark Ralston/AFP)

The rush has impaired the long-term planning for where the Skywalker saga and other Star Wars stories go from here. Rather than take the Marvel approach and begin filming the first movie with the end of the series in mind, Lucasfilm largely has determined the overarching plot from movie to movie. That creates a clash since the multiple moving parts of the Disney franchise machine depend on schedules, forward planning and shared information.

When a video-game division at Disney approached the Lucasfilm story group about a game that would take place in the time between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, video-game developers were told the story group had no idea what was going to happen in The Last Jedi, even though The Force Awakens was close to wrapping production.

Since different directors were handling different films, The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson had to wait to see how The Force Awakens director JJ Abrams would finish his movie before he could finalise his own script. While Johnson was shooting The Last Jedi, an instalment that took the series in unexpected directions, Lucasfilm executives had little idea how they would wrap up the trilogy in the film that followed, the one premiering this month.

Moving to the dark side

Disney’s film plans for the franchise appear up in the air except for the announcement of three movies — without details on storylines or characters — due out in 2022, 2024 and 2026. Each title is slated for a release near Christmas.

Instead, fan focus has turned to The Mandalorian, which has been a crucial driver of subscribers to Disney’s new streaming service. So far, fans have largely embraced the spin-off’s western tone and storyline, which follows a faceless bounty hunter on distant planets in the Skywalker universe. With Mandalorian, Disney has found success straddling the old and the new by taking a character inspired by the original trilogy and fleshing out a new storyline.

Kennedy, the Lucasfilm president hand-picked by Lucas to take over before he sold to Disney, has struggled to bridge the pre and post-Disney cultures at Lucasfilm, associates and former colleagues say. Kennedy is among the most successful producers in Hollywood history, with credits that include ET the Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park. She started working with Steven Spielberg when he was directing Raiders of the Lost Ark, and at Lucasfilm she has recruited young, up-and-coming direc­tors who she thinks can update the franchise for present-day audiences.

That creative freedom has repeatedly clashed with Disney’s need to make a movie that simultaneously moves the story forward while catering to some fans’ nostalgic impulses, according to people who have worked with the company on the new films.

The Force Awakens was criticised for hewing too closely to the 1977 classic, and The Last Jedi criticised for taking the narrative in erratic directions.

The result has been a revolving door of directors hired to great public fanfare and fired when their narrative ambition edged too far outside guidelines or it became clear they weren’t experienced enough to handle $US200m ($292m) productions.

In just five years, a half-dozen directors have been fired or left projects mid-filming or ahead of future instalments, and in the past several months Lucasfilm story architects who conceived recent films have left.

The original director of this month’s Rise of Skywalker, Colin Trevorrow, got the job on the strength of his 2015 blockbuster Jurassic World, but several scripts he submitted to Kennedy were rejected as the two disagreed about where to take the Skywalker saga in its final film. Kennedy fired him in September 2017.

She replaced him with Abrams, who originally had planned on directing only The Force Awakens. Bringing him back to conclude the trilogy is seen by many in Hollywood as the safest choice for appeasing diehard fans, since Abrams is best known for nostalgia-laden updates to franchises including Star Trek and Mission: Impossible.

Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in 1977 film Star Wars.

Disney has shown a willingness to push Star Wars in new directions in other venues. Iger ordered the Galaxy’s Edge theme park attraction to be based on Batuu, a planet new to the series, rather than on Tatooine, the home of Luke Skywalker, which would have been catnip for diehard fans. On Batuu, Disney can park the Millennium Falcon, flown in Lucas’s original film, next to the ship piloted by Kylo Ren in the current trilogy. “I don’t want to be stuck in the past,” Iger said, as he attended the opening at Disneyland earlier this year.

Forging into new territory backfired among some fans with The Last Jedi, who said Johnson, the director, seemed to make a movie that had little relation to Abrams’s The Force Awakens from just two years earlier.

The Last Jedi implied Rey, the central protagonist of the new movies, is not a descendant of a powerful Jedi or other storied lineage, as previous Star Wars heroes have been. It defied traditional Star Wars physics by turning hyperspace travel into a kamikaze trick capable of destroying an enemy’s fleet. Worst of all, in the eyes of some fans, it killed off their hero, Luke Skywalker.

Mixed messages

The bitter political fights dividing the US have spilled over to the reactions to the films, especially when it comes to some of the new movies’ female characters.

Kelly Marie Tran, a daughter of Vietnam refugees who joined the franchise with The Last Jedi, said she left social media six months after the movie’s release because of unrelenting racist and sexist harassment from Star Wars fans who didn’t think she belonged in the films.

The storylines of the current trilogy and the spin-off Rogue One, released in 2016, revolve around a heroine and have multiple, central female characters, a big shift from the original movies, in which Princess Leia was the only noteworthy female character.

Not all of the criticism took a political bent. Some fans took issue with the Last Jedi plot, which introduced new tertiary characters and, according to critics, dedicated too much time to subplots involving a side trip to a casino and lengthy interludes following a solitary Luke Skywalker living in exile alongside nun-like aliens.

Disagreements about the politics have grown so ugly that Russian trolls have identified Star Wars debates on social media as places to sow discord, akin to online discussions about Hillary Clinton or Black Lives Matter, according to a report published by Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California.

The disinformation campaign has made it hard for Lucasfilm executives and members of a story group charged with plotting the franchise’s trajectory to understand fans’ true concerns. Did racism spurred by online trolls drive their rejection of Tran’s character, or was it a broader issue of how her character’s arc was developed in the film?

The new Rise of Skywalker is still expected to be a blockbuster, and those alienated by The Last Jedi have turned to Abrams with hope. One executive who has worked with Abrams says the director is keeping long-time fans in mind, saying it is like an invisible fan is whispering in his ear during story meetings.

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