Obi-Wan Kenobi movie trilogy was the first casualty of Solo bomb
The $275-million bomb turned unmade "A Star Wars Stories" TV shows
Aux News Obi-Wan Kenobi
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we now return Obi-Wan Kenobi: A Star Wars Story to the Earth’s crust.
Roughly four years after an explosive box office bomb known as Solo wiped out a library of unread Star Wars Stories, sources excavated the blast’s first identified casualty. Before it was a Disney+ series, Obi-Wan Kenobi was a proposed spin-off trilogy in development when Solo exploded, presumably, due to a coaxium leak.
Speaking to The Direct, Stuart Beattie, the Obi-Wan Kenobi film series screenwriter who received writing credits on the recently-concluded TV series, said that Solo was the deciding factor in taking Obi-Wan from the big screen to the small one.
“It was Solo that changed the direction of the system,” Beattie said. “I like Solo, personally, but it hadn’t made a lot of money… it certainly crushed us. Devastated, absolutely devastated. But, that’s the business, you know, highs and lows. I’m glad it got made. I’m glad the show got made. I’m proud of my story. I’m glad my characters are all through it. And I’m glad I got credit for it. I wish they’d been able to make my movies.”
Solo reportedly needed to make more than $500 million just to break even but grossed roughly $393 million at the worldwide box office, a disappointing total that director Ron Howard later blamed on online trolls.
Beattie’s description of an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie trilogy certainly sounds a little more cohesive than Kenobi’s Adventures In Babysitting. The script went through significant growing pains, apparently. When Disney turned the movie into a TV series, the show stretched Beattie’s proposed two-hour movie into a six-hour miniseries. “I wrote the film that they based the show on,” Beattie said. “I spent like a year-and-a-half working on it. And then, when the decision was made not to make any more spin-off films after Solo came out, I left the project and went on to other things. Joby [Harold] came on and took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six. So, I did not work with them . Iall, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff.”
Ewan McGregor was “on board” for the trilogy. “It’s a great story to tell, right? It’s such a fitting character and Ewan is just so fantastic at it. And he’s the perfect age, everything.”
Beattie said the trilogy would’ve followed Kenobi across three periods of his life. His original pitch of “three stories” followed “three different evolutions” and showed the character’s transformation from prequel Obi-Wan into the Ben Kenobi viewers first met in 1977. “The first one was the first movie, which was the show, which was, ‘Surrender to the will of the Force. Transport your will, surrender your will. Leave the kid alone.’”
The second movie, Beattie outlined, would have brought fans closer to Kenobi’s A New Hope sacrifice, which he considered “probably the most powerful moment in all of Obi-Wan’s story.” As he points out, it’s a “pretty sudden” decision that Obi-Wan makes, and Beattie wanted to dig into how the character could go from “fighting a guy, to see Luke and go, ‘I’m gonna die.’”
Beattie continued:
It’s one of those universal things we all struggle with, to come to terms with our own mortality. So, that was the second step of the evolution for me, that Obi-Wan now has to come to terms with his own mortality, somehow in a prophecy, or Qui-Gon telling him, ‘There’s going to come a moment where you’re gonna have to sacrifice yourself for the good,’ And then [Obi-Wan] is like, ‘What? No, no, no, no, I’m here to help… I can’t, no.’ And get him to that point where Obi Wan has accepted the idea that he’s going to die, and that he’s going to die willingly at a crucial moment, and you will know when that moment presents itself. So that when that moment comes up in [A New Hope], you understand. He’s recognizing he’s been on this journey already, and he’s waiting for this moment, and that’s how he’s able to make it so easily. To do this [sacrifice], and die. So that to me was the second evolution, the second film, the second story. So for me, if I have anything to do with the second season of Obi Wan, that’s the character evolution that I would take him on. That, to me, is really interesting. And like I said, universal.
Has anyone in the history of Star Wars fandom questioned why Obi-Wan sacrificed himself to save Luke? It certainly made enough sense to six-year-olds in 1977. It’s another example of that Star Wars instinct to fill in every crack George Lucas missed in his effort to create a fun, romantic space adventure for kids. If there is a second season of Obi-Wan Kenobi, maybe they can dig into how Obi-Wan learned the phrase “hello there.”
186 Comments
Love it!
I don’t get it
Wearing white socks with pretty much any combination of dark pants/shoes is generally deemed a high crime of fashion, and a sure indicator or slobbery.
OhWell that’s dumb
Those aren’t pants, those are culottes.At least his mom thinks he’s cool.
River-crossing pants!
They don’t have rivers on Tattooine; which is of course, the only planet where anything Star Wars takes place!
He’s still a hundred times sexier then any of us slobs posting
Yeah, fashion rules rarely apply to very attractive people. That’s life, and it’s what makes the OP’s mashup ironically amusing.
Fashion rules still apply, but when very attractive people (especially when those people are famous) break them sometimes others wish to imitate the trend.Something tells me that not a lot of people are going to jump on board the ‘pants are four inches too short’ trend that Ewan MacGregor’s trying to start, though.
Acting like Thom Browne hasn’t been out here for, like, 20 years.
Oh please, we’re all 100x cooler than some dweeb like Ewan McGregor. He’s a Scot, the lowest of the low!
You’re thinking of the Welsh.
Well he’s usually got them pulled down showing his ass whether we want it or not; now he’s got them hiked up exposing his ankles…whether we want it or not.
Somebody get this poor man some full-length pants! No one should have to live with that kind of decision.
And that’s important!
LOL crime of fashion. Fashion rules are fucking worthless.
Or he’s wearing flood pants.
Pretty sure Ewan is pulling it off, though.
What’s not to get? Ewan McGregor used the force to foresee the coming flood. He came prepared.
The brotherhood of the levitating pants?
They’re high waters.
Please turn in your gun and your AV Club Commentariat badge at the desk on your way out.
The connection between Ewan and Milhouse is that us oldies used to call pants like Ewan’s “floods” or “flood pants”. If I remember correctly, in the referenced frame Milhouse is celebrating that finally his floods came in handy.
I’m more concerned about the Stormtroopers posing as superheros.
better than watching them try to hit the broadside of a barn with a blaster.
If the trilogy was the first casualty, those pants were surely the second.
“I felt a great disturbance…as if a million fashionistas cried out in horror…and were suddenly silenced!”
As a kid in Lanarkshire (Scotland) the stock response to someone whose trousers were that high was “yer cat’s deid!”**You seem to be wearing your trousers at ‘half-mast,’ presumably as a mark of respect to a dead pet.
That doesn’t sound Scottish. The word ‘cunt’ didn’t appear anywhere.
lol my friend skye styled him for this junket.
Kindred spirits
“The $275-million bomb turned unmade “A Star Wars Stories” TV shows”What?
MacClunkey!
Fuck I love that. It just made me burst out laughing in the middle of my office.
That’s what you get for trying to read these things. Just skim the paragraphs, pick out some words, and then you can tell pretty much what it says. This article, for example, basically says: Obi-Wan screenwriter “The Beatles” is making a new Adventures in Babysitting series for $500 million. Or something like that.
AV Club writers put and editors put a lot of care and effort. into they’re writing. Do you really we have to shirt allover them just because they occasionally a word and typos? Whomst among us (I know I hasn’t clicked “summit and immediately noticed a few mistakes? Only a real grammer pedant grammar pedantic would spend so much time correctign someone else’s on the Internet. Besides, its not as if their getting payed.
Lol. That looks more like an itunes review. Take this gem I came across today. Developer even responds like he understands that nonsense.
I tried three times to make it through that masterpiece, but for whatever reason, run-on sentences just exhaust me lol.
Pat, I’d like to buy a punctuation mark!
I’m still surprised Solo didn’t do better than that. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, but probably works better if you just think of it as a heist film rather than origin story. Also pretty dumb that everything we know about Han Solo originated from his very first adventure.
I dont hate the movie and there is some fun stuff but I would say it was pretty dumb. Especially when compared to a movie like “Lightyear” which exists for a very similar corporate mandated – IP based reason. “Lightyear” wasnt perfect by any stretch but they sure as hell added some emotion behind “To Infinity and Beyond” which was already timeless but now has a great backstory behind it.
It doesnt need a backstory, though. The idea that it does is moronic.
I still reckon it was timing that did it in. Not only was it pretty soon after the previous Star Wars release; it was competing with Infinity War, Deadpool 2 and Aquaman too.
That’s an excellent point. Even before Disney+ started running out Star Wars-adjacent series, the release of Solo just felt like we were being inundated with SW content that ran ahead of market demand. I’m sure it was the time required for filming, special effects and the like that dictated the pace of release for the original trilogy, but having to wait three years each between SW > Empire > Return meant that fans were climbing the walls for the next movie.
Yes, the storied and celebrated Aquaman knocked a Star Wars movie off of its perch. Sure. Let’s go with that.A SW release is not going to suffer because of freaking Aquaman.
It was too much star wars too soon. they should have taken their time and ‘space’ them out a bit, maybe like that they could have done a decent sequel trilogy instead of just making the prequels look good in comparison
I found the movie fairly boring and forgettable overall. Honestly it’s been a while since I’ve found any Star Wars project truly exciting because they all just play it so safe.
I enjoyed Rogue One more than any of the sequel trilogy (well, maybe not Last Jedi since it actually offered up some new, later discarded, ideas) because to me it had a very Empire feel to it. Progress is made, but at a painful cost. And the best final act short of the original Star Wars.
I’m with you except for the blind quasi-Jedi. I’m not really a SW fan anymore thanks to everything post-OT but partially because of all the rule-breaking (e.g. midichorlians, blind quasi-Jedis). I realize that really puts a straitjacket on the franchise but the OT did well enough with a constrained rule set.
My head canon for Imwe is that he was Force sensitive but wasn’t found in time to be trained. So he’s capable of low level feats like awareness of his surroundings despite being blind, but that’s about it.
New ideas in and of themselves arent important if those new ideas are dumb. And the new ideas in Last Jedi are dumb. That movie sucks.
You thought that the one where Leia randomly starts using the force to fly through space back to safety was SAFE?!
On the other hand, yes, it actually is a pretty bad movie.
Counterpoint; it was a fun movie!
it’s a boring, murky movie with zero stakes. What a shitty thing to do to Lord & Miller.
Release date was full on terrible with Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom all out in the space of a month with Solo in there. Something was bound to take a fall. (Iger basically admitted as much later that the release date was bunk). They should have moved it to August 2018 where the box office heavy hitters were The Meg and Crazy Rich Asians.
It was fine but not good enough transcend that level of market saturation.
Just a three-pronged disaster from coming out mere months after The Last Jedi so no one had SW withdrawals; breaking the current Christmas tradition (where it has all of January to stretch its box office legs) of the Disney SW era by launching during a highly competitive summer window; and because of the production issues, they couldn’t offer glimpses and teases of the movie until a couple of months before release (the mainline SW movies usually get a teaser a year in advance), so no one could whet their anticipation for it until it was already about to come out.
Everything he was famous/notorious for all happened within ten minutes.
There were three things working against it.1) The pre-release buzz around the movie was not very good. Every time news came out about the movie, something had gone wrong.2) Last Jedi discourse wore the fuck out of everyone.3) The release date. Not only was it released too close to Last Jedi, but it had to contend with Black Panther, Rampage, Deadpool 2, and a tiny arthouse film called Avengers: Infinity War.
4: In most cinemas it was a visual mess. They went super-fancy with the set design and colour schemes but didn’t stress to the theatres that they needed to adjust their projectors accordingly so everything came out as a big dark, brown mess.
A few months later I watched it again at home and it displayed on an OLED screen absolutely perfect. Turns out there was quite a beautifully shot film buried in there.
I enjoyed SOLO. I had zero expectations and frankly, only went because I won free tickets. Friend and I had a fun time. It was a fun heist movie, and it was enjoyable to play around in scoundrel realm of SW. No Jedi. Donald Glover was outstanding. The movie was totally unnecessary, though. We didn’t need a big backstory for all these things. The curse of a prequel… answering questions that nobody asked. How’d Han get his name? (Uh, he was born Han Solo?). Meeting Chewie? Sure! HERE IS THE STORY OF HOW HAN GOT HIS ICONIC BLASTER:He bought a stock blaster once. the end
If you enjoyed the movie than it wasn’t unnecessary
Just didn’t seem like a Star Wars movie. I think that was the main complaint as their fandom is absolutely ruthless. They’re the predecessors of video game fandom.
“their fandom is absolutely ruthless.”Yup. They think their movies are some holy gospels. Star Wars movies are shit (all of them), akin to the Bond movies. I love, LOVE the Bond movies but I know they’re paper thin B-movies. People need to take the piss out of Star Wars. Only when they are ALLOWED to return to schlock, will they be any good.
It’s a decent movie, not fantastic by any means but it’s a fun romp. It deserved much more then it got. But then, it’s pretty obvious why it bombed…
it’s far and away my least favorite star wars movie and i don’t think it’s a particularly good heist film either.
Disagree. It’s a real boring, unimaginative slog. I forgot about it five minutes after seeing it. Man, I wish I could see the Lord and Miller version, though. They at least have a fun, creative style that could have done wonders for the material.
I think it’s mainly that audiences had no interest in seeing a non-Harrison Ford-portrayed Han Solo. But I’m sure you can mix in a few parts “divisive reaction to The Last Jedi,” and “they released this movie too soon after the last Star Wars movie.” They should have waited for December instead of trying to make a summer movie out of it. Or better yet, they should have released TFA in summer of 2016, if Disney could have fit in a spot that didn’t interfere with Marvel releases, so the entire saga + “stories” could have continued as summer events.
But did it add anything to the lore of Han Solo or Star Wars? We all know how he met Chewy, the Kessel Run, etc, etc. It added nothing which is why it failed. Disney played it safe and got smacked for it.
No, which is why it’s viewed best as a story outside the SW saga. The biggest mistake was shoehorning every single last defining trait of Han’s into one adventure. If you knew nothing about him, it just becomes a space heist flick.I’d say the Chewbacca introduction was the only one that cast new light, since it does explain his devotion to Han. The movie should have ended with him winning the Falcon and taking it out for its first spin.
Aldenn einrich sucks, he only got the roll because of nepotism/part of the tribe, and Steven Spielberg forced him on that project because he did a skit at his daughter’s Bat mitzvah.He was a terrible choice for Han Solo I mean the guy is like five six or five seven. Han Solo didn’t have curly hair. And is acting wasn’t that great for Han Solo. Not to mention a Han Solo movie is nothing any Star Wars fan ever wanted in a backstory movie.I Love to see a backstory movie about palpatine and how he got trained and so powerful. Would love to see origin movies on bad guys.
I think it’s more the case that the movie would’ve been successful if LucasFilm had just left Lord & Miller alone, rather than making essentially TWO movies by having Ron Howard come in most of the way through to reshoot almost everything. Shared Universe Hollywood seems to really have the attitude that they should just make a whole new movie again rather than releasing WTF they’ve largely got.
It’s another example of that Star Wars instinct to fill in every crack George Lucas missed in his effort to create a fun, romantic space adventure for kids.I don’t want or need every detail of the SW universe explained. That said, I’d watch an Obi-Wan movie trilogy just to see more of Ewan McGregor in that role. It doesn’t even have to tie into the prequels or OT. Obi-Wan could move to Mos Espa and make a fortune as a casino magnate for all I care, as long as it’s a good story and true to the character.
“We don’t need explanations for X” is a distraction from the real issue: all of the live-action Star Wars content from the Disney era has been some level of narratively incompetent. The only unifying factor among all of them is Kathleen Kennedy. I can’t say for sure she’s to blame, but it’s hard to think of any other plausible explanation for why they haven’t been able to make something that isn’t filled with Screenwriting 101 mistakes.
Definitely a matter of personal opinion. For me, Disney-era Star Wars hasn’t been any better or worse than anything else out right now. There’s a mix of good, bad, and forgettable but competent. It’s held to a different standard because Star Wars is a seminal movie in the childhoods of millions.If I was going to blame anyone for, say, the disjointedness of the Sequel Trilogy, I’d blame the Disney executives who probably insisted that those movies be released in rapid succession to justify and recoup their $4 billion purchase of LucasFilm to shareholders. Same answer for the perceived cheapness/rushed nature of some of the SW/Marvel shows on Disney+—the company is notoriously stingy when it wants to be.
The Sequel Trilogy! They had a plan. No, nope, no, they clearly didn’t.
There’s a mix of good, bad, and forgettable but competent. It’s held to a different standard because Star Wars is a seminal movie in the childhoods of millions.We watch a fair variety of other shows and movies, and none of them have even a tiny fraction of the basic screenwriting problems all the Star Wars live-action content has. I was facepalming or saying “wait, WHAT?” about every two minutes when watching Boba Fett and Kenobi, and not once was it because of Star Wars lore problems or because I loved Star Wars so much as a kid. It was just failure after failure of the storytelling or character motivations or dialogue to make any basic sense.
I agree. An intellectual property that is as beloved as Star Wars should be able to produce movies and tv shows that are mediocre at worst. Most of the Disney Star Wars content is just horrible. All that money and the output is just amateurish.
Kathleen Kennedy is greenlighting scripts that are not screen ready, but the mistakes they keep making with Star Wars does not seem to be at an executive level. The film making and writing (and acting with a few exceptions) is embarrassingly sloppy and not up to the standard of any half way decent IP. Everytime I try and watch a new Star Wars thing I’m always left asking “Isn’t Hollywood full of talented people dying to tell a star wars story?” “Isn’t that what inspired half of the people working today to get into the industry in the first place?” “Shouldn’t someone have an original idea?” but alas. The only way I could see it being Kennedy’s fault is if she’s not hiring the right directors, but to her credit JJ Abrams, Jon Favreau, Rian Johnson (I love TLJ), and Taika are pretty solid hires to lead the franchise. I hope one day we find out what went wrong.
the mistakes they keep making with Star Wars does not seem to be at an executive level. The film making and writing (and acting with a few exceptions) is embarrassingly sloppy and not up to the standard of any half way decent IP.I would blame that on the executive level. Maybe it’s not Kathleen Kennedy herself but some executive is hiring the producers that are putting out this work. And high-profile projects like Obi-Wan Kenobi are absolutely being reviewed at multiple stages by LucasFilm executives. I can believe they don’t care about the quality of the writing, but I’m genuinely surprised that they look at some of these awkwardly staged action scenes and go, “Yup!”Then again, it’s direct-to-streaming. They have our money either way.
This is fair but execs aren’t writers and I think on some level it is hard to tell a decent script from a mediocre script. The writing, acting, and occasionally directing on so much of this stuff is so sub par.
I think it was a pretty sizable mistake to hire three different directors who didn’t agree on the story to tell for the new trilogy.
That to me is a creative failure of the writers and directors of these movies. Of course the execs and producers do shoulder some of that blame, but I don’t know if it was JJ who said ‘what if Palpatine was Rey’s father?’ but when youre the director and carry the sway that he does, the buck absolutely stops with him. It’s not an enviable job but still, hire 10 top notch screen writers to write 10 completely different takes and choose the best one. Disney is acting like it gets infinite do-overs and the audience has infinite patience to sit through re-heated leftovers (they might be right on that one.) The D+ shows are a little different cuz they’re such complex productions and I think they’re just pumping them out too quick to give them the quality control they deserve.
I think many of us see Kathleen Kennedy as the Kevin Feige of the Star Wars IP, but she can only wish she was that. Where are Lucasfilm’s minders and keepers of the franchise? All gone to greener pastures?
Yeah, I think people have sort of gotten the wrong idea that every franchise’s Executive Producer is like Kevin Feige and the MCU, but Feige is pretty uncommon in his extreme control/architect role. Kennedy seems to be more operating as a traditional Executive Producer and mostly just looking for hires and rubber stamping projects that will sound good to higher ups. I don’t feel like things would be significantly different if someone else was in that role, maybe just a different flavor.
I’m more inclined to believe that Disney’s top leadership is the ones to be putting the pressure on for frequent projects, on the cheap, while also boxing them in from doing anything too original because well, it’s easy marketing if you just rely on things people recognize.
I would also say that I think what I call ‘toybox syndrome’ is probably a big part of the lack of originality problem. As you said, lots of people getting hired for these probably were inspired by Star Wars. So then you get the call; you’re going to write a Star Wars! What an opportunity to tell a brand new story.. but also you now have access to every character/location/item that you were such a big fan of growing up. Maybe you could weave your story to include them? And also them. And maybe this too. When else will you have the chance to play with these after all? Next thing you know we’re on Tattooine yet again finding Luke’s landspeeder or something.
It’s not even really a new problem, the old Expanded Universe books were rife with it too. If you plotted out the EU timeline the entire original trilogy cast was getting tied up in galactic threats every two months for like 20 years after the films.
Yeah they’re just making too much stuff. I wish they would’ve spent the last 5 years getting a handful top tier writers from Marvel Comics to write Star Wars comics and they could just adapt the best ones.
My understanding is that Feige is a massive Marvel Comics nerd as well which helps. I don’t know if the same is true for whoever makes SW movies nowadays.
Kathleen Kennedy is bad at her job and by all accounts failed upwards. She is just one of those people that succeed by having the ability to build and maintain relationships with the right people. Hollywood is full of those people.
Yea, I don’t get it either. But, you know who does get it? The anime studios that they hired to do Visions. Those people understood the assignment.
The issue is that they want Star Wars to be the MCU but refuse to actually try to expands the universe to new characters and instead just want to “play the hits”. It’s why Mando was such a refreshing change, it was new people. Then season 2 became “Hey look at all these cool clone war characters you don’t care about and Boba Fett!”. Boba Fett was bad and it doubled down on the “cool” clone war characters few people cared about. I actually kinda likes Obi Wan but please god don’t make a second season.The other bigger issue is Kathleen Kennedy is no Kevin Fiege. She doesn’t have the same level of respect for the material and the micromanaging aspect needed to create a interlocking universe. The best thing for Star Wars would be to let people adapt stories in completely new eras and areas of the galaxy. A thousand parsecs or a thousand years away from anyone names Skywalker
Star Wars doesn’t even have the potential to be the MCU IMO. The MCU works because they have tons of characters who are known both for solo adventures and for team-ups. People get excited from the prospect of two known characters meeting and teaming up against the villain of the month. Lucasfilms seems to think the same is true for Star Wars but it just isn’t. So they really need to nail making these movies and shows exciting and fresh but they don’t even seem to be trying to do that because they think what people want is non-stop fan service.I don’t really need a connected Star Wars universe where the shows fill-in the blanks between nine movies of wildly varying quality. I just want a couple of really good shows around new ideas.
I do wonder how much of this is the result of the animated shows having been so popular. Those shows were all about filling in the gaps of X character or story. They were just deft enough to have enough original characters and independent stories to balance it out. Many of the Disney+ efforts to me have felt like an attempt to capture that but for live-action.
And while I’d personally prefer more wholly original stuff that doesn’t get bogged down in navel gazing, I’m not entirely sure the non-stop fan service you mention isn’t working for them, at least in the streaming arena. I never fail to see quite a lot of outpourings of excitement on social media whenever some new reference to the animations/comics/games shows up in one of the series. Maybe they just realized it doesn’t work as well in theater releases.
Star Wars is the connected team up, and breaking off solo films/series ought to work—that’s basically what the EU was, right?
Me too. I really would love a KOTOR era movie. It would feel like Star Wars and kinda have its look, but it could be different enough to be interesting and involve characters we never heard of doing shit that is a surprise to us. Same with going with a Legacies style future setting set hundreds of years in the future of the current 9 movies
The best thing for Star Wars would be to let people adapt stories in completely new eras and areas of the galaxy. A thousand parsecs or a thousand years away from anyone names SkywalkerThis or use the same characters, but exclusively in grounded storylines:Luke starts a new moisture farm and has to run a successful business during a post-Empire economic collapse. In a twist on “inspirational sports movie”, Chewbacca coaches the equivalent of a Little League team except it’s little Wookies and they’re using bowcasters.Kramer vs Kramer except it’s Leia and Han.
I like The Bad News Bears only with a drunk retired Chewbacca
Mandalorian got me because I’d always wanted a starwars show that wasn’t jedi focused. Laser swords are fun but I like sith and jedi more when they’re rare. Doing that wandering samurai or weird hermit thing. When a Jedi or Sith shows up it should be a big deal instead it’s like everyone’s got a lightsaber now.
It’s those damned women messing up Star Wars! something something Kathleeen Kennedy is a name I’ve heard!
Coming soon: Andor, the best must-see don’t-miss Star Wars show since the invention of sliced bread.
What’s funny to me is that I thought the trailer for Andor was fantastic. Like, it legitimately made me excited for a Star Wars show. To be fair, it didn’t change whether I’m going to actually watch it as it airs (Kenobi put the last nail in that coffin); I’ll still wait for reviews and see if they actually manage to tell a coherent story for once.
There better not be any cute characters in Andor.
“What’s your name?”“Cassian.”“Your full name. Who are your people?”“My people?”
“The surname of your parent and/or guardian?”“That’s it — my name is Cassian And/Or.”
Yeah, Andor could end up being surprisingly good. The early rebellion stuff (circa 5 years before Yavin) has always been my favourite segment to explore.
“any other plausible explanation”.The billions of other people writing them and directing them.
Too many cooks in general.The fact that they’re hung over George Lucas’s own framework which was full of shit dialogue and plot holes aplenty already.
As yes its the woman producers fault! She clearly has no experience being a producer on great films the following are a list of stinkers she produced:
Gremlins, Back to the Future, An American Tail, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Schindler’s List, The Color Purple, E.T., Jurassic Park, Alive, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Hereafter, Lincoln, the Indiana Jones series.
To name a few.
It’s also blatantly false to say the only unifying factor is her on all the films. There are so many people working on these films. J.J. Abrams also produced all three of the new trilogy while also writing and directing VII and IX. There is so much overlap with all of these star wars projects but people keep parroting the Kathlean thing to a nauseating degree.
Abrams had nothing to do with any of the TV shows. And yes, it’s entirely possible this has nothing to do with Kennedy, although since she’s in charge of Lucasfilm, ultimately everything that it produces is to her credit or fault to at least some degree. Otherwise, you’re asserting that she’s in charge of Lucasfilm but is not responsible for anything Lucasfilm does, which, what?I don’t even know where you got the idea that this has anything to do with her gender. Like, what?
“I don’t even know where you got the idea that this has anything to do with her gender. Like, what?”
This is blatantly ignorant of the droves of internet misogynists who specifically blame her for making Star Wars too “woke” and “”pc” because shes a woman and has some liberal agenda.
I’m aware of those idiots, but nothing I said even remotely implies that my criticism has anything to do with her gender. So thanks for introducing that red herring.Aside from that, you posited that there’s lots of other people who have worked on all these projects, except, no, there aren’t. And even if there are, Kennedy hired them. You can’t escape the fact that the person in charge of Lucasfilm ultimately bears responsibility for what Lucasfilm does!
… and the “fill in the gaps” model CAN work. Rogue One is very good, and I like Solo more than seemingly most people in these parts. Both fill in gaps in the overall story. Rogue One is a bracing war movie, and Solo is a fun space movie, with a great heist. Both tell their story in a couple of hours, and get out. The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan probably would have worked much better in the same model.
Say what you will about the prequels overall, but Ewan McGregor is the best Obi Wan. Sure, Alec Guinness was only in 1 movie (with a couple force ghost appearances after that) versus McGregor’s 3 movies + TV show, but McGregor really brings the character to life.
You could have probably just stopped after ‘the best.’
Honestly this makes so much sense because even at a brisk six episodes, Obi-Wan Kenobi still managed to feel stretched out.
If they wanted to stretch one movie into 6 hours, why didn’t they just adapt the triligy into 6 episodes? Each episode is a two parter? Or at the least combine 2 of those stories so it’s a little less tepid.
Cuz Disney wants to stretch this shit out as much as possible. Only the first movie in the trilogy was written. The writer said he “envisioned” it as a trilogy and I guess had ideas for the second and third movie. So from a pedantic standpoint, it’s because there was only one script to adapt. From a practical point of view, idk, maybe there were time jumps in between movies that would have made more sense in between seasons than episodes.
Yeah it would have been better as a two hour movie
They didn’t say it out loud, but this is exactly what happened to Boba Fett. There was a movie on tap, with James Mangold rumored to direct. The Solo flop axed the Boba Fett movie, which opened a lane for Mandalorian — and then when they reached back for the Boba Fett script, it had to be slid out of place in the timeline and stretched over however many episodes and there just wasn’t enough there to do it with. If you go back over it there’s about a 2 hour movie’s worth of good sequences in BoBF — you got the Long Speeder, the Jabba’s Palace ship heist, the showdown with the Pykes, and enough Krrsyntan to fill in the gaps.
boba fett was gonna be josh trank if i remember correctly (obviously mangold could have been attached at one point, too) and then he kind of torpedo’d himself with his awful decorum on fantastic four.
Boba Fett was completely rewritten from the ground up by Favreau, regardless of what Mangold or Josh Trank or anyone else was working on.As this article points out, though, some of the DNA of Beattie’s project did survive to the Obi Wan series, hence why he has story credit across a few episodes.
The development of Obi Wan was fraught with issues. Recall that the original series writer, Hossein Amini, was fired, the project was pushed back and new writers, led by Joby Harold, were brought in.
I wonder if Hossein’s version had nothing to do with Beattie and then the subsequent writers went back to that older material and mined it for ideas. Who knows, but it was a long, winding road to screen.
A BRISK six episodes? I’d call them a slog, but YMMV.
I jut finished the Book of Boba; even with two if it’s episodes not even dealing with the title character, it still feels long. Then I started the Bad Batch–16 episodes (with the first being double-length)? Madness. I can only imagine how empty these shows would be if they were standard network tv shows with 22 or 24 episodes.
It’s wild that “Solo” failed because Bob Iger used it as a test balloon for the MCU model. He wanted to see if Disney could sustain more than movie every year. And instead of realizing that people were just a little burned out, they blamed the movie and changed their entire strategy. And they got score to do anything different or interesting.
Well, they actually DID realize people were burned out, which is why there hasn’t been an SW movie since Episode 9 and won’t be for at least another couple of years.
If Solo being mediocre got three movies cancelled, I wonder what “Episode 9 being the worst movie in the entire franchise including the prequels” got cancelled.
Episodes X through XII…?
??? Episode 9 was only the second-worst though…
I consider Episode 9 to be worse than the Holiday Special.
Oh yea. I forgot about the Holiday Special.Third worst.
Not just the worst SW movie, literally one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, full stop.
Episode 8 was certainly the most interesting after the ultra-generic rehash that was episode 7
I mean, the list of planned projects that have turned to mist in the aftermath of Ep IX is pretty extensive and easy to find.
we’re never getting another star wars movie. they’re gonna dangle taika for 6 months and then he’ll leave due to creative differences.
Episode 9 with its many flaws was still a better and more entertaining movie than The Last Jedi, which was aggressively awful.
It made 1 billion dollars. They don’t care if anyone liked it or not.
The correct rankings are:
Star WarsEmpire Strikes BackReturn of the JediClone Wars Animated SeriesRogue One: A Star Wars StoryThe MandalorianObi-Wan KenobiSoloRebelsThe Bad BatchThe Last JediThe Force AwakensRise of SkywalkerStar Wars Holiday SpecialAttack of the ClonesRevenge of the SithBook of Boba FettThe Phantom Menace
I have spoken.
I’m pretty sure Rian Johnson’s trilogy got cancelled. As well as any future plans they had with JJ Abrams.
The former is unfortunate, but if it means that JJ is out a job it’s an acceptable trade-off.
I was Star Wars obsessed as a kid and I didn’t get why Kenobi allowed himself to die until I was like 26
I still don’t understand why Obi-Wan’s body disappeared. I’ve seen people explain it as Obi-Wan and Yoda understanding how to become force ghosts, but there are other characters who show up as force ghosts whose dead bodies are shown. Anakin’s body is cremated and he still shows up as a force ghost.
They’re still figuring out how that works. Only good Jedi can come back as Force Ghosts. Er…b-but, Anakin was evil, right?
No! He threw an old man down a hole to protect his own child, which retroactively undid 25 years of mass murder and genocide, making him good again.
Plenary indulgence.
Even Vader was like, “wha???”
Ah, though perhaps Anakin’s body DID disappear and Luke merely burned the remains of the Vader suit!
Probably gave all the ewoks in that village cancer, burning all that plastic and heavy metals.
And electrical components! Definitely.
May just be me but his idea sounds like one movie to me. Just because it takes place in three different time periods doesn’t mean there are three good movies to mine out of a basic story of showing how Kenobi overcame PTSD and accepted his fate.
So wait, if this proposed second movie was supposed to be Obi-Wan right before A New Hope, what’s the 3rd? Obi-Wan’s Force Ghost Adventures where he just roams the astral plane while popping in occasionally to talk to Luke in episodes 5 & 6? An epic hunt where he has to find Anakin and Yoda’s Force ghosts in time to wave at Luke at the end of ROTJ?
Obi-Wan: Treetop Party Planner.
Not hard to see how the TV show took the first 2 hr movie idea and stretched it to 6 episodes. There’s a lot of weak points in the show that just scream “we’re filling time. This should have been a movie”.The ideas about the trilogy sound way more intriguing than what we got from the show though. If they didn’t want to make a movie, I don’t see why they couldn’t have adapted all of those ideas into a show. You probably couldn’t do it in 6 episodes, but what about 12? Hell, D+ is just a content mill anyway so why not do 3 six episode seasons? I’m just saying there was probably a way to do it better than what we actually got.
Maybe the movies would have been lackluster too since ideas always tend to sound better than what you end up getting, but its a little bit of a bummer seeing the ideas here and comparing it to what we got from the TV show. The show wasn’t “bad”, but its basically just some cool Vader scenes and not much else. Could have really used some of those “ideas” and fleshed them out more
Solo and Rogue One are the best of the Disney Star Wars movies and the best Star Wars anything since Empire and somehow they did poorly and the sequel trilogy, which is a certified shit show with more plot holes than swiss cheese, did well. Consumers and fans are dumb af. And I love the “oversaturated” comments from people that couldn’t handle a new Star Wars movie every year, but have no problem going to 10 awful superhero movies a year with some of the worst plot lines in fucking history.
a disappointing total that director Ron Howard later blamed on online trolls.Were there trolls? Sure, but point the finger where it belongs, Opie. The movie was fine enough, but it was just that: fine enough. But that’s it.1) It was wedged between two massive blockbusters that almost certainty stole it’s thunder2) It was largely un-necessary. It was corperate mandated origin story that nobody really wanted.3) Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Last Jedi was decisive. That almost certantly hurt the box office take.4) Star Wars wasn’t special anymore. If you think back to 1-3 and absolutely 4-6, the 3 year gap served to get everyone hyped for the next movie. Now with a Marvel Movie every other (pre-pandemic) month and a Star Wars movie twice in one year, nobody gave a shit anymore.
I agree, especially unnecessary origin stories. Alden Ehrenreich did a decent job but how can you compare to Harrison Ford in his prime. We really didn’t need an origin story for Han.
i also think, straight up, people did not give a shit about the adventures of young han solo.
And THAT’S the frustrating thing. A younger Han movie could have been – well, I wont be so bold as to say great, but at least a whole lot of fun. All they had to do is cut the Brian Daley estate a check and adapt the hell out of his three books (Stars End, Revenge and Lost Legacy). No, not particularly deep books, but they nailed the feel of Star Wars without jedi and sabers and only 33.3% of The Big Three.
well again, i think regardless of whether they made a fantastic movie or not most people just don’t give a shit about the adventures of young han solo. they expected a huge built-in audience that didn’t exist. it’s also funny that it scared them THAT badly because in my mind they have just as much data to suggest that a star wars movie will make money. solo is the exception not the rule.
All good points!
I believe the word you’re looking for concerning The Last Jedi is “divisive”, not decisive. I say this with zero amount of condescension.
I believe the word you’re looking for concerning The Last Jedi is “divisive”, not decisive.Aw damnit! The typo got me! And of course who could possibly want to edit past 15 min because Fuck You, that’s why.
lol I know that pain.
Also, when you extensively rewrite and reshoot your movie, it’s on you. I don’t feel like it’s fair to say it bombed when they basically made two movies and only showed one.“We filmed this movie twice, but it only paid for itself once, so it’s a critical failure. No more Star Warses!”
Also, when you extensively rewrite and reshoot your movie, it’s on you. I don’t feel like it’s fair to say it bombed when they basically made two movies and only showed one.I hate what DC has done, giving in to the Release the Snyder Cut fanboys (meaning they will NEVER shut up now), and I realize that it’s nowhere near in a state ready for release, but I do have to admit that I’m curious about seeing the rough cut of the original Solo.
If it makes you feel better, I think there’s a world of difference between expressing curiosity about a lost Lord&Miller project and what the Snyder stans did.
God dammit this franchise has been on life support since 1983. Just fucking stop already.
The most tragic casualty of Solo’s performance is that it robbed us of future opportunities to see more of Donald Glover as Lando. Pitch perfect casting there. Should have just made ‘Lando: A Star Wars Story (guest starring Han Solo and Chewie)‘ instead.
apparently there’s some ‘lando’ series on the horizon but unless it’s actively filming i have a hard time believing A. it’ll happen and B. that glover is involved.
It’s been officially announced with Glover, but it’s one of many SW projects in development and we already know that a few of them have fallen away. And Glover is kind of a busy guy.
I would love a Donald Glover Lando series, especially if they have Billy Dee acting as the narrator.
Falcon: A Star Wars StoryThe ship is what brings them together anyway.
I feel like todays deepfakes could have saved Solo. It wasn’t a bad movie at all. And the kid they got to play Han did a good job, too. He just didn’t look like Harrison Ford enough.I really think that was its main impediment.
That’s never been an impediment to any movie, ever.
I assume this is a sarcastic post
Have you seen Uncanny Valley Luke?Also, I don’t imagine there is any amount of money in the universe that could convince Harrison Ford to do another Star Wars movie.
Seeing him was fine. Hearing him speak was the problem.
I can’t get over how utterly awful the idea of an entire fucking trilogy about Obi Wan set between ROTS and ANH is.Here’s a clue: If your movie series can pick right up with a major character twenty years without missing a single beat, without any lingering questions about how and why he got to that place, then holy fucking shit, you do not need a trilogy of movies to show how he spend his time in the interim.
Jamelle Bouie said the failure of Solo should put an end to “tick the boxes” movies, at least in the Star Wars IP. But they were ticking boxes in Obi-Wan Kenobi (not that it bothered me). Bit too much box ticking in season two of The Mandalorian and in the Book of Bobba Fett, though
“the show stretched Beattie’s proposed two-hour movie into a six-hour miniseries.”Not really. Yeah, there were six eps, but the run times were:53 minutes, 39, 45, 36, 40, 48. Which is about 4 hr 20min. And then each ep has like 7-8 minutes of credits, ”previously on…” footage/foreign voiceover credits (the first ep had over 10 minutes of prequel recap/credits) so we’re really looking at a movie barely longer than Avengers: Endgame.
Point is, we’re not looking at some sort of The Hobbit-level padding of one book into three movies. The Obi-Wan series seems like a slightly longer story than the first movie was supposed to be.
I honestly like Solo the best of all the Disney era movies.That being said, Obi-Wan was kinda crappy and I’m glad I didn’t pay to see a movie of it in the theater.
What I find funny about this revelation is that the biggest complaint leveled against the TV show was the pacing and the feeling there was a lot of filler to make 6 episodes. What would have 3 feature films been like?
My comment is not really related to this article, but it’s the most recent one about this show so here goes.
I had a thought while watching the finale last night about the timeline of this show relating to the other shows they’ve been putting out. It’s probably ~20-30 years between Kenobi and Mandalorian/Boba Fett/Ahsoka, right? They could very easily have Ice Cube show up in one of those shows playing a grown up version of his son’s character (can’t remember his name). He could feasibly be involved in some sort of smuggling role since he was basically part of the Jedi Underground Railroad smuggling people in this show. As much as I am normally a “let’s see more of the universe instead of the same characters we already know” person, this would be a pretty cool move.
unfortunately that would require ice cube get vaccinated.
Poor Opie…has he directed a flick in the past 15 years that’s not a box office bomb?
I’m still hoping that it overall does badly enough that they scrap their plans to turn Star Wars into another MCU…
Seeing as to how some of the SW tv shows are so non-sensical (looking at you, Book of Boba Fett!), I can’t imagine how meandering an entire trilogy of Kenobi movies would have been. It’s probably best left as a series at this point.