Posted on 06/26/2018 10:44:50 AM PDT by servo1969
If you don't want to watch, here's the quick written version:
Disney staged a big "secret" conference call with ranking people in the Star Wars division. Security guards were posted outside the doors at offices to prevent eavesdropping. Pixar and Marvel representatives were able to listen in on the call, but not speak on it. Apparently this was allowed to get feedback, I guess at a later point, about the Star Wars situation.
Disney's head Bob Iger wants to fire Kathleen Kennedy, but there's a problem: No one they're willing to offer the job to is willing to take it. JJ Abrams (Randolph reports) was offered the job, but turned it down flat. "Several" were approached.
One person that's brought up as a possible replacement for Kennedy, Dave Filloni, isn't being considered for the job by Iger, I guess because he hasn't run anything big like a studio.
Randolph says (speculating, I think) that no one wants the job because the Lucasfilm team is divided between old-guard Star Wars people and Kennedy's handpicked loyalists.
I would speculate myself that, assuming this claim that no one wants the job is true, it's because the brand is broken, and people know that, and it's a no-win situation: Everyone seems to think that Star Wars is supposed to make money automatically. That's no longer true post-Solo, but people still think that, so any head of Lucasfilm is in a situation where the best they can do is meet expectations (make money), and the worst they can do is fail spectacularly.
There's no upside. Well, except a huge pile of money, but I imagine the people being approached are already getting huge piles of money from other ventures with more of an upside as far as their reputations.
So no big-name person would want to walk into that situation. Smaller names would take that chance, but apparently Disney hasn't gotten desperate enough to offer it to a smaller name. Yet.
Randolph says that Disney feels that Star Wars is too targeted to "older SJWs," instead of its traditional fan base of men, and this is also hurting Star Wars in its merchandise sales, as "older SJWs" don't really buy movie tickets and certainly don't spend a lot of money on Milennium Falcon playsets.
She also reports that all the Star Wars "anthology" movies are indeed on hold as Disney tries to figure this out, except maybe for one: The Obi-Wan movie, which Disney thinks it should have made instead of Star Wars. However, while this movie is not officially on hold, it's also not on the front-burner, either.
Lastly, while "Episode IX" is still on (it's already started filming), it's "too late for any major course corrections." Kathleen Kennedy has ceded all creative control to director J.J. Abrams, maybe to spare herself further blame, maybe because she wants to just sit this one out, or who knows, maybe because Disney wants the ball in someone else's hands.
One point she alludes to, which she made before: She thinks that Star Wars never appealed to Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy didn't like the franchise, because it was, indeed, a boys' adventure franchise.
Instead of making a boys' adventure franchise she didn't get and didn't like, she made it into something she could like: a girls' empowerment fantasy.
This kind of sums up the problem with Social Justice Warriors taking over male-skewing sections of pop culture: They just don't like it. They never did like it. Some of them even feel that these parts of pop culture encourage "toxic masculinity," and therefore are evil.
And therefore must be subverted and remade into something they never were before.
So you... put multimillion dollar companies into the hands of people who don't like the product those companies sell and in fact might even hate?
Well, good luck with that, I guess.
Doubling Down and Redoubling Down: Apparently an official employee of Lucasfilm, writing for the "official" StarWars.com website, has decided to inform people that they are not "customers" of Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm owes them nothing at all, not even polite treatment.
She seems to be echoing Kathleen Kennedy, who has previously declared that she owes nothing to the male fans of Star Wars (who, let's face it, have maintained the value of the franchise for 40+ years):
"I have a responsibility to the company that I work with. I don't feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way. I would never just seize on saying, 'Well, this is a franchise that's appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'"
Yes... yes... reach out with your Hatred... all is proceeding precisely as I envisioned...
This debacle foreshadows Netflix's stupidity, giving the Obamas a contract to produce films. I can see it all now:
"Why I, Obama, Am The Most Beloved President in US History." Produced, directed and starring Obama.
Balderdash.......Disney had to know what was going on.......and approved of it.
Now they're Monday morning quarterbacking the flop.
I screwed up. Someone earlier pointed out there are two Kathleen Kennedys. I thought they were the same. You get smarter reading Free Republic.
One in from the MA Kennedy Klan and was in politics and the other one worked with Steven Spielberg. Both are big liberals born in the early 50’s within a year and a half of each other.
Trump will never get another TV show after the Presidency but he will be able to tweet (if they don’t ban him).
They don't think 5-year-olds buy their own Millennium Falcons, do they? Disney is torn between its left-wing politics and its profit motive. They're pulling this type of nonsense with their Marvel franchise, too, and it will cost them.
The only way to make Episode IX cool is to open it with a scene of a third group, ptreviously unknown to Star Wars viewers, destroying both Rebellion and Empire.
I did not go see Solo because of The Last Jedi...I’m a huge Star Wars geek and have been for quite some time. And Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy managed to make me disinterested in the franchise after seeing The Last Jedi...which is no small accomplishment. Complete disregard for the established storyline, characters, lore, etc. Everything potentially interesting in Episode 7 was discarded like it wasn’t important, lowering the quality of that movie as well, and of course it dumped upon Episodes 1-6 and turned everything into a parody of itself. Rogue One is the only decent movie Disney has put out under its tenure that truly respected what is was supposed to be and the writers cared about continuity.
Grace Randolph gets it right - the SJWs decided to come into our house and just trash the place...they “culturally appropriated” our Star Wars.
Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson both need to be shown the door as well as their allies. this current sequel trilogy should be scrapped and 7 & 8 should be declared “legends” and removed from canon. Otherwise, I doubt I’ll be all that interested in seeing any more Star Wars films in name only...
Solo LOST $100 million - probably more. It is no small accomplishment to make a Star Wars movie lose money. There was a massive boycott effort following The Last Jedi by the fanbase against Solo. TLJ’s numbers were good thanks to strong opening...its drop offs were massive that in its latter weeks it was taking in less than Rogue One in the same time frame. TLJ’s DVD and BluRay sales have also been way down. In addition, their toy sales have also plummeted. LucasFilm employees have been hurling multiple insults at the fans over the last few months as well and the allies in the press have been attacking fans as “white supremacists”, “white male toxic fandom”, etc. The usual leftist fare.
7 could have been made better by 8...(generic stuff could have been greatly expanded upon) - instead, it took the few potentially interesting things in 7 and just discarded them as unimportant...so 7 is a far worse movie because of 8 because it now pretty much means nothing...just a generic movie with no point to it.
What’d they do, kill off Solo because he was white, male, and capitalist- essentially an underdog American cowboy crossed with an early 20th century traveling salesman and undefiled by PC?
Figures they’d snuff him.
It is probably not a gender thing but I have not been blessed with the gene to enjoy Star Wars. It just leaves me cold, like most fantasy warring world shows. Absolutely zero interest.
The Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy is a different person from Maryland’s Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
No, don’t even put 7 & 8 into Legends, they don’t deserve to even be listed in the same place as the old EU, which is FAR superior, even if it does have its duds. They’d need to be just declared non-canon, period.
Now, Rogue One? That COULD actually work under Legends, provided that some tweaking could be done to make it better fit.
Yeah, no kidding. I think the closest it ever got before then to Star Wars even losing money was with the Clone Wars movie that was released in 2008 (at least, MSN.com seemed to have some articles around the time it was released that implied that The Clone Wars was a box office bomb), and even THAT never got nearly as bad as Solo.
It also just comes across as sick that the guys at Lucasfilm are insulting their base and customers. Besides, it’s suicidal as well since it’s destroying profits. Had I been running the company, I’d probably make sure to fire anyone who makes even ONE insulting remark to the audience, even do extensive monitoring of their twitter accounts.
You mean Resistance and First Order. But yeah. After Snoke was killed, not to mention the Resistance is pretty much nearly extinguished, we’ve pretty much got the end of the saga as it is. Can’t expect Leia to play any more role in the story thanks to Carrie Fisher’s death. A third faction may be the only way an Episode IX would even be feasible.
Not until they film a bonfire of ewoks while everyone roasts marshmallows will I give a damn.
Thee FemiNazis need to be checked.
They are marauders.....constantly injecting their war-like tentacles into places they do not belong.
Accountability, actually. The sense we have to account for our actions, the things we say we will do - this is what defines, generally, the trajectory of any society - or group, or gender.
Men of our word. I don’t know of a corresponding female aspiration.
Well, I do know that Mallory Millet at least DOES believe in accountability, even practiced it herself by saying that ultimately it was females fault for humanity being in a state of sin. I guess Phyllis Schlafly thinking that the Equal Rights Amendment is going to put women in an even WORSE position than before is also accountability. Both of them, BTW, were feminine, truly feminine.
Besides, I know men who promote “accountability” yet were scumbags, like for example Jean-Paul Sartre, who pretty much stated we’re “condemned to be free.”
You are substantiating my point through the exceptions. I think increasingly women are starting to resist third wave feminism.
Women have ALWAYS been in charge. Always. Family used to be why women were so powerful. They purposefully tossed that bit out the generational window.
Notice how pets have assumed a status children wished they could have had? This current generation have decided raising pets is enough.
I see this everywhere, and its chilling.
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