Titanic irrevocably changed the movie industry from $80 million A-titles to $150 million A-titles in a matter of years. To get back to this discussion, Star Wars was a very low budget movie, which should be considered a massive part of its legacy.
If DVD hadn’t come along and saved the industry, the post-Titanic decision to go high budget may have destroyed it. You cannot comprehend how much money DVDs made the industry between 2002-2006. Probably at least 100 titles made the studios over $1 billion in profit each.
I saw Star Wars at a theater with a massive sound system in 1977. I was 10 and it was pretty cool. I thought ESB was a pretty good sequel and RoTJ was meh until the eWoks dropped out of the trees and overdid the cutesy teddy bear bullshit. Completely ruined the franchise imo. Everything after that was trash. Jar Jar Binks was a complete Mr. Bean ripoff imo and I hated him. Did the actor who played him deserve death threats? No, but ffs what a useless character. My wife made me see this in the theater completely against my will and the best part of the movie for me was when the kid in front of me spilled a one pound bag of m&m’s into the row in front of him. Such a satisfying sound.
I checked out some reddit threads on this and got 3/4 of the way through one before I realized they were all playing a video game and most of the comments were about that. Lots of ewok hate in sprinkled in there too.
This kind of reductionism doesn’t add anything to the debate. Star wars was cobbled together references to B movies and things like Kurosawa before it which were themselves referencing films before then back to the 7 basic plots told over campfires before agriculture.
It was a bunch of stuff I hadn’t thought about when watching the movie that is very accurate. It’s like a DVD special feature. It provides added value to the discussion.
Agree with this actually. Jedi easily second best Star Wars film and Ewoks one of the better parts of it. Somebody told me once that the original idea was a planet full of Chewbaccas and I think that it was a good switch. I am famously a huge Chewbacca fan but we only need one of those guys. Although I am curious if all the Chewbaccas have bizarrely crossbow shaped laser guns or if he is the only Wookie weirdo who owns one. I hope the latter.
Sure but pointing out a different causal variable doesn’t negate the existing ones. This is obviously a complex system with many causal variables. My point all along is that the birth of the blockbuster teen focused IP is one contributing causal variable to the problems we see in the industry today.
Now that you mention it, we have all just been taking Han Solos word that he is speaking in his native languange and not just howling in horror or pain.
Is your problem that they don’t make enough movies that you want to see anymore or is the problem that the movies that you want to see don’t make the top ten anymore?
Well, at least we’re making some progress from blaming a single movie for all of the ills you see surrounding Hollywood. Maybe next up we can examine whether your personal feelings are the best metric for the quality of Holllywood’s output, and then ways that blockbusters can, in fact, increase the amount of films you like!
