1977-1983:

Golden age of Star Wars. Bar set way too high

1999-2018:

Episode 1: Sucked JarJar balls. Take your midi-chlorians and shove 'em up your ***
Episode 2: Convoluted, cliché and thin. The movie is in my very soul, tormenting me
Episode 3: Almost made up for the trilogy being a train wreck, then Darth Vader went all Frankenstein and yelled "NNNnnnoooooooooooooooo!!!!"
Episode 7: Let's tell the story again but this time it's a girl. Shocker. Let's get Andy Serkis to do his evil voice on a CG character. Shocker.
Rogue One: Came out of nowhere and was great. The most "star warsy" movie since 1983, though "droids with attitudes" are wearing me out
Episode 8: Carrie Poppins and that drunk Uncle Pennybags wannabe sticking coins in BB8. No thanks.
Solo: A Star Wars Story: The first major trailer had droids with attitudes set to the song "Sabotage." Yikes. Oh look it's another movie where a character says "I'm putting together a crew." Shocker.

Final thought: It all doesn't matter. I'm a consumer whore, have seen every movie and have thrown "I don't even want to know" money at this franchise. Can't get enough of it. Never will.

Those movies were like getting a BJ from a woman wearing braces.

More like high hopes followed by chafing, pain and yes...regret

One of the key take aways from the current reviews is something to the effect of “enjoyable but clearly trying to sell something.”

Of the newer films, as far as keeping in the spirit of the originals, “Rogue One”
has come the closest. It was a cool Star Wars flick that seemingly came out of nowhere and had a purpose, good pacing, decent characters, great adversaries, cool effects and music and almost no “Luke tosses the light saber over his shoulder then drinks alien tit juice” stupid moments.

Saw Solo. Predictable and enjoyable but for the love of God Disney throttle back on "droids with attitudes." Yeah yeah I get it R2 and 3PO had attitudes but not "SO GLAD WE TOOK THIS JOB" or "You've gotta do that thing to me later" attitudes. Yikes.

Oh and now I've got Woody Harrelson fatigue as prior to Solo recently rewatched The Hunger Games, War for Planet of the Apes and Zombieland. Looks like I'll have to dig out my VHS tapes of White Men Can't Jump and Kingpin pretty soon.

Finally, just throwing this out there. With Star Wars and Marvel it's pretty clear that Disney will have zero interest in ever reviving the Tron property. I think there are still some decent stories to tell in that world and would like to see another studio buy the rights. Plus we might get another pinball out of it

Disney consumer whore here.

If you’ve been to the parks as many times as I have you’d quickly pick up on Disney’s 2P formula. Princess for girls, Pirates for boys. Same formula for decades but has changed with the times. The “Princess” has evolved from the shrieking in the dark wood because of scary trees type to the confident, independent bow and arrow wielding hang with the boys type. “Pirates” on the other hand...well...let’s talk about that.

Disney, while strengthening female roles over time has done so to the detriment of male roles. They have been weakened. No strong males are willing to make the big sacrifice. Old Disney had strong Kevin Flynn sacrifice himself to the MCP so Tron could defeat it. New Disney had weak Sam Flynn not able to defeat anything without his daddy’s help (including another self sacrifice). Weak men. That of course has translated to Star Wars. Finn leaves the group and tries to run away at Maz’s place. Weak. Poe who seems strong put in his place by female Vice Admiral Holdo (and Leia). Weak. Finn who TRIES to self sacrifice has plot ruined by female Rose “saving” him. F****** weak!!! What did they do to strong male Han? Killed him at the hands of weak Kylo. I think Han knew it was going to happen and will call it a self sacrifice. What did they do to strong male Luke? Made him hide, avoid, cower. Old Luke would have shown up to the fight. New Disney Luke does a Jedi mind teleport and not even to fight. He did it to deceive, then die. Weak.

IMHO the only Disney property getting it right is the Marvel universe. Strong males. Strong females. Most importantly STRONG STORY TELLING. Star Wars is dead. Pitty.

This is more entertaining than TLJ

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This past month I read the Hunger Games trilogy to my 10 and 11 year old daughters. We have since watched the four films. I can’t help but compare the stories of central character Katniss to that of Rey. When I say compare I mean there is no comparison. Katniss’ journey and story arc is complex and compelling. Rey’s (current) journey is a joke. The storytelling is a joke.

Star Wars is off the rails. Go ahead Disney, roll out the old bones of Billy Dee Williams so you can do some more pandering. Big surprise there btw. Keep being shown up by better storytellers. Keep letting fans edit your own movies better than you do. Ridiculous.

Plot pitch: A reincarnate Yoda dons a Vader suit and bemuses various Sith with syntax resembling object-subject-dangling auxiliary verb. A running gag is the cane is a light saber that can’t be used as a cane because it sinks into every surface.
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Disney won't do anything with Tron anymore. Another studio should approach them for the rights as there's still a lot of story to be told on the Grid.

More entertaining than TLJ

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It worried me from the beginning learning that there wasn't a complete pre-written story to be told over three movies, that there would be multiple writers and directors in the process. That's where Kathleen Kennedy f****d up. Do TFA and just hand an unfinished story to the next guy and say "your turn!"??? This isn't f*****g MAD LIBS. Lucas was the pointman/anchor on TWO trilogies. Say what you want about Ep 1-3 but the story had an ARC for god's sake. Say what you want about JJ Abrams but something tells me the outline he wrote, the one Rian Johnson threw away had an arc. There should have been one pointman/anchor on these three films. Imagine Peter Jackson handing LOTR off to M Night Shyamalan or some other hack midstream. No thanks.

I don't know, maybe we blame JJ Abrams, Mr "too busy to stick around." He was killing it with the Star Trek reboot, handed if off to Justin Lin who not surprisingly gave us "Trek and the Furious" and threw that franchise into the toilet. I know it's not JJ's fault btw, it's KK's fault period. Good to see that JJ came back to "save" the trilogy. It was an enormous undertaking to put the reboot on his shoulders. I can't imagine the pressure to now try and save it. I wonder how pissed off he is at Rian Johnson...

In describing Rian Johnson's approach to SW the author deliberately used the term "subvert our expectations." That means one of two things:

1) The author is a hack/SJW/superfan/apologist which makes me hate this article
2) The author is openly mocking Johnson while simultaneously trolling SJW/superfan apologists which makes me love this article.

As for gearing toward younger viewers that's probably the best path for Johnson. Corny dialogue, underdeveloped characters, elementary storylines would all play well to his approach to SW. He can easily dismiss detractors with the line "This is a childrens film for children. I'm not interested in what adults have to say about it."

One doesnt have to argue. It's from the Lucas playbook

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2017/4/13/15288998/george-lucas-star-wars-celebration

It worked. The Cheeto gorging bovine American public yet again handed their money to the Mouse so they could waddle in and get their hit of social justice indoctrination. But cool effects, right? I didn't see the movie how did that butt double look? You can't have social justice unless the female lead has a nice round butt in a tight suit. Just ask Black Widow she'll tell you. Look at the movie poster. The male characters displaying their powers, the female character displaying her...assets.
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Check this out! I WANT ALL OF YOU TO DO THIS AND POST IT. I just went to my local theater online. Tonight: Friday night 8PM Captain Marvel. Should be the hottest time and the hottest night for a movie. There are SIX seats sold right now. Holy **** lol.

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Notes noted

In comparison this same theater showed The Force Awakens 30 times a day and it was sold out/nearly sold out for at least three weeks. Looks like Captain Marvel fell off the cliff. I'll keep an eye on when the theater cuts back the 30 showings a day to half or less than half that.

I just checked multiple showings at this theater:
6:00-8 tickets sold
7:00-15 tickets sold
7:30-40 tickets sold (someone bought a block of 30 seats. will they show up?)
8:00-6 tickets sold
8:30-8 tickets sold
9:00-8 tickets sold

Yeah it's a nice theater. We saw Tron in 3D Imax when it came out. Maybe my favorite movie going experience in quite a while. AMC theaters are down the road. Not as nice a theater but they have those damn nice oversized EZ chairs that recline! You have any of those?

This x1000. The Marvel team made me care about a character that is an Fing TREE!!

I've been saying for years that another studio should pick up the rights to Tron. With Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, re-releases of classic animation to live action its CLEAR Disney has no interest in Tron which to me has a strong enough cult following to support more stories from The Grid.

PS: True story. I'm wearing this Tshirt right now

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I'd like to see Tron moved to a higher priority

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I've said it before and will repeat that since Disney appears to have no interest in the Tron IP that another studio approach them for the rights. There is still a lot of story to be told on The Grid.

I'm at Disney World right now. According to the different tracking sites the lines were supposed to be 2-3 out of 10 with G.E. opening later this month. The sites were wrong the lines are more like 6-7. As far as the Star Wars franchise is concerned there are clearly thousands of people here that aren't that critical and eat up everything SW. The Mouse has the SW machine going full tilt.

SW aside, I'm happy to report that the Tron ride seems to be going up quickly. Nearly 10 years after the movie came out the ride is going up. Why build now? It makes me curious about Disney's future plans for Tron.

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Agreed 99%. JJ Abrams is hired by studios because his movies make a lot of money. That's it. It's eye candy. Its junk food. If you want compelling stories by modern directors hit up some Coen brothers, Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and the like. My only disagreement with your post is that JJ didn't direct Star Trek 3. That was Justin Lin who turned the beloved franchise into "Trek and the Furious"

Disney's loss of friendly neighborhood Spiderman = no plan for unlikable Captain Marvel which currently has no writer, no director and no production schedule.

https://cosmicbook.news/disney-losing-confidence-captain-marvel-brie-larson-spider-man?amp

Yep looks like the article was disputed. My bad. Didn't mean to spread fake news

The final installment is the bun of a giant shit sandwich, people. Disney sugar coated the shit for us but make no mistake about it...dont bite down on this one.

I can only imagine how different the current trilogy might have been under a Jon Favreau. For starters it might have had a story arc that lasted all three films

Also, thank you Jon for casting Bill freaking Burr!!
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Just watched episode 3 of The Mandalorian. I'd like to point out that episodes 1-3 have a complete story arc unlike the trainwreck the latest movie trilogy suffers from. Four writers in Favreau, Yost, Filoni and Famuyiwa crafted a simplistic yet engaging storyline with interesting characters and environments. My wife made a good point in that we never see the face of The Mandalorian, never see his eyes, and he doesn't even speak with much animation. Yet, we know what he's thinking and feeling in the moment and can still connect. That's good storytelling. For the love of God I had more emotional attachment to a BOUNTY DROID with 8 minutes of screentime than I have to Rey or Finn.

The newest trilogy is just sloppy. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Where it all went wrong IMO was the asinine decision to hand a partly written story off to the next guy, then pass it to someone else to write and finish. It's just astonishingly stupid and lazy.

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The worst Star Wars content was the holiday special except for the part where Harvey Korman does a galactic Julia Child (@ 22:30). Even that part is more entertaining than Finn saying "I'm in charge. I'm in charge now."

Dude I'm right with you. It's great to be able to finally have some good content and look forward to more. Before this show I would have pointed to about 1/3 of Rogue One as the best storytelling in the Disney era.

Oh it's worse than the worst movie of all time. It's the worst movie of all time that made $1.3B worldwide, which in turn empowered its creators to make more of the same.

The overhyped Captain Marvel and subsequent fizzle was actually kind of humorous to watch play out. The new Black Widow movie seems about 10 years too late IMO. That being said I'm interested in the release of The Eternals (Nov 2020). It "might" fall under your "awesome Marvel movies" category

Yeah I'm trying to wrap my head around the need for the BW movie at this point. I guess the answer like you said above is MONEY.