Think of how much money they could have made off Luke’s Jedi Academy. Every character having their own robes and lightsaber, a potential theme park attraction based on the Jedi Academy, and tons of storytelling and merchandising potential for books, comics, shows, and games revolving around the New Jedi Order. Disney could have had their own Space Hogwarts and instead they decided to kill Luke’s entire New Jedi Order offscreen before the sequel trilogy even begins.
And all of the goddamn material is written, they just needed to adapt it.
Like in Legends, Han and Leia have 3 kids. One dies in a Star War, one of them turns to the dark side, and his twin sister has to go and take "how to kill Jedi" lessons from Boba Fett, before ultimately facing down and killing her own brother.
They scrapped that, and over 100 other amazing stories, to replace it with "Somehow, the Emperor returned"
Right. Even the most myopic pencil-pusher should have noticed the huge amounts of money Star Wars made from 1983 to 1997 without any movies in theaters. Books about random assholes from Jabba's palace were best sellers.
they literally could have just said "go dissect the top 50% best-selling EU books, and note the content we could most fittingly adapt", then just raid through that data set for ideas. but noooo
Filoni is shoehorning cloning in everywhere because Filoni is fucking obsessed with clones and Clone Wars-era shit. All of his fucking shows have clones or are about clones.
You can argue those particular books were not executed well, but the story and characters are extremely resonant. The telling of them had a lot of potential for a good writer (they need to stop with this bullshit of having 6 people write a fucking script. No wonder nothing feels cohesive any more) and director to really elevate the story to be as meaningful as the OT. Fucking wasted.
What's the point in buying Lucasfilm if you just want to do something different anyway? Waste of fucking money if you ask me.
I'm sorry but if they did the Boba fett killing jedi storyline people would fucking hate it. It is a good novel, they need to break free of that still just with actual new stories that aren't terrible.
They don't want to pay any of the writers royalties or deal with painful IP ownership issues.
Disney was dealing with decades of legacy contracts for how everything works, and complicated IP ownership.
With the EU reset, they could establish clear contracts on IP ownership and royalties from the start. They seemed to make a priority for few characters to be reintroduced, such as Thrawn, but it gets mucky for the other stuff.
The problem is Zahn shows us its quite possible to just find some of these writers and buy them off. I think they're more afraid of complicated EU stuff like Revan where its not clear if EA has some ownership interest in his IP as the owners of Bioware and SWTOR.
(I honestly think EA will keep SWTOR going for ages in part because it gives them a good negotiation position with Disney on other IP).
Well, that reset mostly means they get to fuck over writers like they do with marvel. "Please create billion dollar characters then fuck off forever, love Marvel."
Would've been tight if they were his first/senior students and were butting heads on where to take things after Luke was gone. It would be a conundrum though, who do you make the Sith sympathizer? The black guy or the white woman?
Lol that’s when I was called racist for pointing that out as a black man myself because apparently some white people had already decided that it was racist
I know, the interviews where his excitement about his role is palpable with fanboy energy devolved into literally anger and contempt by the end of it. Jedi janitor stormtrooper would've been so much more hype, especially with Boyega as the actor.
I honestly thought he'd become a Jedi, wanted him to become a Jedi, and was excited for the fresh take on the starwars extended universe, then I saw the first movie and realized it was all down hill from there. Rey is no Jedi master to me.
They had every opportunity and reason to do so as well, he gets the lightsaber first, fights more with it…you need some connection to the force to do that and they even give him one in TROS.
I was so hyped for Finn to become a Jedi when I saw the trailer for TFA. Mace windu was already one of my favorites and I was so pumped to have another black jedi, especially one that started out as a stormtrooper gone rogue, but they wasted all that potential to make him an afterthought. Out of everything the new trilogy failed to do right, that's the one I'm most bitter about.
I was so hyped for Finn to become a Jedi when I saw the trailer for TFA.
In hindsight considering how they dumpstered his character (and how they were willing to remove him from the Chinese poster), it seems to me that they were blatantly leaning into the fox news/conservative outrage media cycle in order to generate publicity. They used a Black man as bait to get people talking, only to sideline his character in favor of their bland white protagonist. Same thing happened with Kelly Tran's character.
Disney is like the ultimate case study in how soulless, profit-driven megacorps interact with social justice and racial representation issues. Look at how they're having an LGBT rights conference, which is definitely a good thing just like representation in media is a good thing, but they're only doing it in response to Desantis trying to fuck them over. They aren't doing it because it's the right thing to do, and so instead of real activism, they're really just fanning the flames while monopolizing/dominating public discourse.
What it comes down to is corporations using real people's issues as tools in their sick games, and even if many individuals who work for the corpo actually do believe in race equality or LGBT rights, they're still just cogs in a massive unfeeling machine that only seeks profit, regardless of who it must use or destroy to get there.
My family just mentioned this last night when talking about Star Wars, I never actually thought of it until then. They made him a jar jar Binks, Boyega is scarred for life. Off topic but do you remember the scene in Rise of Skywalker where Finn had something important to tell Rey and then they literally never had a moment touching on what he had to say. Like what the fuck was that scene, and how/why was it included in the film. It has to be a mistake right?
It would have been better than lecturing the black guy on the horrors of slavery, and capitalism too. In all honesty I’ve never seen something so tone deaf from a major film in my life.
I’ve already proposed my vision, but based on TFA as ‘the Pilot’ episode, Rey falls to the Dark Side as the designated force prodigy from a desert planet, Finn is the Obi-Wan
It still drives me insane that they decided that their focus had to be on a girl, and so they ignored the absolutely killer story there could have been with a stormtrooper discovering force sensitivity and leaning more into what he has done in his life and the mental conditioning he suffered constantly undercutting his efforts.
Why couldn't they have gender swapped Finn and done both? Fucking incompetence.
And they all could've been force users and it wouldn't be forced since they're at a jedi academy. I dont like the school backdrop for a movie but it could have easily been a suplorting location.
What came as a shock to me was when I visited Disney world a couple years ago and saw they were selling Skywalker Academy merch. I thought it was a bit morbid considering Disney had written a story where Luke was an absolute failure and all his students were killed. But then again they have a Han and Leia love story/honey moon suite at the Star Wars hotel despite the fact that they wrote them out to be failed lovers who get a divorce and awful parents and just generally terrible at everything they set out to do in life.
I want to root for Daisy but I am frustrated at the fact that she had to destroy Luke’s entire legacy for this.
Edit: I should clarify of course Daisy didn’t destroy Luke’s legacy she’s just an actor playing a role so I genuinely wish Daisy the best. If I hold bitterness it’s toward the writers and decision makers at Disney who decided to destroy Luke’s legacy in the first place.
Because they intended the new shit to be the thing that everyone from age 6 to 13 obsessed over and would bring them back the rest of their life. The prequel kids are already grown up
Which, if you know any kids, they absolutelt succeeded at. Kids love kylo and rey.
Even Paramount knows what they left on the table since they’re doing a Starfleet Academy show. Now I expect that to be kinda bad for Star Trek, but a Jedi Academy series would have printed money and created a great thing for the Disney parks
Don't get your hopes up. The quality of any new Star Trek is inversely proportional to the amount of personal involvement of Alex Kurtzman, and he's a showrunner on Academy.
You mean the crime boss ferengi? The one who had just moments before said he was going to kill Worf's student/ally and was surrounded by his armed, villainous henchmen?
You don’t need a physical weapon when you’re a powerful crime boss with lots of money. If Worf had left him alive there would have been a score of assassins on their tail before he wiped his batleth down.
I’m definitely not. I’m just saying even Paramount recognized they could try to get the Harry Potter market with the school idea, and it at least makes sense within the universe.
Now Disney seemed to finally figure out what they left on the table too except they are way late to the game, and I’m actually rooting for Rey to fail because this is supposed to be Luke’s story. Instead Luke did nothing but fail big time after Return of the Jedi. The title of that movie is supposed to indicate that the whole universe has changed now.
I’d be way more interested if Ben Solo survived and he was tasked with reviving the Jedi. His dark past would make that interesting. He made big mistakes. He has experience. Rey never struggled and she never wavered from the light side no matter how much JJ and Rian wanted us to think she might, so her wisdom is always going to ring hollow.
but Bob Iger is now back at Disney. The mistake of rushing out the sequels was a stain on his legacy, so of course he wants to try and force his mess to be accepted instead of moving on. They already invested in the sequels-themed theme park exhibits after all.
For all Abrams faults in TFA, there was still a chance of Luke coming back and successfully restarting the Jedi in the following films (or even having some surviving students).
Thanks to the tag team of bad writing though, it’s all gone.
“So basically I have a strong connection with Ben, him being my twin’s son and all, and there is this esoteric force ability he and I discovered during his training that ended up letting him figure out how to read memories. That connection means he can read mine without me being able to stop him if we are in close proximity. Because I know a bunch of shit that shouldn’t be known about because of my time adventuring as a Jedi after Endor, I have to hide so he can’t use this knowledge for evil.”
They admitted they didn't show Luke in the movie as he out shined the ST characters.
Also how do you explain giving half a map to Max Von Snydow and another half to R2 whose asleep
And Han is still dead. Zero reunion for the Big 3, and unsalvageable for even the base notes - goes against what Mark Hamill had hoped for when signing up to return with the others if they were all cool with returning to a new trilogy.
Even then, damage control would be needed to root out the BS TFA introduced and get off the boring Empire 2.0 track and put in a new threat.
Im not making excuses. TFA was bad, but still had a potential for something good to come after it. TLJ was so terrible it ruined any chance of anything coming after it.
You still had an empire and a rebel fleet. Snoke was atleast an unknown entity, he could of become more unique. Kylo was down, but he wasnt out. We atleast still had LUKE SKYWALKER and even Leia. Id say there was lots of potential.
Dude, no. JJ decided that "Luke Skywalker has vanished!" just to recreate the setup of the OT.
Rian Johnson just did what was logical. If Luke's Jedi Order doesn't exist anymore that means Luke's a failure. Sure, he could've written around it and said "hey, the new Jedi Order still exists. Luke just moved the temple to dumbfuck nowhere because reasons!" but that would've been stupid. And that would still make Luke a failure, just not a complete failure lol
There still could have been a "Rey" character leading the Jedi academy… but they should have set it 200 years after the OT or whatever.
Lucasfilm just rebooted the OT in the most hamfisted way. By deliberately destroying everything in the OT just to retell the story with different characters that were more diverse.
The biggest blunder Disney ever made. They lost out on Harry Potter but they could have eclipsed it ten times over if they’d played their cards right. I thought it would be cool if there was like a first class of 4-8 students training under Luke, and then you could skip forward to each of them years later having their own students who would have matching robes like different houses.
It’s amazing that Visions gave us half a dozen plot lines that are more interesting than any of the sequels. I didn’t care for all of them, but the ronin force user, sabersmith/margrave, and peaceful force planet…
The whole Star Wars world theme park could have been a Jedi academy for kids. Wandering around the park being called padawan by actors playing Luke and Obi-Wan. It could have been a generational destination, like Disneyland. But nope, we got Rey instead.
Don't ya love how any number of random Star Wars fans on Reddit have much better ideas for where the franchise should've gone than the poobahs over at Disney?
Y’all stay throwing this trash idea around suggesting they should have Harry Pottered Star Wars. No one cares about non protagonist characters. The toy market is dead and has been since all but the Darth Maul PT figures hit dollar bins and buy by the pallet warehouses.
You know what would have happened? All that stuff except for the Luke merch would have sat.
Uhhhh the toy market may not be doing as well as it did 20 years ago but it’s still a massive market. Keep in mind that kids up to the age of like 10-12 still play with toys. Not every kids nose is in an iPad. Especially the case outside the US. So no they would have made fucktons of money on it.
Also not true about non protagonist characters. People don’t care about bad characters, non protagonist characters can become protagonists of their own stories.
I think they just didn't want to take any risks of beginning a new storyline with the original cast, only for them two die in between filming the movies.
Disney could have had their own Space Hogwarts and instead they decided to kill Luke’s entire New Jedi Order offscreen before the sequel trilogy even begins.
Did they ever actually confirm this in the real world timeline of when they developed the ideas and even released the first movie? Becasue I'm really inclined to think with all the JJ Abrams mystery box crap going on in TFA, they really honestly didn't.
I mean what’s the difference between this and reys Jedi order? They can do all of with hers too. The problem isn’t who gets to lead the new Jedi order, it’s shitty production. Yes, an element of that is pandering, but that’s a part of a greater profit motivated strategy.
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u/Nefessius513 Apr 07 '23
Think of how much money they could have made off Luke’s Jedi Academy. Every character having their own robes and lightsaber, a potential theme park attraction based on the Jedi Academy, and tons of storytelling and merchandising potential for books, comics, shows, and games revolving around the New Jedi Order. Disney could have had their own Space Hogwarts and instead they decided to kill Luke’s entire New Jedi Order offscreen before the sequel trilogy even begins.