from [
link to themattwalshblog.com] :
On top of the 3 (and by 3 I mean 97) additional Star Wars sequels, Disney will also be producing other movies about individual minor Star Wars characters. And then they'll make movies about the other minor characters in the movies about the other minor characters. Then they'll make a Star Wars movie about a Star Wars character making a movie. Then they'll go back and make prequels to the prequels of the original sequels. Then they'll re-release all of it in a special digitally remastered pig latin edition.
Finally, I expect, they'll simply make a film of a guy screaming "STAR WARS!" for 2 and a half hours. And people, quite certainly, will buy tickets for it.
I'm not hating on Star Wars. The original movies were pretty good. Yes, George Lucas plundered like a drunken Viking from Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the result was a series of truly entertaining films. I just don't understand the people who make a religion out of them. I can't quite wrap my head around the folks who flock like lepers to gaze upon anything with the words "Star" and "Wars" in the title, like it's a sacred relic capable of curing sickness. It's not. It's a lifeless bag of nothing capable of curing you of your inclination to spend that 28 dollars on a more constructive endeavor.
I know it's useless to complain about this. Film-making is an art but it's also a billion dollar business. Any time monetary interests and artistic interests collide, the artistic interests don't stand a chance. The artist would sacrifice wealth for the sake of making something true and beautiful. The businessman says forget that noise and happily makes something fake and ugly and then collects his 800 million bucks. The businessman wins. That's just the way it is. We all know this.
So it's because I'm a foolish idealist that I can't help but cringe when I hear someone justify the borderline necrophilia of George Lucas and now Disney by saying: "Well the Star Wars universe is so big and there's just so many stories to tell." Yeah. Maybe. But you know what else is big? THE REAL UNIVERSE. Why can't we hear a story about something happening amidst the stars without it necessarily involving a "Trek" or a "War"? I know, I know, you want to "find out what's been happening with your favorite characters". Well I'll tell you -- nothing. Nothing has happened. It's not real. It doesn't exist. And what does it mean exactly to say that a fictional universe is "big"? Aren't all fictional stories told within a fictional universe? If Disney is going to give us movies that don't feature Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and have little connection to the original films and still call them "Star Wars", could I make a romantic comedy about two elderly Walmart greeters in Seattle and call it "Spiderman: Old People in Love"? Sure, Spiderman has nothing at all to do with the story but my movie takes place within the "Spiderman universe". Hypothetically, if you were to head east out of my fake Seattle and travel to the fake New York you might find Spiderman swinging about and battling James Franco.
Or I could just make my crappy movie in its own universe and sell it on its own merits rather than attempting feebly to connect it to another product on the hope that people will see it simply because it has the name "Spiderman" in the title.
Hell, maybe I can paint a picture of a tree and call it "Mona Lisa: a Tree" and sell it for 40 million dollars because it's a tree in the "Mona Lisa universe". The possibilities are endless. At least the possibilities will go as a far as public stupidity will take them. So, yeah, endless.
United States
