The Rise of Skywalker is Hollywood’s biggest example of why you shouldn’t hate the player, but rather the entire game.
Right of the bat, The Rise of Skywalker was not a perfect Star Wars movie. It might not have even been a good one. There are plenty of reasons to feel it was an underwhelming if not disappointing conclusion to the 42 year old Skywalker Saga. But the reality is it’s what Star Wars fans wanted, which made it good business.
So everyone who blasted it for being stale or unoriginal need to check themselves.
With Rise of Skywalker hitting video-on-demand and home entertainment a few weeks ago (and likely headed for DisneyPlus sooner rather than later), this might be a good time to examine why it made the decisions it made and why it disappointed so many critics. Critics who should have known better.
First, Rise of Skywalker has more than its fair share of rabid haters who would like you to believe it was failure at the box office. Regardless of your feelings about the movie, it was far from the bomb the hate crew would have you believe. Return of the Jedi was the lowest box office performer of the original trilogy and one of Hollywood’s rules of thumb is that the third entry in a trilogy probably won’t fare as well as its predecessors. So the fact Rise of Skywalker grossed less than The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
And Rise still grossed over a billion dollars, joining a very exclusive, very impressive club (to add some perspective to it’s overall performance, even if Hollywood hadn’t been forced to hit pause this spring there was a genuine possibility no movies released in 2020 may have joined the billion dollar club).
At the end of the day, The Rise of Skywalker did what it was supposed to; it made money. It was good business. So let’s just permanently park the “it was a box office failure” talk, shall we?
That aside, when Rise of Skywalker hit theatres last December it was sneered at by a lot of movie critics and Monday morning pundits. Some liked it (“Star Wars is back!” they proclaimed as though it had gone on vacation) but many others shared one common and resounding complaint; that it played it safe (Forbes declared it “the worst Star Wars movie ever made.”). That it felt like many of the Star Wars movies before it, a bland sci-fi opera with a predictable cookie cutter plot.
Many critics felt that, while The Last Jedi had its fair share of problems, it was at least tying to break the norm. It dared to be different. It was trying to grow. And that approach was a mistake that nearly doomed the entire franchise.
In many respects, The Last Jedi was a indeed departure from the traditional Star Wars storytelling formula. And a sizeable portion of the Star Wars fandom turned on the franchise as a result. Simply put, we have never seen a fandom turn on a franchise the way so many fans turned on Star Wars following The Last Jedi. People who considered themselves lifelong fans were going out of their way to sabotage it, review bombing it on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB and as many other places as they could. People who cheered the franchise’s return a few years earlier were now actively campaigning against it, investing their time and energy to ensure it’s failure.
Why was Rose Tico’s role reduced to almost nothing (a shame considering all the nonsense actress Kelly Marie Tran had to put up with following The Last Jedi)? What happened to the potential bromance between Finn and Poe? All valid questions, and ones that can be answered by the franchise’s choice to return to its status quo. To its comfort zone.
Given the rabid hate-on so many of the franchise’s fans had for Star Wars, could you blame the powers that be for returning to the tried, tested and true format for the saga’s final chapter?
The argument that since the fans who turned on the franchise probably weren’t going to see Rise of Skywalker (or at least more than once, anyway) so the film makers could have continued to build on what Rian Johnson did with The Last Jedi has its merits. But that can be countered by the fact that many fans who hated The Last Jedi at least accepted Rise. Or did so with minimal complaint.
The simple truth is Rise of Skywalker wouldn’t have been able to join the billion dollar club if it had been as divisive as The Last Jedi. There would have been a very good chance that it would have lost money and that was something Disney couldn’t afford, especially when it was investing millions into building new Stars Wars theme park attractions, starting DisneyPlus and practically mortgaging the Mouse House to buy 20th Century Fox.
Having said all that though, Disney may wind up paying a long term price for their decisions. There are legions of fans who may never return to the Star Wars fold (or at least not until Kathleen Kennedy, the target of much of their hate, is banished). And so far, it has proven difficult for the the franchise to attract new fans to replace the departed ones.
(On that note, without Googling them can anyone name of the producers-not directors-in charge of the DCEU’s flailing? Or Sony’s botched Andrew Garfield Spider-Man reboot? Or the declining X-Men films? It may be time everyone asks why so many angry fans lay all the blame for Star Wars shortcomings at Kennedy’s door yet give her none of the praise for successes like Rogue One or The Mandolorian.)
Again, Rise of Skywalker had its fair share of issues, many of them reflections of the trilogy’s challenges as a whole. Reigniting the Star Wars franchise was always going to be an uphill battle. Star Wars arguably has the most passionate and protective fans in the world and getting the majority of them on board was going to be a near insurmountable hurdle. Making three differing movies with three differing visions by different film makers and trying to coral them into something resembling a cohesive trilogy instead of plotting out each chapter/entry with painstaking precision was the wrong way to go about it. There should have been a single, consistent creative team following a carefully constructed and plotted vision from day one.
(Having Emperor Palpatine return as the trilogy’s big bad, his relationship with Rey and having her channel the power of all the Jedi during the saga’s climactic battle was reportedly always the plan, but it felt like it was an idea shoehorned in at the last minute. And the truth is while a lot of the trilogy was fun, it suffered from a disjointed storytelling feel that could have been avoided if there was one creative team in the driver’s seat team from the start. That approach probably would have solved a laundry list of the trilogy’s problems.)
The second much of the fandom whiffed a scent the new trilogy was going to be different from what they were used to (or expected), they were going to turn. Every major franchise suffers from it (jump on a Star Trek discussion board and declare Star Trek Discovery your favourite Trek show. You might need an ice pack and therapy afterwards).
At the end of the day, Rise of Skywalker was the safest way to put this particular chapter in the franchise’s history to bed. Not the best, not the most progressive, but the safest. And given how much of the fandom prefers a signature approach to the franchise, future chapters may be just as conservative (the fact that The Force Awakens-a near carbon copy of A New Hope-seems to be the consensus favourite movie in the sequel trilogy is telling).
Making movies isn’t art, it’s business. And blockbusters like Star Wars need a really big audience that’s really hungry to buy tickets. If there isn’t a sizeable return on a studio’s investment the movies don’t get made (all said, the current Star Wars films cost around half a billion to produce while Disney is investing in the neighbourhood of 100 million dollars in each of the live action shows it’s producing for DisneyPlus). The first rule number of success is knowing your audience, knowing your customer. The fandom made its feelings pretty obvious after The Last Jedi, so everyone involved corrected course. To paraphrase everyone’e favourite mafia movie, it was business.
Look no further than 2018’s A Star Wars Story: Solo for additional proof. While releasing it only five months after the divisive Last Jedi was probably a mistake, the biggest reason it bombed was because a lot of fans actively boycotted it to punish Disney for The Last Jedi. Solo’s fate combined with the fan backlash against The Last Jedi guaranteed the franchise would return to a safer, more conservative storytelling tone.
Everyone who bashed Rise of Skywalker should have known this. They should have known better. Even if they were disappointed by the film and its direction, they should have acknowledged why it made the choices it did. The question they should have asked wasn’t why the movie did what it did, but why the audience wanted it that way. Because it was the fandom that dictated the movie’s direction. Don’t like it? Take it up with the fans but remember to hate the game. Just leave this player alone.
Image via Forbes
