Disney has hardly done a great job with the Star Wars universe. There’s been plenty of issues with the franchise since they got their hands on it, and they aren’t easy to fix. A big part of the current complaints can be laid at the feet of Disney’s culture, which demands maximized profits on all properties, like a money hungry machine that produces Poweredized Entertainment Product of which no one can apparently get enough. That philosophy rarely allows for magic in the modern world, and the Star Wars franchise has been a prime example of the entertainment giant’s hubristic overreach. Nevertheless, Disney can fix what’s ailing the Star Wars franchise. They just have to do, like, everything differently.
Rethinking the Writing Talent
There are so many flops and duds and flat out bombs in the average Star Wars script that it’s practically defined the films. A “Star Wars” movie is often one in which the characters act not like human but like superhuman avatars of good and evil, spelling out their emotions through a dance as formulaic as Kabuki theatre. Little can be done to improve this problem while the caliber of the writing staff remains so lackluster. If Disney wants to revitalize the franchise, they need to str by getting a creative revitalization underway at Star Wars Plaza or wherever it is they keep the studio robots that pump out these films today.
Forget the Yearly Release Schedule
Nothing ensures diminishing the quality of the franchise like a rapid release schedule. There are no narrative franchises that release on a yearly schedule and manage to create anything like good films. Either you can do the same thing every year and be decent at it, or you can do a bad job trying to do something different every year. Those are the options, and so far, Team Star Wars has been sticking to the former as they ride the remains of the franchise into the burning rubble.
Tell Different Stories
There is no reason that every Star Wars film needs to be about galaxy-spanning battles of good and evil. True, they tried this is Solo. Kind of: they chickened out in the end and did a quick slap dash hero revision to make sure the film was still, in some way, about the forces of good rebelling against the far more powerful forces of evil. How is it, that the Light Side is so sure they’re in the right here? They always seem to be working as an insurgent group against the rest of the galaxy’s will. Can we get some stories from the Empire’s perspective?
Use Different Locations
One of the greatest strengths of the Star Wars universe is its diversity of cultures and locations. And yet, somehow, we keep telling the story of the Sad Jedi That Couldn’t. The universe has been in a decay of one kind or another for every Star Wars film. Even in the prequel trilogy, the locations are no more interesting than three-dimensional set dressing, and we never truly learn a location half as well as the films imagine we do. Is Scarif really the most unique location we’ll get in the Star Wars universe? And even then, we couldn’t escape the allure of Tall Shining Towers of Space Steel or whatever it was they stored their data in.
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