Disney Hasn't Learned Its Lesson, Newest Star Wars Movie Proves It
There is a new Star Wars movie in the works, with the project team headed by Damon Lindelof.
Names of the people on that team did not invoke too much optimism from the start, as none of them had previous experience with blockbusters. Now a few details have emerged about the movie, and they suggest that optimism indeed would have been misplaced.
We have reported before that the new movie is likely to include characters from the sequel trilogy, even if not in the main roles. That is fine by itself. But that also indicates the tendency which plagued Disney 's Star Wars from the beginning: reliance on nostalgia-baiting.
While it is almost inevitable for any long-running franchise to start using itself as the main source of inspiration for its later entries, the sequel trilogy not just used earlier Star Wars movies for inspiration, it tried to reuse as many elements from them as possible, from aesthetics to plot points. And one of the specific criticisms levied against it was, unsurprisingly, its propensity for bringing back old characters.
In fact, the very fact of placing Lindelof at the helm indicates Disney's reluctance to let go of the past. Lindelof is a close collaborator and creative peer of J.J. Abrams, who directed Episodes VII and IX, and was primarily responsible for bringing back as much elements from the original trilogy, as possible, including even resurrecting Emperor Palpatine for the finale. (So much for all the talks about abandoning the past in Episode VIII.)
Before that, the two famously pioneered the "mystery box" style of storytelling with their long-running television show Lost. How well that worked for Lost in the end is disputed to this day, but it is a fact, that the "mystery box" questions that were asked in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens were never satisfactorily answered. Several of them were pretty much dropped and forgotten entirely.
By now it is obvious that the sequel trilogy has failed to meet the expectations, creatively or in the box office. The very fact that we'll probably need to wait until 2025 for Lindelof's project, with no other Star Wars movies expected to be released before that, confirms that Disney is feeling that something went wrong and trying to address the problems.
However, what little information about the upcoming movie we have suggests, that Disney's answer for now is "more of the same, except with less frantic production schedule".