That's a bit flanderized, when they acknowledged it was a new era, with the aged OT era characters, the New Republic mentioned, and the First Order implied to be the biggest Imperial warlord faction (even if TFA was too much of a love letter to ANH).
I love the 4th Season in general, the Vulcan, Andorian, and Klingon arcs are some of the best episode they ever did. It's just These Are the Voyages... that I did not like at all. I do, because general audiences are going to be a lot easy to please, the majority of them are going to be pretty happy with any decently made movie. The fans on the other hand, are going to go in looking for very specific things, and if they don't get those exact things, they are going to be an absolute fucking nightmare. By making a movie for the general audience rather than the fans, you have a much better chance of a greater percentage of people liking your movie.
Obviously any movie given a wide release in cinemas is going to be for general audiences to some extent, but each one will still have a target audience. The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of the most successful of all time. When they’re making those movies, dont you think they’re looking at existing fans and pitching it to their tastes?
All of these assessments are based on false perceptions, which in turn makes them false in and of themselves.
Sure, but they're not just going for those fans, they're going to include stuff for casual audiences too. I'm not saying they should not include stuff for the fans, all I'm saying is that they have to include stuff that appeals to causal audiences too, because no matter how big a fandom is it isn't going to be big enough to make a movie successful all by itself.
And I agree! I’m not saying make things solely for the fans, just that it might work better in the long run if they pitch things more towards fans than casual audiences. The sequels seemed to aim way more for casual audiences than existing fans, or at least fans who were still fans before they kicked off, but then they came with the bump of being a new Star Wars trilogy. Of course, we’ll have to see how much goodwill the franchise has left. It’s hard to point to a trilogy that made at least a billion at the box office as needing adjustment, but then it’s also hard to deny that results were mixed. I think they’d have ended up with a better final product if they just decided who they were making these movies for, and I definitely think hiring Lucas would be a smart move if they decided to target the audience a little more.
OK, I thought you were saying that they should only make the movies for fans, because they don't need general audiences.
Yeah, just the focus. The prequels were pretty focused on what the fans wanted, but then they still did really well and attracted a good share of the general public.
The Prequel Trilogy did not truly fail, but got more mixed reviews in their day than the Sequels have (quickly gaining a reputation for being overproduced, stilted, bland, and comedically misjudged in comparison to the OT). I mean even Poe prank calling Hux didn't feel as tone deaf as Jar Jar's prat falls, grating "pigeon talk", and incessant stupidity. Though the whole world of Naboo alone felt much more well rounded and believable than most of the planets in the ST films (with only Canto Bight and Jakku getting close).
I think TPM failed, then Lucas just refocused and the final two succeeded in their own way. TPM always felt very much like an attempt at a new Star Wars. The pacing is closer to the older movies. There’s a much stronger focus on dialogue. There’s one major lightsaber battle that happens right at the end. It isnt really good, but it feels a lot closer to the originals than Aotc and rots. After that Lucas just looked at what people liked and went for it. Lightsabers, Jedi, and action sequences. What I’ve always disliked is less the badness and more the laziness, but looking at how the sequels turned out it’s pretty clear Lucas made the right decision from a commercial perspective. Even people who loved the prequels will often tell you ‘yeah, the dialogue is bad and the characters aren’t great, but the action/visuals were amazing and a loved the ‘lore’’. Basically, ‘yeah, they aren’t great, but they delivered exactly what I want.’
Yep, even if it made no sense where Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin are far younger than they logically should have been. Kenobi should really have been a middle aged man, but Lucas decided to create the Qui-Gon character as his master.
Indeed. The PT succeeds in fleshing out the different planets in a way that the ST struggles with. The PT struggles with characters to be sure but it is visually dynamic.
Yeah, George has a pretty broad and cohesive vision with imagination, something Simon Pegg implied after he watched The Last Jedi, despite being a Prequel basher:
Which different planets? I can’t remember any really being fleshed out in the PT, except maybe Coruscant.
‘Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like fucking Shaft’ is one of the best prequel bashing lines ever.
Naboo, Coruscant, Geonosis, Kamino. They all felt distinctive with a life of their own. Takodana is probably the one I recall from the ST, other than Jakku, which is only memorable because of how everyone talks down about it. The one missing from the PT is Alderaan. I think it should have had more than a 30 second cameo at the end of an overlong film so that its destruction meant something a little bit more in ANH.
You can sense humans being socio-politically dominant on Naboo and Coruscant (explaining the Nazi-esque human supremacy ideology fuelling the original Empire and their First Order successors).