The Failure of Disney

When the Sequel Trilogy was announced, shortly after Disney had bought Lucasfilm Ltd, fans were all too happy. Finally, the story of the galaxy far, far away would continue! What we got, though, was not something to be happy about. How could Disney take over a multi-million-dollar franchise and destroy any goodwill they had with the fans in such a short time? Where was the failure?

The short answer is that Disney did not understand the franchise they’d just bought.
They saw the money Lucasfilm made with Star Wars through the TV series, the DVDs, Blue-Rays, and downloads, the books, the comics, the action figures, and the licences and assumed that they could make just as much, if not more. And they could have, don’t get me wrong. The exchange in ownership of the IP didn’t cause the fans to grow angry. The announcement of new movies was met with happiness. The movies killed that happiness effectively. Now, the TV series are working on restoring it.
Why did the movies (except for “Rogue One”) kill the happiness? Because they reviled the old heroes, gave us a rehash of the Original Trilogy (OT from here on), and are not a trilogy, despite claiming to be one. A trilogy has at least one plot arc running through all three movies, books, etc. The Sequel Trilogy (ST from now on) lacks that. Rey’s parents are the closest it gets to having one, but that topic is tossed back and forth between the two directors and ends with Rey being a niece of sorts (?) to Palpatine. (As she’s the daughter of his good clone, she’s not really his granddaughter, as a clone should be more akin to an artificial twin brother, so she’d be his niece. Relationships in Star Wars are complicated, what can you do?)
The producers of the ST had no idea what the franchise really was about, they not only dismissed what is now Legends (that was to be expected, to be honest, because it would be impossible to catch the casual movie-goer up on what happens in the roundabout thirty to forty years which have to have passed — imagine putting all of that into the title crawl, it would make the crawl two hours on its own!), they also didn’t really catch up on the canon material. They didn’t understand the characters and neither did the directors and screenwriters they chose! You want angry fans? Because that’s how you get angry fans.

The story itself also has loads of problems, though.
There is no way that the war between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance could have lasted for over forty or so years. The Legends’ solution (a split galaxy) works, as the Empire might be able to hold on to some worlds and keep them under control — others might even prefer the status they gained under the Empire. Yet, thinking that forty years of civil war would not at one point end in a balance of power is weird. Yes, I know Europe had a hundred-year war, but at that time, Europe didn’t have modern weaponry and equipment — and the galaxy far, far away has even better military equipment than that. I (and most other fans) can buy into a ‘cold war’ idea, but not into what Disney gave us.
There also was no reason to revile the heroes of the OT like that. Their character development was essentially undone and they were shown in ways which in no way fit with their character traits. Han has learned not to be all about his own advantages (even already by the end of “A New Hope”), so why is he back to being a smuggler and con-man (something he wasn’t before) all in a sudden? I can buy that his and Leia’s relationship might not have worked out — especially with their son turning to the Dark Side —, but that doesn’t mean he has to become a worse scoundrel than he was before. And then there’s Luke. Honestly, there is no way in Hell Luke would have resorted to trying to kill his own teenage nephew while he was sleeping, no matter what said nephew had done! Luke is defined by a handful of traits and the strongest are his compassion and his kindness. There’s no way he’d resort to cold-blooded murder (even though we all know a teenager can easily make you contemplate murder…).
Instead of reviling them and then killing them off, another easy solution would have been for them to be mentors or superiors in a way. At the age they were in the story, they’d have learned the lesson of leaving adventures to the younger ones and stay in the background for assistance. No reason to go out and fight evil on your own if there’s a group of trained Jedi you’ve got at your fingertips — and a Jedi should see the wisdom in that…

I also love the Emperor as much as the next Star Wars fan (or a bit more, I’m the ‘I love the villains’ type of person) and I certainly appreciate every time Ian McDiarmid steps forward and dons the robes again. That man has breathed a lot of life into what could have become a caricature otherwise. Well, to a degree the Emperor is a caricature, but a great one. Best villain ever. Yet, bringing him back for the end of the ST was not a good move. I am aware that Legends did that, too, with the “Dark Empire” story line. That one, however, was set about ten years after “A New Hope” — it seems much more likely that a clone would have stayed hidden that long. Doing it forty years later is over the top and not a good idea at all.
I’m also not going into the whole Ben Solo topic. I’d go into a rave that starts with Leia never calling her son ‘Ben’ as she knew Obi-Wan under his real name and ends with Ben being a failure as a Dark Lord — unlike the Legends character he’s modelled on: Darth Caedus aka Jacen Solo. Enough said about him.
Instead, why not use a child or grandchild of the Emperor for that? In Legends, there was a host of descendants of Palpatine around, although most of them lacked the hunger for power which drove him all the way to the Emperor position. Having a handful in canon would be easy enough. Rey is one of his descendants, why not put up a Big Bad who is related to her? That could have cut out Snoke completely and given us a strong enemy she has to prepare herself to fight. Or made Snoke a smokescreen the real ruler hides behind — also nice.

Instead, Disney gave us three disjointed movies which are definitely not a trilogy with two directors going at each other over their decisions. The Prequels gave us Jar Jar Binks, which was worse enough, but the way the ST deconstructs all that is fun and good about Star Wars is by far worse than that. Jar Jar is one character that could easily be cut out. The ST is a catastrophe that should never have happened. Disney didn’t understand the franchise and didn’t want to invest in directors who did. Now they are doing an about turn by relying on directors with prior experience for their Disney+ series — and it works. Hopefully, they’ll one day banish the ST into another ‘alternate universe,’ as they did with the Extended Universe (now Legends), and make a proper new trilogy.