Service Dog wrote: ↑
fafnir wrote:The general formula for a superhero movie is that they exist as independent stories.
This is false. All the Marvel superheroes live in a shared reality, and they always have. The D.C. superheroes live in their reality.
Sure they live in a shared reality, but you have an expectation on the audience of The Empire Strikes Back that they will have watched A New Hope that you don't get in Iron Man 2. Star Wars movies seem to naturally want to come in trilogies and are expected to tell an overarching story of a group of heroes who you meet in the first movie battling a single bad guy and his hangers on. We must have about a century of plot now. Apart from Infinity War, how often do the heroes in a Marvel movie have to battle the same vilain two movies in a row? Is there anything like the century of overarching Star Wars plot in the MCU that the audience need to know?
Even in the comics, in a shared story arc, the writers don't assume you are following the events in the Avengers, Dr Strange, Spiderman and the Fantastic 4 comics simultaneously. The level of dependency is typically pretty minimal. The movies take that further by compressing a whole story arc into a single movie.
When the different discrete groups in the shared reality meet, it's a big deal. Pick a random Marvel movie and watch it with somebody who isn't into superhero movies, and I'd expect them to understand what is going on, the motivation of the villain etc (though I think this is becoming less the case now, and I think spells trouble for the MCU). What would the same random person make of The Rise of Skywalker or Attack of the Clones? Wouldn't the beginning of Return of the Jedi be confusing if you hadn't seen a New Hope or Empire? Did they even bother to properly explain who Palpatine was in The Rise of Skywalker? Have any of the movies actually worked on their own since A New Hope? I haven't seen Solo. Maybe the Ewok movies, that I dimly remember?
Even an independent movie like Rogue One doesn't really make sense story wise without the assumption that the audience understands it's significance to the wider story. It's like if you told the story of Endgame from the perspective of Black Widow and ended it when she dies. The overwhelming bulk of superhero movies make sense and work as stories if you didn't watch the films that came before or after it.
Service Dog wrote: ↑All the WWF wrestlers are a pantheon in one reality
Sure, but you also have to make wrestling plots accessible enough that they function in isolation. The plot lines grew up in an environment where they couldn't rely on you having been there last week and the week before so you would understand the arc. If the heel is the babyfaces father and it's important, they are going to make absolutely sure you understand this. Same with superhero movies.
Barely. It's a place like Neverland is a place. Turning George's hokey space opera setting into a real fleshed out universe is a contradiction in terms.
Sure, and Star Trek stories function much more like Marvel movies in terms of what discrete, independent things they were. Yes, it's a single universe, but the vast majority of episodes might as well not have happened from a universe continuity, or audience understanding point of view. The only meaningful dependency I can think of between the classic Star Wars movies is the death of Spock in the second one and his rebirth in the third.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
fafnir wrote:
If you try and flip Star Wars so Han Solo is the main character, or Boba Fett, you've thrown out the center of the original movie that made it great.
You're defining Star Wars in a self-defeating way. I don't buy it. A young Luke Skywalker is Peter Parker.
No he isn't. Peter Parker exists out of in universe time. Peter Parker was decoupled decades ago from living in any decade. He doesn't age. You could make a retro Spiderman movie set in the 60s. You could make Spiderman black, or a girl, or an alien. Luke Skywalker exists at a particular time in the in universe timeline. You can't tell a Luke Skywalker story set in the old Republic without some radical explanation of why he is there. You can't tell a Luke Skywalker story where he is a girl (not explicitly anyway). Luke Skywalker hasn't been abstracted down to a reusable Platonic ideal in the way Spiderman has.
OK, the current MCU Spiderman exists within the continuity of Endgame. That was an aberration. Think of all the MCU movies that could have taken place at any point pre-Endgame in any order without it making any difference. Your typical MCU movie exists largely independent of the main continuity.
Service Dog wrote: ↑Luke's squeaky-clean character begs to flip him into Dark Luke, then flip him back.
The world isn't crying out to find out what happened to Luke between Jedi and The Force Awakens. The character doesn't need this story telling, and is he actually a good vehicle for telling other stories?
Who is crying out for this? Not nearly enough people for it to make sense turning into movies. The original story was what worked. Trying to extend it out into a wider universe is like trying to make Casablanca 2. Just because one can imagine plots with the characters doesn't mean the things that worked about the original can be brought across by just having it be in the same universe. Casablanca and Star Wars are both too specific to turn into workable cinematic universes while preserving any of what made the originals worthwhile to most people.
It can work as books, it can work as cartoons, to some degree it can work as a TV show because the audience that are interested in what happened to Luke after Return of the Jedi may well be big enough to support that and is much more of a tightly defined target. It can't work as movies costing hundreds of millions of dollars with an audience with wildly different tastes and expectations.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
fafnir wrote:
Unlike superhero movies, Star Wars has never been about iterating on the possibilities of an archetype. To turn it into a cinematic universe in the manner of Marvel, it kind of has to be. If they do that, is it really Star Wars?
How much does this 'really Star Wars' concept matter? I don't know if it was "never" about iterations: Luke changed across the first 3 movies. We always knew Obi-wan was young once, and Yoda. And Darth-before-he-was-evil (tho the prequels botched telling that story). We knew the great old Republic was 'fallen'.
The number of people who care about what Obi-Wan Kenobi did when he was young is far too small to justify making a movie about it. What is so compelling about the story in itself, for people who aren't particularly into Star Wars that justifies the movie? Every Iron Man movie was fun on its own and worked on its own. Cut off from the connection to all the other movies, is Obi-Wan Kenobi a compelling character in the way Iron Man was? Iron Man is a character who was created to tell stories with. Obi-Wan Kenobi is a character who was created to advance somebody else's story.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
fafnir wrote:
With most Marvel movies you know the basic plot regardless of which superhero the movie is about. The number of them where you have some kind of handsome hero who is a bit too full of himself. There will be a powerful MacGuffin and a bad guy who wants it. You then have an initial battle that doesn't defeat the bad guy and establishes the heroes emotional connection to the challenge ahead and the conflict in the soul of the hero that must be resolved. There will be a second battle where the hero is defeated and the bad guy gets control of the MacGuffin. The hero then resolves the conflict in order to win the final battle. This happens over and over.
I don't buy this reductionism. I think Marvel's 1960's success was in defying this formula.
I was talking there about the movies, not the comics. The comics have a much more limited audience and different rules apply to them.
Service Dog wrote: ↑For example: The Thing's story hasn't been told on screen yet... and it would be great. He's a low-self-esteem, lower-class, ugly-mug... who is unwillingly transformed into an orange rock monster. Which only confirms his hard-luck self-pity. But-- despite himself-- he shambles-along & does the right thing because he has a good heart. But even-tho he's immensely powerful... he's a tragic freak/ convinced no woman could love him. Then a blind chick doesn't care what he looks like, hooray. He hates his old neighborhood, but it also made him what he is... and it's the only place that's truly home. This is 'Dead End Kids' and 1950's-social-justice-noir.
Wasn't that told in the Fantastic 4 movies? I don't remember it too well. If they do make another movie with The Thing, I doubt it will be a wild departure from the formula. My guess would be some plot along the lines of him being transformed, he's upset, some threat appears that he has to accept his new form in order to defeat. Standard stuff. All the stuff you like in the comics is what gives the movies the depth that allows them to iterate over and over on the same simple story and still be interesting.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
fafnir wrote:For Sci-Fi, the only pulp stuff I would go for is Philip K Dick.
And _that_ is what disqualifies you... and anyone who agrees with you... from 'management' of Star Wars.
If you don't respect the material-- if it doesn't 'speak' to you-- then don't think you Know Best about it.
There are not remotely enough people with the type of interest in the type of Sci-Fi that the Star Wars extended universe represents to justify the kind of investment Disney made and the size of movies Disney wants to make. They could start adapting the best of the extended universe books tomorrow, but they would operate at a massive loss. This isn't about respect. There isn't going to be a Philip K Dick extended universe either.
Service Dog wrote: ↑That's who director Rian Johnson was, and fucking Kathleen Kennedy. J.J. Abrams is partly like-them, but he's got a shred of affinity for all-this.
Perhaps, but if they were going to sell Star Wars globally to markets like China, they were always going to have to throw the fans under the bus and hope that so long as there were x-wings and lightsabers, the poor saps wouldn't realise. They did it in a stupid way, but it was always going to be a deracinated Disney sausage of a movie wearing a Star Wars mask.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
I'm chagrined to say it... but I'm fundamentally a 'Star Wars Kid'. I watched re-runs of Star Trek... but I always knew it was firmly mid-60's... a little 'before my time'. I heard pretentious-types say 2001 was the great science-fiction masterpiece... but I could plainly see it was a snoozefest.
Yet I was sophisticated-enough to know Star Wars was the real deal-- and Battlestar Galactica was a rip-off. And 'Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century'. And the Dune toys were "are you fucking kidding me?!!"
The original Star Wars movie was terrific. I'm with you on that. Better than all of Star Trek even when they rip of Shakespeare or Melville for stolen pathos. All that is good in the other Star Wars movies is just the reflected glory of the first one as far as I'm concerned. I admire the writing achievement of Empire in finding a way to continue the story.
Service Dog wrote: ↑
I think Jon Favreau must-be exactly my age... he seems to 'get it'. This happened at Marvel comics... in the 1970's & 80's... when the WW2 generation which created the Fantastic Four & Avengers & X-men... were joined by young guys who had come-of-age consuming those comics... they were Native Born in that Imaginary Space... it came naturally to them to 'think' in those terms.
I'm sure Favreau is a great improvement. It's going to take a lot of consistently good product to dig Star Wars out of the hole it's in. I'm doubtful that this is a path that leads to a functioning big screen cinematic universe like Disney intended. Getting him involved has been about the only smart decision they've made.
Service Dog wrote: ↑FWIW... I would guess that John D. & I both think it's easy to make-up good Star Wars stories... because we've delved deep into the the tabletop pen&paper rpg hobby... we've spitballed storylines beginning-middle-end in just a few hours. Taking a productive shit isn't as difficult as giving birth.
Maybe, but successfully creating a cinematic universe seems to be quite a bit harder than giving birth. DC keep trying and failing, Star Wars looks to have failed at least for the moment, Universal failed with their monster movie universe in a single movie. My prediction is that the MCU are going to have a much harder time from here on in as well now they are doing longer form stories and the Eternals.