Were the Star Wars Prequels Too New Hollywood for a 21st Century Audience?

When we read about the New Hollywood (for instance, in Peter Biskind's famous history, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) we are likely to read about Star Wars less as part of that New Hollywood than as what would do so much to end the New Hollywood, the rise of the merchandising and franchise-friendly "blockbuster" that equipped the Suits with a reliably, massively profitable model of moviemaking that left them less at the mercy of willful artistes.

Yet George Lucas, and Star Wars, were definitely of the New Hollywood. George Lucas discovered the San Francisco underground film scene, studied at USC, learned about Kurosawa and Godard, made movies like THX 1138 and American Graffiti, worked on projects like Apocalypse Now (only late in the game bowing out of helming it to do Star Wars instead). He certainly aspired to be an auteur, and seems to me to have gone about the making of Star Wars--at the time an extremely unconventional project that saw the director fighting endless battles with the executives--as an auteur (and learned the hard way that this was one thing when making an American Graffiti, another when it's a $10 million movie shot on three continents with a giant FX budget for envelope-pushing effects, learned it so well he didn't direct anything else until The Phantom Menace). And one might add that the earlier versions of the Star Wars script were at least somewhat more political, much more adult, New Hollywood stuff, before, realizing the tension between that and the more Bruno Bettelheim, fairy tale-type aspiration he held for the movie, opted decisively for the latter. When he made The Phantom Menace he ended up making something more like those earlier versions of the script for Star Wars, with its more elaborate world-building, and its political themes. And of course, that seemed to play a big part in turning much of the fan base off to the films. In that there would seem a significant irony--that Star Wars, so often slighted in discussion of New Hollywood film, saw its prequels treated as badly as they were because they were too New Hollywood for fans who had come to expect the very different kind of film that Star Wars had done so much to make routine.