Star Wars Was Not, and Could Never Have Been, Another MCU

The title of this post makes the point--Star Wars was not, and could never have been, the second Marvel Cinematic Universe-style hit machine that Disney was so clearly hoping for when it bought Lucasfilm. There are at least three reasons for that.

1. As one finds attending to George Lucas' creative process when he worked on the original Star Wars he was torn between making a more "adult" piece of science fiction, with complex world-building and political themes, and a fairy tale as he understood the form on the basis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. In the end he opted for the latter--and produced Star Wars as we know it. The catch, however, is that fairy tales are simple and short, with a beginning, middle, end, and expanding them is apt to turn them into something they are not--as is evident when we look at the Expanded Universe, even at its best. (A figure like Grand Admiral Thrawn, for example, has no place in a world of fairy tale simplicities.) It is evident, too, when we look at George Lucas' own prequel trilogy (1999-2005)--in which we see something of those more complex, world-building-intensive, political ideas Lucas had but eschewed when working on the first film in the '70s. The Expanded Universe has been a success with a limited hard core of readers; the prequels alienated many. So was it likely to go with any other such effort--with, as Disney demonstrated, stretching out the Star Wars' saga's main line by three more movies leaving fans looking at it and saying "This is not my Star Wars" (and not just because of the culture war politics, even if that is what gets all the press).

2. As might be guessed from that fairy tale origin Star Wars was never a creation comparable to the Marvel or DC comic book universes--really a bunch of separate comic book characters, separate stories that over time got to be complexly interlinked into a sprawling narrative. Putting it another way the core of those universes that people attend to are those characters, each the stars of their own show, so to speak, the heroes of their own stories, who happen to live in the same world as those other stars and heroes so that they get involved in each others' lives. By contrast Star Wars was the "hero's journey" of Luke Skywalker--and if members of his supporting cast struck a chord with many fans (a Han Solo, a Lando Calrizian, a Boba Fett) they did not provide the same basis for setting up Iron Man and Thor and Captain America in their own movies, and then tying them together in the Avengers. Thus a Han Solo movie was the kind of thing more likely to appeal to Expanded Universe readers than the general audience--as was seen when that movie actually came out. It did not have to be a debacle--but the level of investment in it, reflecting the unreasonable expectations for the general-audience interest in such a movie, made it so.

3. Besides the fact that Star Wars did not provide a superhero comic universe-retinue of characters each plausibly the star of their own film, there was the significant liability of the world they inhabited. One of the principal attractions of the superhero genre as against other forms of sci-fi action spectacle--most evident in the most consistently high-performing franchises, like Batman and Spider-Man, as against the more exotic franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy--is that superheroes operate in something like the real world, presenting the audience with a minimum of what Darko Suvin would have called "alienation" effects (things that yank them out of the experience, not least by forcing them to think). We all know Gotham is basically New York--while Spider-Man actually does live in New York--and it is easier for the general audience to get into that than the story of someone on Coruscant. Alas, making a Cinematic Universe out of Star Wars required the audience to not just be willing to follow the adventures of someone on Coruscant, but to be specifically interested in that fictional world in itself. Again, the hardcore fans are happy to immerse themselves in that galaxy far, far away. But they are no basis for consistent billion-dollar hits (as, again, the results show).

The basis of all of this seems to me to have been fairly obvious stuff to anyone who bothered to understand Star Wars, and the cinematic market, and for that matter bothered to learn a little bit about how science fiction works. (Certainly something of this would have been obvious had they read a certain book I can name. Ahem.) But I have no idea if anyone at Disney-Lucasfilm understood it, while it seems obvious that if they did understand it they regarded it as far less important than the Star Wars brand name, which was what they paid those billions for and on which they bet so heavily, with this admittedly seeming to work out for a while Episode VII was a sensational success, financially at least (making a billion in profit by itself, according to the folks at Deadline).

But things fell apart fairly quickly, so much so that Kathleen Kennedy recently spoke of Star Wars being handled not like the MCU but the much-lower output Bond movies (read: rather than three billion-dollar movies a year, one movie that will probably fall short of a billion every three years). While the press does not seem to have made much of it this is a confession of the effort's defeat--catastrophic, war-losing defeat--which can seem the greater given how 007 himself has not been doing so well lately, with the same going for Disney's other revenue streams.