Is bleak. It is very bleak indeed, if the Dark Herald is hearing things properly.
There was a big pow-wow at Disney on the future of Star Wars. Iger, the senior executive leadership at Disney as well as the leadership of LucasFilm. Disney has massively over-invested in Reylo Star Wars. The sunk costs are too big to reskin the rides and attractions at Disney Parks. Disney hates the idea of retconning away Rey anyway, they NEVER throw away a property, that company’s executives are as repelled by that idea as fish is of getting a suntan.
They have come up with the most designed by committee future of Star Wars imaginable. This is the result of market testing, egos tied to malinvestment and of course the malinvestments themselves.
Consequently, the new big Star Wars movie is going to star five characters.
Ready? Because Disney don’t care if you aren’t
- Rey
- R2-D2
- Chewbacca
- New character that will be introduced in the TV shows
- (You guessed this one already) Baby Yoda.
Bob Iger had to go with something. In fact, anything. He can’t shitcan Kathleen Kennedy, not with a big proxy fight coming up. He has to express confidence in her despite her disasterous record because he was the one that never fired her.
What they are telling themselves is that the reason Rey isn’t popular is because she has faded from public memory and needs to have her profile raised and not that she was Queen of the Mary Sues.
This is literally the complete opposite of a character-driven approach. It’s a plot-driven approach driven by the need to force the completely different characters from different mediums together. Why not throw in a character from the Alan Dean Foster novels and another from the Dark Horse comics just to increase the degree of difficulty?
It’s really too bad neither of the writers I tried out as collaborators were able to make the grade on my now-ancient not-Star Wars project called FARAWAY WARS that would have preceded Nick Cole’s GALAXY’S EDGE by more than a year. Well, perhaps once I’m finished with my next four books, I can crank one or two of them out myself. It’s more likely that I’ll initially do it as a comic script, however, as Arktoons continues to grow.
