Why I Find Blockbuster Failures Inspiring

 You’ve probably heard about the colossal failure that was The Rise of Skywalker, a mixture of bad ideas, retreading an already established cannon into a new, worse cannon, and dropping characters with tons of potential. It was probably the biggest disappointment of the decade in film and cinema, considering it was one of the most hyped films of the decade. And you would have to think, before knowing anything about it, with Disney money backing it, plus all the already established written stories in the Star Wars universe from the books and TV Shows, you would think it would be an easy smash hit, right?

Right?

But, no. It was a failure. But really, it was more than that. It was a spit in the face to any Star Wars fans that still had faith in it after the, some would say even worse, second movie, The Last Jedi. It took potentially amazing characters like Finn and Rey, who by the end of the first movie, The Force Awakens, had numerous online threads written about them with hypotheses about where their character arcs would go, and dumped them down the bland, uninteresting drain. 

And honestly, I find that shit inspiring. 

Just think about it, you have Disney, one of, if not the biggest company in film entertainment in the 21st Century, backing Star Wars after they bought the rights, and they still couldn’t make a good Star Wars movie. It can really boggle the mind with how absurd of a notion that is. One would think that with enough money, something that big would have to make something good, or at the very least, something passable, something better than the Prequels, the goddamn Prequels. But no, they were somehow worse. 

But I still think that’s a good thing, or at least in some way, proof that good story telling cannot be bought. Sure, they can make it look nice, hiring the best VFX artists in the world to make that shit look as photo-real as possible, to the point that it is indistinguishable from reality. And when things explode, the audience will “oooh” and “awww,” but at the end of the day, if there isn’t a compelling story and interesting characters pulling the weight of the movie behind it, those explosions don’t mean jack, son.

The best counter to this would be, of course, Marvel, who are owned by Disney, but still work in a separate room from Star Wars in the Disney mansion. And in the Marvel movies, you can really feel the love and care that go into every scene, because the people in charge there actually care. They want to make good stories, not just pretty movies, because they were the comics they read and loved growing up. They know everything about them, all their villains, their friends, and their losses. (Most of this is attributed to the Russo brothers and Jon Favreau, who started and watched over the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its inception with 2008’s Iron Man.)

This isn’t to say there aren’t Star Wars fans working on the newest movies, but more to say that there are people who don’t care with more power than the ones who do, and they push for their ideas to make it to the final cut because they think they know best when really, they don’t. And when people like that are left in charge of the final product, it results in one of the worst scenes in cinematic history ever created and put on the big screen. (Please go watch that because it is honestly the most tone deaf scene ever made. They literally kiss as if victorious while their base is blown up in the background. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was satire.)

To wrap this all up and get to the point, you can’t just make a good story by throwing enough money at it that it’ll suffocate, you have to put in the time and effort of simply sitting down and thinking it out, writing and rewriting, editing and collaborating until you have something you think is good, and then you do it all over again. But that takes time, and that is one of the things Disney does not give its team an abundance of. Movies have to come out on a scheduled basis, no matter what the end product is. 

And I think the best quote that encompasses this idea is, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” This is usually attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto, videogame creator of the series The Legend of Zelda and the Mario Bros games, although no substantial evidence has been found that he actually said it. Still, the basic idea is there, and I hope Disney one day puts that quote up on their walls.