The best Star Wars movie to come along since Disney bought Lucasfilm for a pretty penny is arguably Rogue One, but that’s sadly more of a reflection of how disappointing all the others were than a compliment to the movie itself. It has a great setup – a heist story about the Rebel spies who stole the Death Star plans – but it suffers from underdeveloped characters with wasted potential, clunky exposition, structural problems in the second act, and most egregiously, having none of the coolest shots from the trailer in the actual movie.
Instead of letting director Gareth Edwards make the movie he envisioned, studio executives interfered with the production. They brought in Tony Gilroy to rewrite the script and heavily reshot Edwards’ movie. Originally, Jyn and Cassian had to run across a chaotic battlefield to get the plans to the Rebels; in the final cut, they just do a file transfer. Rogue One is a fine movie that’s worth the audience’s while, but the origin story of the Death Star could have – and should have – been so much more. Sadly, Rogue One’s $1 billion box office haul convinced executives they’d saved the movie, so it set a precedent for Disney and Lucasfilm to step in and make radical changes to everyone’s Star Wars movies. After Edwards was denied creative control, the producers’ treatment of Star Wars directors just got worse and worse.
The original directors of Solo: A Star Wars Story, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired in the middle of production – after they’d already shot a lot of the movie – and replaced by Ron Howard, who managed to piece together a passable cut of the agreeable blockbuster that doesn’t take any risks that Lucasfilm apparently wanted. And, of course, it went down in history as the first Star Wars movie to tank at the box office.
Kathleen Kennedy had apparently gotten cold feet about the comedic direction that Lord and Miller were taking (although their whole background is in comedy, so this shouldn’t have come as a surprise), with some reports that the tone they were going for was akin to Guardians of the Galaxy. Lord and Miller were a promising choice to direct Solo. From the moment it was announced, Star Wars fans thought an origin story for Han Solo was completely unnecessary. But Lord and Miller have made a career out of taking completely unnecessary movies – like 21 Jump Street or The Lego Movie – and turning them into huge hits that feel totally necessary. Perhaps they could’ve done the same with Han’s origin story.
After the debacle of firing Solo’s directors, Kennedy went and fired the initial director of Episode IX, Colin Trevorrow, while she was at it, because the two couldn’t agree on the script. So, J.J. Abrams was brought back to conclude the sequel trilogy (and the entire Star Wars saga) in the worst and weirdest way possible with The Rise of Skywalker. A few weeks after The Rise of Skywalker’s disastrous, polarizing release, one of Trevorrow’s drafts of Episode IX – titled Duel of the Fates – leaked online. Star Wars fans read it and almost unanimously agreed that it was a lot more original, coherent, and imaginative than The Rise of Skywalker.
Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have been guiding The Mandalorian, seemingly with a lot of creative control, and it’s been working wonders. Disney and Lucasfilm need to give Star Wars directors some space and let them make the movies they set out to make. The studios need to start taking some risks, because surely they’ve learned by now that there’s no such thing as a safe bet when it comes to Star Wars movies. Also, just generally, studio meddling very rarely has a positive impact on a big tentpole film – just look at Fant4stic, Alien 3, Batman Forever, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Predator, Spider-Man 3, or Disney’s own John Carter.
Lucasfilm has a handful of Star Wars projects in the pipeline, including Rogue Squadron from Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and an untitled film by Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi. These directors are absolutely perfect for the Star Wars universe. Both have proven they can deliver massively satisfying blockbusters with a lot of passion and a unique artistic voice. Jenkins and Waititi’s personalities can be seen all over their superhero movies, and the tone of those movies is fun, lighthearted escapism – the spirit of Star Wars. Jenkins banished the word “cheesy” from her vocabulary in directing Wonder Woman and approached the material with the sincerity that George Lucas has always brought to his space operas.
These directors are perfect for Star Wars (and Waititi has already proven his mettle with The Mandalorian’s first-season finale), but their movies can only succeed if Kennedy and Mickey Mouse’s army of executives give them the same freedom that DC and Marvel executives have. Instead of clipping their wings, the studios need to line their wings with money and leave them to do their job. If audiences keep getting hit with mediocre Star Wars movies stitched together by money-minded studio executives with a base-level understanding of the Star Wars universe, then we’ll start seeing a lot more bombs like Solo. Solo’s failure isn’t necessarily a surprising one-off; it could be an ominous sign of things to come.
In a post-pandemic world, if Rogue Squadron is released and it’s yet another Star Wars movie with a great director whose vision has been reshaped into an unrecognizable, generic blockbuster, passive fans might stop bothering to see Star Wars movies on the big screen altogether and just stick to the ever-growing roster of Star Wars streaming content on Disney Plus. The Mandalorian has been the greatest piece of Star Wars media in years, but Lucas’ galaxy far, far away was meant to be seen on the big screen.
In order to replicate the same sense of wonder that audiences felt when they watched a plucky little Rebel ship getting chased through the cosmos by a gargantuan Imperial Star Destroyer in the opening shot of the original 1977 movie, Lucasfilm needs to hire visionary directors who love Star Wars (like Jenkins and Waititi) and, more importantly, give them creative freedom. Obviously, there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in these situations and Kennedy has to consider how each movie will play in international markets and please shareholders and all the other business-related things that people bizarrely calling for Kennedy to be replaced by Jon Favreau or Dave Filoni haven’t taken into account.
But there’s a vast middle ground between giving directors final cut and firing them in the middle of production. The studio executives should have as much involvement in Star Wars’ big-screen output as they have in its small-screen output because, between The Mandalorian and the final season of The Clone Wars and all the other cool stuff on the way, that balance seems to be working out pretty well.
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