Star Wars: will the new films be good news for fans?

Certainly, as a child I was bewitched: for at least a year in the early 1990s,
my top priority on arriving home from school was to push one of three Star
Wars VHS tapes into the video player and be temporarily transported to a
galaxy far, far away, in a custard cream and Ribena-fuelled reverie.

Fast forward to The Phantom Menace in 1999, with its two-plus hours of
incoherent politicking and the minstrel show horrors of Jar Jar Binks, and
it seems clear that by this point, Lucas had completely lost sight of what
made Star Wars tick.

Will Disney be able to rediscover it? I'm quietly confident that they will, if
only because the studio's deft handling of the Avengers franchise suggests
they understand the importance, and cash value, of pandering to a
pre-existing fanbase.

In fact, Disney would be mad not to develop Star Wars along the same lines as
the Marvel superheroes franchise, which they have successfully turned into
an outrageously profitable, wholly self-sustaining movie ecosystem. Plot
threads and character arcs are stretched over multiple films, and every new
instalment acts as an extended trailer for the next.

By fostering this box set mentality, where fans invest in a continually
unfolding storyline, Disney has scared up almost $4 billion over the last
four years, and a further six Avengers-related films are due to be released
by the end of 2015. Forget Star Wars Episode VII: by the end of the decade,
we may well have Episodes VIII through XVIII, and that $4.05 billion
investment will look very canny indeed.

No, says Tim Robey

If ever a movie franchise needed its next instalment, rather than its first
one, to be called 'A New Hope', that franchise is Star Wars. Hope, to be
charitable, can't entirely be ruled out. There will be no more fricking
prequels — I through VI are done and dusted — so the tantalising prospect of
fresh, unpredictable storytelling can be dangled before us. George Lucas
will surely vacate the director's chair, allowing a thrusting young geek
hero (Joss Whedon? JJ Abrams?) to call the shots.

Will this be enough? That's the question. Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm
looks less like step one in a much-needed creative overhaul, more like the
boxing-up of a monumental George Lucas retirement package. There will be new
rides at Disneyworld, Disneyland and all over the Disneyplanet. There will
be massive, brain-melting cross-promotion on the Disney-owned American TV
networks. And there will be toys. Lots and lots of them.

There will also be three new films, but we're dreaming if we imagine that the
originality of these will be paramount, or that the innocence and awe of the
first trilogy can ever be recaptured. The product of this massive corporate
merger can only be, well, a product. Fans worldwide must fiercely resist
everything that Disney does to whip them up into a frenzy of excitement for
the 2015 release of Episode VII. Do they really want to relive the
childhood-ruining dismay of Phantom Menace? Scepticism must be the
healthiest tack: this way the films may yet surprise us.

Still, at the risk of inviting hate mail from the entire internet, I'm not
sure that Whedon-ish, smart-alecky,
we-know-this-entire-mythos-better-than-you script choices are what Star Wars
really needs. I don't want sarcastic quips from C-3PO about something funny
R2-D2 did in a deleted scene from The Ewok Adventure. Obi-Wan-style, the
only hope for these films is keeping it simple, decluttering the already
migraine-inducingly overbusy Lucas universe, and getting back to classic,
honest storytelling. It's here that Disney should take a stand, if Lucas
even gives them permission. They need an artist like Irvin Kershner in
charge (I realise he's dead), not a clever nerd. Until that decision is
made, I think expectations are best kept at a wary level of hmmm.

Source:
http://www.news.ezonearticle.com/2012/10/31/star-wars-will-the-new-films-be-good-news-for-fans/