Disney didn’t kill Star Wars
But Disney made Star Wars more safe
Did Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm kill Star Wars? That’s the impression I’ve gotten from talking to some of my friends and looking on the internet!
But that seems like an overreaction. And while overreactions are usually wrong, that’s a lazy place to stop thinking about the question. Instead of basing my belief on a heuristic, I decided to turn to the data. To see how the quality of Star Wars has changed over time I collected Tomatometer scores, Rotten Tomatoes Audience scores, Metacritic scores, and Google users scores for all 11 live-action feature films and the 2 live-action Disney+ shows. The results are pretty clear: after the original trilogy, Star Wars movies and shows have hung around 75% approval with or without Disney.
The specifics of my analysis depend on how much weight you give audience scores versus critic scores, but no matter how I’ve sliced it there hasn’t been a drop off in quality since Disney took over. On the contrary, an argument could be made that Disney has improved Star Wars by raising the quality floor of Star Wars. Whatever you think of The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, those movies are at least competently produced in basic areas like visuals and dialogue1-- unlike The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
But why do fans feel like Star Wars has gotten worse with Disney? I think it’s because Disney has changed the direction of Star Wars stories. Star Wars was never loved because the movies and TV shows were particularly great. Yes, there were some home runs (A New Hope and The Mandalorian), but there were plenty of misses (Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones) and a lot more in between. Star wasn’t isn’t loved because the movies are great, but because the stories were great. Star Wars was loved because the stories opened up a whole new and fantastical world to the audience. Disney has taken Star Wars in a safer direction. Instead of expanding the galaxy, they’ve chosen to fill in gaps and reuse old stories and characters2. It isn’t that Star Wars is worse, but that it is smaller.
Exit thought: Analytics in professional baseball has led teams to emphasize swinging big for home runs even if hitters strike out more versus a more consistent and controlled approach at the plate. Maybe Disney could learn something from this? Yes, by taking more risks in their stories Disney could produce more movie flops, but by taking more risks they could expand the Star Wars story and re-excite the fan base.
Funny enough, the opposite can be said from a planning perspective. Disney Star Wars have been more a hodgepodge than the pre-Disney movies with each director undoing what the previous director did to do their own thing. This is especially true for the sequel trilogy.
I’d argue the two biggest successes Disney has had were Rouge One and The Mandalorian. Both used completely new characters to tell different stories than have been told before. Conversely, the sequel trilogy was pretty disappointing and was just a recycled version of the David versus Goliath story told in the original trilogy.