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Comment by Sendotsh | Hacker News Reader

I'm a SW fan, have been my entire life. Not one of the fans that go super-deep into lore and nit-picking every aspect of every movie and debating it all (although I do respect that level of fan too, and think they create some interesting discussions/content), but I've watched every movie a few times, read a heap of the books, play all the games, collect the Lego, etc etc.

I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better. It's all just formulaic mass-produced share-holder stuff now, but it does the job.

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> there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment.

They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.

I wish they'd done a live-action remake of treasure planet, The art direction would really lend itself to Disney's animation capabilities.

The absence of competition reinforces conservatism.

Bluth leaving Disney was the best thing to happen to them.

> I think that Disney is doing to SW what they do to everything... they make it appeal to the maximum possible audience for the maximum possible profit. There's no deep desire to create amazing stories, there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment. The stuff they make is "good". You'll still pay for it, and enjoy it, but you'll always end up feeling like they could've done better.

For Star Wars, at least, that's a pretty solid step up. I paid for Episodes 1-3, but didn't particularly enjoy them. Episodes 7 & 8 at least left me feeling good about what I just watched, and I quite liked Rogue One (I didn't see it in the theater, though).

I have the same feelings as you. I LOVED Rogue One though. It definitely brought out the child in me.

Side not, smuggler's run did the same thing. I triggered my inner child.

The new movies are hit or miss.

Rogue one was good, Episode 7 was okayish as a introduction to new arc and characters, Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.

We don't talk about Solo. That move does not exist.

> Episode 8 was killed by playing it safe - it was such a wasted potential.

I get that, although I'll be honest—a bit part of what I liked about 8 Ep. 8 was that it killed off all of the dumb hanging threads from Ep. 7. Episodes 4-6 had huge surprises, but they mostly came out of nowhere, not with giant neon signs pointing at them "GEE DON'T YOU WONDER WHO REY'S PARENTS ARE IT'S A HUGE MYSTERY!". Episode 8 just threw all of that out the window and I loved it for that.

Disney's genius, more than anything else, has always been an oscillation between kid-comprehensible and parent-intriguing. In the same work.

You can see it in the details of their animated films, presumably where the workers were given a bit more artistic license.

The scene i think is the most wasted was the death of Snoke.

There are myriad ways to go forward in interesting directions(Kylo and Rey could go both dark jedi, gray jedi, swap sides(i think that it will come to that) or even go for a 3rd way, or even destroy the concept of jedi itself) yet they basically returned to status quo.

It also felt like it was heavily edited - like there were two drafts, and someone mashed them together.

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