Is Entertainment Media’s Coverage of Star Wars Evolving?
Entertainment media looks like it’s in a bit of a tailspin right now. Perhaps they’re shell-shocked in the wake of so many failures they were convinced would be monster hits, realizing that their protected studios’ critics are much more numerous than they thought. They’re likely also dazed from the dawning realization that they’re not as influential as they thought, not able to control narratives, shape public opinion, or shame their dissenters into shutting up. That leaves them with a conundrum: do they state the obvious and try to salvage some dignity, or do they continue being good little servants and maintain the lies? Yesterday, two articles were released, one from Variety and one from The Hollywood Reporter, and the narratives couldn’t be more different.
The Variety piece is called “Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out for Blood’ — From Social Media Boot Camps to Superfan Focus Groups.” It’s essentially the same article you’ve seen a dozen times whenever a new show or movie that isn’t popular with fans of whatever franchise it’s inevitably denigrating is released. The charges are all present and accounted for: review bombing, racism, caring about the lore of a particular property (which means just being a fan of something is toxic), calling things woke, etc. They still insist it’s a small subset of the fandoms, but they don’t explain how groups so few in number are causing so many franchises to collapse, especially when “casual fans” don’t care about the same things. For that matter, if it’s such a small number of fans, how is review bombing possible? Wouldn’t the vast majority of casual fans who like anything their benevolent Hollywood betters throw at them drown out the toxic fans? See, the possibility that these shows and movies are bad, or at least not pleasing to fans, is never mentioned. It’s everyone else’s fault, and now, studios are being forced to lower themselves to trying to make additions to franchises that fans of said franchises will enjoy via test groups and the like. Surely, U2 is planning a benefit concert for them as we speak.
Here’s where it gets interesting. On the same day, The Hollywood Reporter ran an article called “Is Disney Bad at Star Wars? An Analysis.” This is longer and discusses each entry in the Star Wars universe since Disney bought Lucasfilm, and while there are still some digs at fans (if you didn’t like The Acolyte, you’re either a racist or pathetically trying to convince people you aren’t) and a little shade thrown at Gina Carano (without mentioning her name, of course), it’s surprisingly honest about Disney’s shortcomings as the modern Star Wars steward. It goes soft here and there, doing what it can to give Disney as much credit as possible while making the point that their Star Wars content has been on a downward trend, and they’ve pretty much botched both their theatrical and Disney+ sections of the franchise. (They revived “a dormant franchise;” yeah, and Frankenstein brought a bunch of dead body parts back to life, but the result was a monster.) But the admissions The Hollywood Reporter makes in this piece – like that the sequel trilogy made less money with each film or that The Mandalorian and Grogu, even if it’s successful, is still a two-hour-long episode of a TV show – are impressive, something it appeared the entertainment media was not capable of doing. They even throw fans a bone when they say we have every right to have trepidation about new Star Wars content given Disney’s track record and general sense of discord. Is this the beginning of a trend? It’s hard to say; it could be an outlier they can tout to save face when they defend Disney’s next debacle. But maybe they’re tired of looking like idiots for a company that appears to have no qualms about embarrassing them. If that’s the case, Disney and the rest of Hollywood should be worried, because it’ll be hard to point the finger elsewhere when they’ve lost the press.
Let us know what you think of entertainment media’s possibly evolving stance in the comments!
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