To be fair to Fincher, didn't he want to take his name off of it because he problems with the script?
How could it be any other way? Because "canon"? It's a senseless concept. Suppose I buy the full rights to all Alien intellectual property, and then commission a prequel story in which Ripley cruelly murders a dog for no reason. Does this ruin the first movie, by making it into a story about a heroic dog murderer? No, I didn't change the first story at all. Owning the IP doesn't make me into a time traveler who can retroactively modify the meaning of art created in the past. Even if I were the original creator and not just somebody who has the IP rights, I cannot travel into the past and modify the meaning of things already published.
you just summed up Star Wars 1-3, only without having to buy the rights issues. so, yes, "prequels" and "canon" can harm the existing movies, or at least how people feel about them.
I know a lot of people feel that way, but it seems like self-inflicted harm to me. In the 90s I thoroughly wore out VHS copies of IV, V and VI. I came out and I thought it was a dull stinker (except podracing.) I really didn't like it, but it didn't change how I felt about the earlier movies which I continued to enjoy. They continued to be exactly the same movies they were before, it was just the new one that wasn't good. Midiclorians cannot devalue the original movies because they objectively weren't in the original movies. If you choose to believe they're now in the original movies, retroactively, because the IP holder says so decades later, how is that not a self-inflicted wound? When I hear these kind of complaints about later movies ruining earlier movies, all I can think is "stop hitting yourself".
Star Wars 7 showed that the celebration at the end of 6 was premature. The Empire is still out there and is still a match for whatever government exists. Luke, Leia, and Han haven't won. The misery continues for another 40 years.
Star Wars 8 explained nothing.
Star Wars 9 "somehow Palpatine returned".
Fuck Disney and fuck everyone they hired.
Fundamentally memories aren't really immutable; I feel like Alien 3 actively made Aliens worse because now it means that the last third of Aliens was kind of pointless. This is canon, and moreover by the time I watched these movies I was a teenager (~2006 or so), and so it was well-entrenched into the canon.
Instead, we got a "no guns" and trashing everything that was great about the second movie. I have a difficult time reconciling it with the fact that it's a Fincher movie.