>Someone can take the name and make mass produced garbage

This hit hard. Disney bought Lucasfilm. Look at Indiana Jones 5, I don't think anyone ask for it, but Disney made it and it's a major flop.

I agree, but it seems like many people are incapable of thinking this way. See the number of people who say that new star wars ruined old star wars, "ruined their childhood" even. How? How can a new movie ruin an old movie? Causality does not work in that direction. But some people think it does and the illogicality of their position doesn't change the fact of how they genuinely feel.

> How? How can a new movie ruin an old movie?

I think it must be kind of like desecrating a corpse. Maybe watching someone dig up and do something prolonged and unthinkable to the body of your dead grandmother can't undo all the lovely years you had together, but if witnessing that act enraged you, you might find that suddenly every time you see her photo or visit her grave you're reminded of what you saw and that it upsets you all over again.

Not saying I fully buy it but I think the fans’ point is that what Disney is doing to Star Wars today is diminishing the entirety of Star Wars, the average of past + present. Every new Transformers or Indiana Jones or Ice Age makes the overall work worse, regardless of whether you even see it.

> I think the fans’ point is that what Disney is doing to Star Wars today is diminishing the entirety of Star Wars

They may believe that, but it's not true.

I think it is not just diluting the quality to get a worse average. Fiction often involves the audience filling in the gaps: Someone drops a hint that characters have known each other a long time; you can imagine that as you’d like. In the end, you get “and they lived happily ever after,” you decide what “happily ever after” looks like.

Sequels and prequels need to add more drama and action, so happily ever after never ends up being all that happy.

> I think the fans’ point is that what Disney is doing to Star Wars today is diminishing the entirety of Star Wars, the average of past + present

Lucas was at the helm for Return of the Jedi, Star Tours, and the three prequels. I think we can't lay the blame for the Holiday Special on him, but that certainly happened too. There's the Ewok tv movies too, which thankfully I've never seen.

Even if all the Disney Star Wars films are crap, they're just continuing the trend. I prefer to simply believe there are two Star Wars films, and let others believe what they want to believe.

As a man in his 50’s, what I think of those movies doesn’t really matter. They aren’t for me.

Are 12 year olds saying the latest Indiana Jones diminishes the series? If not, then Disney should carry on.

Andor is well worth a watch though

People who claim a new movie ruined their childhood are just being over-dramatic, are using it as a shorthand for it destroyed a thing from their childhood, or both.

I do think, though, that sequel can make a story worse pretty easily. For example, the combined story of the Star Wars sequels, prequels, and originals is simply worse than the originals alone. When you just watched the originals, you could imagine your own Clone Wars, they could be whatever cool thing you want. Dropping neat-sounding hints and letting the audience fill in the gaps with whatever cool thing they imagine is a classic storytelling technique get a free feeling of depth. Replacing that cool thing the audience imagined with trade negotiations makes the story worse.

Similarly, character arcs are a thing. The protagonists usually win and end up in a happy place, at least in a non-grimdark universe like Star Wars. Making a sequel that says: Actually Luke Skywalker spent the rest of his life failing and ended up as a miserable old grump makes his story arc worse.

You can just watch the original movies and ignore the rest of course, it is after all fiction so getting the whole story doesn’t really matter. But these are huge releases that get lots of press, and I think it is unrealistic to expect fans to just ignore them.

Maybe I'm making too much of it, perhaps it's just the modern style to use hyperbolic rhetoric in movie reviews.

But for new movies to make old movies worse used to be an uncommon attitude I think. I remember in the 90s and 00s, lots of movies had really shitty sequels, often straight to DVD, but nobody talked about these cash grabs ruining the original movie. For instance Aliens 3, Alien Resurrection and then all the AvP crap... some people like these (I think Aliens 3 is defensible FWIW) but a lot of people really don't. Still, nobody talks about Alien or Aliens (e.g. 1 & 2) being ruined by the later movies. Aliens 3 is frequently criticized for the way it killed well-liked characters from Aliens, but that doesn't stop people from still enjoying Aliens. People just choose to ignore Aliens 3. And why shouldn't they, because Aliens 3 is canon? That's just a legal IP relationship, that doesn't matter.

And Disney has dozens of straight-to-vhs/dvd cashgrab sequels of their classic animated movies, people who don't care for them just ignore them and they aren't said to ruin the originals. There used to be a general understanding that sequels are very rarely good, people were pleasantly surprised when it was otherwise and nobody said their life was ruined by a bad sequel. Because who cares about cannon in animated disney movies?

I've seen Lucas's Clone Wars, but if I watch the original Star Wars I'm not compelled to relate it to the Clone Wars movie. By simply choosing to ignore it because I don't like it, I free myself to imagine my own clone wars.

I think new movies ruining the originals is some relatively recent cultural phenomena that was brought on by internet culture's obsession with canon. The existence of popular sites like wookiepedia both evidence it and drive it. If I'm wrong and it's not an overabundance of respect for IP laws that is the root of this, then why isn't bad fanfic also said to ruin the original?

Of course, it is fiction, so if you want to have your own version of the story and cut off the bad parts, that’s definitely not hurting anyone.

Nowadays studios really lean into the idea of establishing an expanded universe and canon, since then it becomes a recurring revenue stream and all that. So, I wonder if this is an aspect of that trend, just a different way people tell stories and, as a result, consume them.

I think people ignore 90’s disney cash grab sequels mostly because they were so garbage that they didn’t get integrated into the cultural zeitgeist (and also, people who loved Lion King when it came out were too old to care about the sequel).

Stuff like the Star Wars prequels is not quite at that level of badness, might be marketed toward everyone, so it enters the general conversation about the movies. Of course, it is possible to not engage in that stuff, but then, I guess people who are talking about Star Wars in 2023 are interested in the whole thing, right? You can only think about 3 movies for so long, haha. So, I bet lots of people saw them movies, have fond memories, and then moved on, but they aren’t talking about it anymore.

I think some of the reason for the strong reaction is Star Wars is for kids while Aliens is not. There are a lot of people who were in an age of innocence when they watched Star Wars and it gets them upset if the new movies aren't entertaining to them as adults. Even if you did watch Aliens as a kid it's a horror movie in space with a giant bug in the shadows making it a lot less relatable.

Maybe it's because they re-released modified versions of the original Star Wars trilogy[1]. Although timing wise, some of the re-releases happened before the Star Wars prequels, including the "Han shot first" controversy[2]. Some people's childhood might be ruined by the altercations, but it seems unfair that the new Star Wars are fully to blame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_in_Star_Wars_re-releas...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first

Narrative causality does work that way; a later-made prequel can ruin a story element that was fine in an earlier-made sequel. This is infohazards 101.

Prometheus would be an example of that

> How? How can a new movie ruin an old movie?

It is the age old problem of recognizing the canon.

The Star Wars brand means one experience to said person.

You mix other experiences into the soup and he'll say it's ruined.

It's true that his experience has been changed and it's also true that we are allowed to change his experience of the Star Wars brand.

The positivity/negativity of people's reactions is a red herring. They are both valid.

The real danger is when people try to gaslight people who have had a bad experience and then try to fuse/melt people, into yet another new Star Wars themed experience.

It makes you stop wanting to feel anything positive about the brand entirely.

It shouldn't be so difficult to get older generations and younger generations to watch the same product and come off with a positive experience.

Star Wars doesn't do it though, they fragment off the older generations into niche media, trying to recapture the past.