Star Wars The Product

Buddy cop movie, The Mandolorian and Grogu, hit theaters this weekend. The film is expected to gross about $102 million dollars by the end of the Memorial Day holiday. It’s probably fair to say those box office receipts, more than any other factor, drive the direction of the Star Wars series of films and television shows.

Lest we ever forget that Star Wars is a product promotion vehicle as much as it is a film franchise, there’s Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs character Yogurt reminding us with his phrase, “merchandising, merchandising, merchandising,” as he hawks various Spaceballs products like breakfast cereals. It’s probably near incalculable how many units of toys the Star Wars franchise has moved over the years.

So it’s interesting that many think Star Wars really owes nothing to its fans.

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I still see comments like that one above about Rian Johnson’s entry in the Star Wars universe, The Last Jedi. The theory being that most male fans of the series couldn’t handle a film where all the women were perfect and all the men were deeply flawed. I guess those guys are called chuds. They are also in large part responsible for the historic and ongoing success of the franchise.

It’s said that no one hates Star Wars like Star Wars fans. While that may be true, it can also be said that, at least at certain times, few fan-driven properties have creators that seem to care less what the fans think. I often see comments from critics who enjoyed the lowest rated Star Wars episodic TV series — The Acolyte — blaming the fans for its lack of success. One article I read claimed what Star Wars needed was to be sexier and this was a step in the right direction. Was that what the majority of devotees have been asking of the new spin offs? That they sex it up?

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I bring up the angle of Star Wars as product because, in producing consumer entertainment, just as in producing consumer goods, one has to keep the audience in mind. I develop software, and in that business, we have to anticipate the customers wants and needs. We can’t be didactic about it, either. We don’t instruct them in what they should want and then blame them when they don’t like what we offer them. It seems to me that creators act a bit like post-journalists, where the journalist offers up a guiding narrative of how the consumer should feel about the facts they are providing. The creators of certain Star Wars properties want to offer the fans what they believe the fans should want, if they are to be enlightened. It comes off as patronizing, and, unsurprisingly, turns the fans off.

I respect the creators for wanting to take risks. It’s nice to think of Star Wars as art sometimes, that even through the sci-fi necessities of laser swords and planet destroying disco balls, it can offer stories that speak to our human condition. One can never get too far from the commercial aspects, though.