It’s been over ten years since the Walt Disney Company bought Lucasfilm and ‘Star Wars.’ Bob Iger paid over $4 billion for Lucasfilm while seemingly letting George Lucas believe they were going to follow his outline for the sequel trilogy. A decade later Disney has no upcoming ‘Star Wars’ theatrical releases until 2025 and they can’t get people to tune into ‘Andor’ on Disney+.
The lack of interest has gotten so terrible that they are now going to air the first two episodes on ABC, Freeform and Hulu to try and bring in viewers and subscribers. It seems the showrunner for ‘Andor,’ Tony Gilroy, is coming out saying that they expected critical push back but a large audience and instead got the opposite.
He told Variety:
“I’m very pleased with what they did. The materials are great. I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-“Star Wars” people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.” He continued, explaining how it went counter to his expectations “The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience.”
‘Star Wars’ has seemingly been on the decline since ‘The Last Jedi.’ Initially Disney’s ‘Star Wars’ started off strong with ‘The Force Awakens’ and then ‘Rogue One,’ but they never gave fans the Han, Luke and Leia moment they all wanted and killed Han off so it wouldn’t happen. By ‘The Last Jedi’ it became clear that there was no overarching story for the trilogy when director Rian Johnson undid and wrapped up questions and characters from the first film. By the time ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ came out Lucasfilm found a way to displease long time fans more and push away new fans at the same time.
Disney+ ‘Star Wars’
When ‘The Mandalorian’ hit Disney+ fans started to return to the franchise. Things were looking up but then ‘Boba Fett’ started to lead into another decline with audiences. While many new shows are coming including ‘The Acolyte’ and ‘Ahsoka’ fans are already getting bored. It could just be too much. ‘Star Wars’ films were events and now it’s starting to feel like a chore to watch them all and keep up.
By the time ‘Andor’ came out many fans had grown tired of the non-stop, and arguably sub-par content. Now Disney is struggling to bring in audiences for their ‘Star Wars’ on Disney+. The upcoming price increase for the streaming service is not going to help either.
Pricing and oversaturation are turning people away. A prime example is The Galactic Starcruiser hotel at Walt Disney World. Ten years ago people would have gladly paid $4,800-$6,000 to stay in a ‘Star Wars’ hotel. However they would have expected original trilogy theming, more immersion, and a ‘Star Wars Land’ themed to areas they knew like Hoth, Tatooine or Endor.
Now the hotel is seeing more and more dates booking far under the capacity limit, with reports of it being only 25% full and this hotel only has room for 502 people to begin with.
Even now, except for holidays, availability is wide open. Going into 2023 almost all dates are available.
Disney has somehow mismanaged one of the biggest franchises in history. The media, Disney and Hollywood can no longer ignore the issue and pretend it’s just “toxic, misogynistic, racist” fans to gaslight the word into thinking everything is fine. It clearly isn’t.
What do you think? Comment and let us know!
Source: Variety, Bounding Into Comics
Pirates & Princesses (PNP) is an independent, opinionated fan-powered news blog that covers Disney and Universal Theme Parks, Themed Entertainment and related Pop Culture from a consumer's point of view. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of PNP, its editors, affiliates, sponsors or advertisers. PNP is an unofficial news source and has no connection to The Walt Disney Company, NBCUniversal or any other company that we may cover.