Like a ragtag group of Rebels taking on a Death Star, angry Star Wars fans who are furious at Disney / Lucasfilm over the firing of Gina Carano from The Mandalorian are absolutely thrashing the official Star Wars YouTube channel.
Nearly every new video posted to the Star Wars YouTube channel is met with a massive amount of downvotes and comments expressing support for Carano.
A recent video upload entitled “The Razor Crest Enters Galaxy of Heroes, We Want Your High Republic Questions, and More!” currently sits at 1.3K upvotes to a massive 5.9K downvotes as of the writing of this article.
And that negative fan reaction is by no means unique to this video. Just perusing the past few weeks’ worth of uploads shows that nearly all of the uploads since the firing of Carano have been massively downvoted.
In case there was any doubt as to why viewers are downvoting these videos, the comments make it explicitly clear — it’s the firing of Gina Carano by Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy.
As if that’s not bad enough, the official Star Wars channel traffic is absolutely abysmal for the number of subscribers that the channel has.
With over 3.5 million subscribers, the channel pulls in less views than many unofficial channels that cover Star Wars news and have substantially fewer subscribers.
Our sister YouTube channel, Clownfish TV, manages to pull in almost as many daily views on YouTube as the official Star Wars YouTube channel with only a fraction of the subscribers.
It also appears that the official Star Wars YouTube channel has flatlined for new subscribers.
Clearly, the Gina Carano situation is having more of an impact on fan interest in Star Wars than Disney would like to admit.
In fact, it could be that Disney is looking at more long-term damage to the Star Wars franchise than there was after The Last Jedi. There really won’t be any way to know until we see how fans react to upcoming Disney+ series and more data starts rolling in regarding Star Wars merchandise sales, The High Republic and other initiatives.
But if I were a betting man, I’d wager that Disney has already squandered all of the goodwill it got back with the return of Luke Skywalker… and then some.
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.