Posted in: Disney+, Movies, Star Wars, TV | Tagged: Ahsoka, asajj ventress, disney, lucasfilm, star wars, Star Wars: The Acolyte

Star Wars: The Key to Franchise's Future? More Anti-Heroes & Big Bads

Lucasfilm would be wise to look more to the Dark Side for the Star Wars franchise's future - and why The Acolyte seems like a good start.

It's hard to believe it's been 11 years since Disney acquired Lucasfilm for Star Wars and 14 since the acquisition of Marvel. The dreams of universe-building seem like a blur considering how it's built both empires. It's been fun rides as films kept building up hero after hero and certain auxiliary characters get their own films and/or series. As we learned since the pandemic in more recent years, the fanfare has slowed considerably on both franchises with a mix of underwhelming output and burnout. There's also a deluge of fans who will never be satisfied with the output as more characters get introduced in this ongoing worldbuilding. While it's hard to pinpoint every single issue in the franchise, here's a look at how the franchise creatively is burning out its audience.

Star Wars Should Embrace Darker, Morally Ambiguous Characters

It's easier to attribute the flameout of the Star Wars franchise theatrically to the vitriol from the final two films of the Skywalker Saga in 2017's The Last Jedi and 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. It's a fact that no single Star Wars film will ever be universally beloved without question. There was a fan video that felt the need to "improve" upon the Alec Guinness and David Prowse fight from A New Hope (1977) because of how dramatically different the fight choreography has grown over the years. It's hard not to be a cynical bastard since fans will have the eras they grew up in they'll be fiercely loyal to and show some level of context in objectivity. There ARE cringeworthy lines in EVERY Star Wars film. There was the promise of standalone films with 2016's Rogue One, which also led to the critically acclaimed Andor on Disney+. You wouldn't really know it from the lack of fanfare. Unfortunately, any further momentum of standalone films in the immediate future was dashed with the underwhelming performance of 2018's Solo. It wasn't great, but it was hardly terrible enough not to invest another story in, given how much of the franchise's popularity was helped early in its history. Now the leftover announced films are in development hell, and some projects even dropped.

Now we turn to Ahsoka, which acts as a sequel to Dave Filoni's animated Star Wars shows The Clone Wars and Rebels, a live-action venture to continue the character now played by Rosario Dawson. It was effective for what it was, but all it did was play it safe, and safe doesn't get many people talking since all it did was retcon the ending of Rebels trading Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) and Ezra (Iman Esfandi) in place of Ahsoka and Sabine (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). We also had an Obi-Wan Kenobi standalone series with Ewan McGregor returning, a lackluster 80 percent of a season of The Book of Boba Fett that shared episodes with The Mandalorian and season three of The Mandalorian, which had no other major story to tell than letting Din (Pedro Pascal) and Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff) on a quest of restored honor to mixed results.

Aside from the existing animated shows, I'm looking forward to The Acolyte because for far too long, the Light side has owned the monopoly on storytelling even as the lines between good and evil have blurred over the years with the ongoing moral cracks from the Jedi and the New Republic shown. Perhaps, we do need more stories with depth and nuance. At the very least, introduce more anti-heroes into the franchise to lead a series as we've explored more morally ambiguous characters like Saw Gerrera or perhaps a redemption story of Asajj Ventress from Filoni's animated-verse or Maul in the Crimson Dawn. I'd even take another smuggler-centric story that focused on another character like Hondo Ohnaka. I'd go one step further, MA-rating, which they're already doing with Echo, and take bolder steps like Marvel has as they're also bringing back characters like Deadpool and Punisher for Daredevil.

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