I love Star Wars but some of the fans need a bit of perspective.
The fact that some think the TLJ is worse than prequels....seriously I just want to force anyone who says that to watch TPM again.
I'm trying very hard to not get into is TLJ good or bad, I think all the points made are wrong but I've had this argument so many times now I've just given up and just accept I like it a huge amount of people did as well but also a huge amount didn't for reasons I don't agree with (Apart from Canto Bite I've seen no one defend that sequence, but its notable for being the only part of the film I wasn't fully engaged).
I think the 'failings' (I fully expect IX to romp home in the box office like TFA and TLJ did) by Disney are as follows.
A misunderstanding of its core fan base, they applied the same thing Marvel where they didn't care about continuity outside of the film franchise (except Clone Wars which was still running) not realising the fandom behind the fanfic EU. Where as comic book fans are use continuity reshaping and retellings of the same story the hardcore SW had had one continuity. Just ditching the EU peeved a lot of fans but its understandable why they did it.
'Franchise fatigue', this is primarily Solo's fault but its release so soon after TLJ was ill judged. Coupled with a troubled production, an okay but not stellar film (it wasn't even divisive) just led to no one really interested. Its actually surprising how well Rogue One did. Marvel gets away with it by expecting smaller returns from its smallers outings like Any-Man and the Wasp but Rogue One gave unrealistic expectations that a Star Wars sticker was a license to print money.
Hiring JJ Abrams then Rian Johnson. Abrams is a hack without an original thought in his body his mystery box style of writing is inane he creates mysteries but doesn't want to explain it. this led to two of the biggest problems with TLJ that people complain about. First the decision to remove Luke from the movie meant Johnson had to answer the question what could of caused him to go into hiding whilst essentially the Empire rebuilt, whilst everybody has a diffrent opinion on what that answer may have been some vehemently hated Johnson's decision. The other is 'Who's Snoke?' bear in mind in original trilogy we didn't know anything about Palpatine, Johnson decided it was just uninteresting evil character, finished him off so he could develop Kylo Ren into a bad guy creating a more interesting fall to darkness than happened with Anakin. Most of Johnson's creative decisions (and theres a level to how many he really got to make) that people object to are a direct consequence of mysteries that the creator of them had no interest of solving himself so no direct answer was set up.
I think they ****** of the hardcore fans but I think the franchise is likely in rude health because they don't need those fans. It should be noted that only people I've seen ****** off in my everyday life are those who were heavilly into the EU everyone else seamed to love it.
But we'll see I don't think this will be course correction no more so than season 2 of Discovery was. Disney has had one failing so far with Solo and it was most likely due to hubris than backlash.
