Tag: Lucasfilm

The Radicalism of Stephen Colbert: Trying to kill off toxic masculinity as been very expensive and not worth it

There is a much deeper reason that the news about Stephen Colbert being taken off the air is such big news.  Or why ABC is re-thinking some of its daytime programming, such as The View.  There will be numerous television changes because many of these big production companies have been so committed to progressive causes that the financial impact of it is finally starting to catch up to them.  However, in everyday conversation, the real reasons for economic failures have been largely unexplored.  People know they are generally happy to hear that the Trump-hating Colbert is losing his late-night show, and that many of the other late-night hosts are in danger as well, because of the anti-Trump agenda.  Anti-Make America Great Again agenda points are not popular for good business.  And typically, CBS Studios, a division of Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, would not hesitate to donate $40 million to progressive political causes.  Which is what they are saying the show is losing per year.  It’s not about the money; it’s about the viability of the position.  Losing that much money by putting Stephen Colbert on television every night to attempt to destroy the Trump agenda is more or less a financial contribution to their political platform.  The problem for them is that they spent all that money and committed so many resources to it, yet they were unable to move the political needle at all.  Trump did not end up in jail, or bankrupt as radical liberals had fantasized about.  Instead, six months into his re-elected term, he is doing great, and there are no signs of him slowing down.  And he’s more popular than ever, which is breaking the back of the production companies and their commitment to communism that dates back to the fifties and sixties. 

I know quite a bit about all this as I have been discussing it for years.  For many people, it has been hard to connect the dots.  However, I hosted a major radio show on this topic, specifically centered on the release of the Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, where Disney killed the very popular character of Han Solo.  A friend of mine and I discussed the poor decision that Disney made in killing off the white hero Han Solo and replacing him with a DEI cast that nobody ever took to.  And now, ten years later, the things we said have turned out to be hauntingly accurate.  After that big, popular show, my friend received an offer to work at Disney for an excellent salary.  I always thought they did it to shut him up and get him off the air.  It is much easier to throw money at controversial voices to contain them somewhat.  My friend loved the Disney Company and hoped to improve it, so more power to him.  I told him there was no saving the company, but he had to try.  But the point of the matter is this: Disney didn’t need to kill off the original heroes of the Star Wars saga.  But they did it anyway, and they did it for purely political reasons.  That’s how radical the hatred in Hollywood is for the Make America Great Again movement, which was emerging openly as Disney was committing to these new Star Wars movies that had a DEI cast, and a killing off of the strongest character of them all, Han Solo, who was made popular by the very popular actor, Harrison Ford.

Now I’ve heard it all before.  People tell me that old Harrison Ford always wanted to kill off the character of Han Solo.  As an actor, he hears all the stories about toxic white masculinity, which he has made a lot of money over the years popularizing.  So, for him, to sacrifice one of his roles to the gods of progressivism is a logical choice.  And he has been saying for forty years that Han Solo should die in the Star Wars series.  However, George Lucas knew better, so they brought him back for The Return of the Jedi, and that character went on to become one of the biggest and most popular in the Star Wars brand.  If Han Solo is on the movie posters, people are excited for Star Wars and the toys that came from that series of movies.  But if the movie posters, as they turned out to be, were just diversity, equity, and inclusion characters, then the public was going to reject the offering.  And in that process, Disney killed the Star Wars brand forever.  I don’t think it will ever come back. The damage was so significant that they begged Harrison Ford to return and make an appearance in the last Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, but it was too late by then.  And Disney has not been making any more Star Wars movies because their DEI characters were being rejected left and right.  A similar controversy arose on The Mandalorian television show involving Gina Carano.  She turned out not to be a DEI hire, but a conservative fighter, and Disney tried to punish her for it, and it blew up in their faces in terrible ways.  We are seeing entertainment that is not intended to entertain, but rather to convey political messages through popular franchises, and it has turned out to be a disastrous business decision. 

So, the writing was already on the wall when Trump was re-elected, and Disney was already undergoing its assessment process.  They had to learn, as a large entertainment company, that their public would reject them if they did not produce content that they wanted.  Kathy Kennedy should have known better about the Han Solo character.  Her husband, Frank Marshell, should be able to help her understand it.  He produced all the Jurassic Park movies and was the German mechanic in the very popular Raiders of the Lost Ark movie, notably in the fight scene.  He’s not a progressive lunatic.  However, he and Kennedy are fans of Jimmy Buffett and music from that era, so they have a left-leaning side that certainly comes through in their movies.  Kathy, as a woman CEO, went completely DEI and began pushing for female directors and characters.  I mean, they killed off Han Solo, knowing he was the father figure of the series, and they gave his famous spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, to some girl that nobody knew, as if the public would just accept it.  And they never did.  And the franchise took a permanent hit that it will never recover from.  I tried to tell them.  My friend and I laid it all out on that now-famous radio show, so we know the Disney bigwigs heard it and offered us jobs afterwards.  I have had numerous companies offer me money to try to keep me quiet, essentially.  I don’t blame my friend for taking the money.  Many people do, and it can lead to a fulfilling life.  And that is essentially why nobody understands these kinds of things structurally.  But that’s what’s going on with Stephen Colbert, and many others that will follow.  The man-hating Hollywood has not been working, and if they want to survive at all, they will have to make adjustments because the consumer is the boss.  Not the studios, and they have had to learn some tough lessons, too late.  The ramifications of all those bad decisions are only now becoming well-known and prominent.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Only Way A New Indiana Jones Movie Would Be Successful: Consultants and corporate looters can’t copy success, it never works

There is a way to do it, to make more Indiana Jones movies.  There have been at least seven different people who have played Indiana Jones at some point in time, everyone from George Hall, to Corey Carrier, to Sean Patrick Flanery—even River Phoenix.  Then, of course, there are all the video games and commercial appearances where an Indiana Jones-like character is seen doing something, from amusement park rides and Coke commercials to cameos in other movies.  Unlike other franchise characters, however, Indiana Jones is different in that Harrison Ford created a particular kind of character with a timeline expectation that society will hold Disney to.  There is a nice period in the character’s timeline, from age 25 to 35, where a new actor who resembles Harrison Ford could tell all-new stories that the public would love.  Most of the best Indiana Jones movies take place within a specific 3-4 year timeline that centers on Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in the iconic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that revolutionized the way stories are told and movies are presented.  I personally think it was the best movie ever made and that changed the value of the character created for the public forever.  The chances of doing something like that again with the same character but a different actor is impossible. I think it’s possible to make more movies after seeing how Disney and Bethesda, the video game maker, produced the latest Indiana Jones video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  It was a great game and a lot of fun, and it didn’t try to “reboot” Indiana Jones; it respected the timeline that people had come to know and trust.  And many actors contributed to that effort, and those are the rules of engagement.  There is a lot of talk now, halfway through 2025, that Disney wants to reboot the Indiana Jones movies.  They own the property and want to make money from it.  However, there are rules they must follow; otherwise, they will cause all kinds of social problems, just as they did with the Star Wars movies.  If they want Indiana Jones to remain valuable to the public, they’ll listen and stay respectful.

But if they think they are going to retell Raiders of the Lost Ark with a woke actor like Pedro Pascal, or even a woman, then they are out of their minds, and another Indiana Jones movie would be a disaster.  Indiana Jones is not something that can be ruined in the way that studios often do with Batman movies or James Bond stories.  There has been over 40 years of story telling from books, television, comics, video games that for that entire time held to a stringent canon timeline, and that trust has been built across many generations of fans, from kids today to their grandparents who saw the movies in the theater when they were kids.  I love the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, Florida, the stunt show that has been performed for years at Hollywood Studios. It has featured several different actors portraying Indiana Jones in that stage play.  However, the difference was that all content creators were very respectful of the original idea.  During the period I mentioned, numerous exciting stories could be told about a younger Indiana Jones as he establishes his excellent and famous reputation, which people would love to see depicted in movies.  However, those movies would require directors, producers, and musical talent as passionate about making the movies as were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Williams, originally.  Disney thought they would get away with a reboot of Star Wars by ignoring the story canon and essentially retelling A New Hope with The Force Awakens, and people have never forgiven them for it.  They might have made some short-term cash, but they destroyed the brand, and that has cost Disney a lot.  

This is important because the character of Indiana Jones has likely been the single most valuable narrative device that has advanced the arts and sciences in the world today.  There are many people who have become scientists because of Indiana Jones and the inspiration they received from him as children, which has been very beneficial.  The value of the Indiana Jones property lies in this social motivation.  And unless Disney respects that sentiment, it will harm them in very detrimental ways, and erode the character it currently holds socially.  Indiana Jones is more than just Harrison Ford, and unless a new production is presented with the same level of commitment as those original films were, it will be rejected at the box office, just as the Star Wars movies have been.  There is an arrogance that comes from the consultant class in society, who often con their way into the motion picture studios, never figuring these things out.  And those are the voices at Disney who think they could make a movie as good as the originals were, without understanding the social consequences of destroying the public’s love of the property.   The Indiana Jones timeline is unique in that it spans from his infancy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to his portrayal by a 93-94-year-old man with an eye patch.  Within that timeline, there is room to make movies just as exciting as Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the stories deal with the post-college years.  However, suppose they recast and retell the stories for modern audiences with music by different composers, cinematography that fails to capture the spirit, and scripts that don’t adhere to the formula. In that case, the project will be a disaster.

I think Disney should leave it all alone and let it be what it is.  They’ll make more money off Indiana Jones if they allow it to stay valuable in people’s consciousness.  However, Disney is not filled with creative people; it is essentially run by consultants who choose to live by copying what they think is successful and trying to pass it off as their own.  And it never works well, and it certainly won’t work with Indiana Jones.  So, with all the talk about Disney developing another actor to play Indiana Jones in a new movie, I would advise them to proceed with great caution.  I’d see the film if they were respectful to the established timeline.  But if they want to put a minority character in the role instead of a white guy, and change elements of Indiana Jones for a more modern audience, then it will be a disaster.  And I’m only writing this now in the hope of keeping them from making that big mistake.  But I don’t have much faith that they’ll listen, and will destroy this as they have so many other things in life, and the impact of that in the world is very significant. It matters more than people think it does; we’re talking about the way that humans create reality for themselves through story and narrative devices, and Indiana Jones emerged as a necessity for human consciousness that was more than entertaining.  Disney has been warned, so we’ll see what they do.  I’d like to see it work.  I think there is an actor out there who could carry the torch of Indiana Jones during an exciting period that audiences would accept.  However, short of that, it would be best to leave it alone, as the social impact of changing the value with new content would be devastating in ways that most people cannot measure.  What I have said is the only way that it could be done because all other methods would be very destructive and unnecessary. People are pretty forgiving as long as they know they can trust a story not to change on them. And that’s true with everything in life. People can come and go, but people want to know that the story stays the same.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Individuals Beat Corporations Every Time: Why success happens

This could apply to anything, but studying why some movies released at the theater are better than others is critical because of how the movie business works.  People get together and tell a story, and the value of that story is released to the public for them to vote on.  People tend to think of Hollywood as very glamorous, but in truth, very few people who work in the industry ever get to be a part of an extraordinary success, a ratio even less than in other fields of endeavor.  So it is always interesting to understand why some people put together a string of hits, such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, along with producer Howard Kazanjian.  An even more important example is the role that George Lucas’ first wife, Marcia Lucas, played in some of the most memorable and good movies of all time.  Also, why did a small, family-owned company like Lucasfilm lose its magic once it became a corporate conglomerate under Disney?  All this was in a fabulous book called ‘A Producer’s Life,’ which was about the life and times of Howard Kasanjian, who produced several of the Star Wars movies and the start of the Indiana Jones franchise, among other classic films like Cool Hand Luke, The Wild Bunch, and working with Alfred Hitchcock.  This book caused much stir when it first came out because Marcia Lucas was just as upset about Disney killing off Han Solo as I was for many political reasons.  That was just another example of how corporations that use processes to isolate individual contributions produce products in the world that are not as desired by the market.  In the case of the new Star Wars movies, the belief was that the film itself held all the magic and that a girl could replace a character like Han Solo to accommodate all kinds of woke rules wrapped around the axil of globalism. However, the Disney people never understood Star Wars, and this book had the opinions of someone who was very close to Star Wars, who was the key to their success initially. 

The book came out in 2021, right in the middle of the Covid monstrosity, and Biden had just been inserted into the White House, so I wasn’t in the mood to think about movies.  But I promised myself that if Trump returned to the White House, I’d get the book, take a bit of a vacation, and allow myself to think about some fun things.  For me, these are some of the most fun things, and they show how entertainment impacts culture as a whole.  And when it comes to those movies, Indiana Jones and Star Wars, few people have put together the kind of hits as filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.  The corporate belief is that just anybody can make a good movie or a good anything if only enough money is spent on the project, and in film, typically, the industry attracts all the same kind of sharks looking for an easy dollar as Wall Street does.  But few of them, if anybody, understands what makes hits and misses in the marketplace.  I have always wondered why George Lucas was so good from 1975 to 1982.  After that period, George Lucas wasn’t very good at all.  He may have been interesting, but he had lost his touch, and I always thought it probably had something to do with his wife, Marcia. 

There were two good Star Wars movies, and then everything fell off the rails with Return of the Jedi.  The movies were self-funded and only distributed through 20th Century Fox.  George Lucas hated corporate filmmaking; he wanted to make independent films from a family-driven company.  This allowed someone like the film editor, his wife, Marcia Lucas, to put her personal touches all over those early movies, which were key to their successes.  Something Disney and all its resources today don’t have is that personal touch.  During Return of the Jedi, Marcia and George divorced, and she ran off with the stained glass window guy working on their Skywalker Ranch.  That sounds kind of cheap and stupid, but George Lucas was working hard at the time to maintain his independence from the studio system, so he was putting all the pressure on himself.  This is another reason why those family-made movies were so good.  It wasn’t the board of directors or BlackRock assets making the decisions; it was George Lucas.  But it drove a wedge between him and his wife, and he never recovered.  Neither did she.  They should have stuck it out, but that’s history now, and the results tell quite a story.  Because she worked with her husband, Marcia knew how to get the best out of the coverage shots he provided as a director and could make a story pop on the screen that resonated with audiences.  You have to be an excellent person to produce good work, which gets lost in all corporations: those individual contributions.  For instance, if SpaceX lost Elon Musk, the company would fail quickly.  We always see it in sports: a star player carries a franchise.  As the saying goes, there is no “I” in team, but there is in win.  Teams are not values, they are places where people can hide so they don’t have to deal with the pressure of taking on too much responsibility.

One time, when the character of Indiana Jones was being created, Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas designed the character before principal photography, and they were all talking about giving Indiana Jones some flaws that the audience could relate to, such as making him smoke and drink too much.  But as she often did with many of those early Lucasfilm movies, Marcia stepped in and gave her opinion that was critical to the effort’s success.  Keep in mind that these three moviemakers were some of the best of the best in the business. But it took George Lucas’ wife to point out the obvious.  She told them this was a kid’s movie and they couldn’t have Indiana Jones drinking and smoking.  He’ll lose all his charm, which they didn’t understand then.  But George listened to his wife, as usual, and the character became one of the most beloved in all movie history.  They are still trying to make money off Indiana Jones, with Disney running the studio.  But they don’t understand the character because they don’t have someone like Marcia Lucas in the editing room polishing everything up.  They have access to tens of thousands of talented filmmaking types, but very few understand the subtlety of success and failure.  Without question, Marcia Lucas, as a high-quality individual, made those early movies better.  She also made Lucas, Spielberg, and Harrison Ford better.  Better than any of them would ever be again once she was no longer a part of their lives.  After the divorce, it went all downhill from there.  They still made good movies, but they had all lost their touch, never to duplicate it again.  And no matter what business we’re talking about, that same kind of ratio applies.  Corporations often don’t get it; they mimic what made them great and hope nobody notices.  But to become great in the first place, there is always some charismatic individual, or a collection of them, who come together and make magic happen.  And without those individuals, no process in the world can promise success, purposefully or by accident.  Family-owned businesses are some of the best ways to achieve that success, and Lucasfilm was a family-owned business in those early days.  Once they became a corporate conglomerate, they could no longer make magic, and the brands they were associated with died in the court of public opinion. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Downfall of the Girl Boss: The Market serves the public, not the other way around

If anybody doubted the intention, history would never remember it better than in movies’ ridiculous concept of the “Girl Boss.”  One of the first things I did after the election results showed President Trump losing in 2020 to the dumb old man, Joe Biden, was to read to the public the 45 Planks of Communism from Cleon Skousen’s great book, The Naked Communist, where it was clearly stated, communists intended to infiltrate America and impose their view of the world through captured assets, such as both political parties, and the media.  The proof that had happened wasn’t just in the obvious election fraud that had put Joe Biden in office, but it has been in how foolish the entertainment industry had been with their “Girl Boss” concept, with feminism gone out of control without any market checks to keep it from making a fool of itself.  Once you understand the stupidity of the Girl Boss, a lot of things make sense, and the world becomes more accessible to explain.  It’s also why the pendulum is swinging so violently in the other direction now, and likely all the dumb ideas that the communists who infiltrated our American culture had, are being rejected so outrageously.  The Girl Boss was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  The entertainment industry, particularly film and television, thought that people loved their product so much that they’d consume anything given to them which is clearly not the case.  There are a lot of movie studios that will not survive this stupidity, particularly the big one in Disney.  But it goes to show just how radical, politically, the people running those companies were, and what a mistake it would become because they all had to learn an important lesson, which is unfolding now, and it really evolves into the power of capitalism over the dark forces of communism.  When other countries in the world complain about them being poor, it’s because they adopted too much socialism and communism into their cultures and not enough capitalism.   Being poor is a decision, and if people understood it better, they would have never come up with the dumb idea of the Girl Boss in movies, which is currently destroying Disney in spectacularly avoidable ways, yet they did it anyway. 

Much of this came to the surface due to the Elon Musk lawsuit he is supporting with Gina Carano against Disney for unlawful termination of her contract.  Gina was a famous actor in the Star Wars show on Disney+ called The Mandalorian and was part of the initiative to put more strong women into Star Wars, as outlined by Kathy Kennedy.  But humans are humans, and upon meeting Gina, the CEO of Lucasfilm immediately disliked Carano, likely because she was cute and imposing in person, as a former fighter in MMA.  Insecure women in positions of power are dangerous, as are men in the same state.  But with women, it’s a bit different because with them, their sexual roles in society are to be pollinated, not to pollinate, so there are always insecurities about the men in their lives finding them attractive enough to pollinate.  And when someone like Gina walks into a room, even though Lucasfilm under Disney wanted to promote women in the workplace, they didn’t have women like Gina in mind.  They wanted homely women who were not a threat to their households, women their husbands wouldn’t be looking at with ideas of pollination.  So things started badly for Gina Carano with the boss, Kathy Kennedy, right from the start, and it only got worse once the boss found out that Gina was a conservative. 

So, a conservative in Hollywood, especially a woman, was a big no, no so Disney proceeded to push Gina out of the marketplace and essentially ruin her as an actress to send a message to other actresses that if they wanted to work, they needed to be socialists and they should not look too attractive so to threaten all these insecure movie executives who were now suddenly in charge and directing all these movies and television shows.  The worst example of this in the Star Wars franchise was the character of Rose from The Last Jedi, a movie that was worse than even Barbarella as far as a science fiction movie that tried to put feminism as its central theme and drive the audience to accept it at all cost.  I used to make fun of the Rose character to my kids because I said that Star Wars as a market share would suffer because nobody would buy the Rose action figure.  She was cast as a chunky Asian girl who would certainly not be a threat to anybody’s husbands, and somehow, everyone thought this was a winning enterprise.  Instead, it killed the franchise, as seen spectacularly in the following years as the Target toy racks tried to sell Rose at a discount and couldn’t unload the merchandise.  And it wasn’t just Rose, but it was all Star Wars toys that suffered as a result, leaving the toy maker Hasbro with warehouses of merchandise they couldn’t ever hope to sell because of the bad decisions of the feminists to stick all these Girl Bosses in movies, killed the collector’s market, and Star Wars as a brand was destroyed.  That’s why they can’t make Star Wars movies anymore.

For more than 40 years, Star Wars managed to protect its marketplace brand until Disney came along and screwed it all up with political activism, essentially until that movie, The Last Jedi.  After that, the toy presence of Star Wars disappeared in Walmart and Target, which is a significant market indicator for other kinds of things, particularly along the lines of political sentiment.  As if it had been previously doubted, the entertainment industry would not survive as a propaganda arm for communism, which was the assumption.  Like all other market factors, the market had to serve the needs of the public, not the other way around.  Star Wars would not be used to convert people to feminist thoughts. Instead, people would reject the entire brand, just as they have with Bud Light and the Marvel movie franchise.  Men and women don’t want political propaganda; they’d rather have Superman fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, not some crybaby like Brie Larson in Captain Marvel throwing planets and beating up men nine times bigger than she is and standing over them like a Girl Boss.  The public, men, and women, want what they can relate to and think about favorably, and the Girl Boss was something neither one of them wanted.  And because Disney forced it on them, the public has rejected the product and moved on to other things.  And that doesn’t just hurt the film industry, but it hurts everything it touches, like the theater owners, toy makers, and even restaurants.  When people would sit at home and instead stream the latest episode of The Chosen rather than go to the movies and watch the latest Girl Boss movie, then even dining out is impacted by the decision.  That is the unsaid cost of communism when it is attempted to impose it on society rather than studying market fulfillment and how best to give the audience what it wants.  When it was assumed that the communists were in charge of the propaganda machine and that the public would be forced to obey them, the market reality was crushing for them.  And they have ruined the lives of many people in that assumption.  But the world has moved on.  What has failed are the fools who listened to them, to begin with.  Everyone tried to warn them, but they brought out the Girl Boss anyway, which history will still be laughing at thousands of years from now.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

It’s Not the Fault of Indiana Jones: Disney listened to BlackRock and they’ll never recover

Indiana Jones is a great movie, but Disney mismanaged it by listening to the wrong people

One of the reasons I do these articles on this blog is because people are hungry for real information. Not the kind that the media has grown to give us, usually laced as propaganda to fulfill some NWO vision of centralized control using the China model of communism to determine reality. And there is something really menacing looming behind the various box office results that I say all the time are the ways that people vote for value in our culture. The Sound of Freedom movie is a category by itself, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s room for all these great movies that are suddenly coming out. But the way that the communist left has gained control of the marketplace is by placing the number 1 weekly horse race to movies, all in an effort to make or break their box office results. It’s a baked-in trick by the World Economic Forum types and their media apparatus to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas with the illusion of industry reporting. And I say that as a guy who has read The Hollywood Reporter for three decades. I used to get the magazine version of that publication as an industry guide of great value. So I am quite aware of the switch to this new way of manipulating numbers to tell the kind of story that the financial controllers of communist activism want to tell. And a target early on was the new Indiana Jones movie, The Dial of Destiny. The WEF types wanted to see Disney kill off one of the great American heroes from the 1980s. Early screenings showed that the public didn’t like that. So Disney had to scramble to give the public the ending they wanted, which went against the desires of the BlackRocks of the world. And as a result, Bob Iger and the gang at Disney found themselves between a rock and a hard place with snakes and spikes in between to kill them with a thousand cuts.

See the problem. Even with inflation, this cost structure is ridiculous and not sustainable.

When I look at the box office numbers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I see a pretty good movie that performs well day to day, even on weekdays. It’s consistently good with the other movies that were done in the 1980s, back in a time when those movies stayed at the movie theater for most of a year. But these days, with movies barely staying in a movie theater for more than 60 days, a film has to have a lot of pop on the front, most of this due to failures of liberalism. The movies are controlled by labor unions who want inflated budgets with unlimited money spent. And if a studio complies, they are rewarded with good press that will take them close to a good box office score. Disney got caught trying to appease everyone, including BlackRock, and they made everyone mad with a movie that had its budget out of control. If George Lucas was producing this Indiana Jones film, he would have kept the budget under 100 million, or he wouldn’t have made the picture. Kathy Kennedy let the budget spike up to around 300 million before advertising. So the standard is the problem, and the controllers expect to rule the marketplace. And Disney has damaged their own brand, so anti-Disney people started campaigning against this Indiana Jones movie several years ago. Then there was the political agenda from BlackRock and Vanguard about replacing Indiana Jones with a woman and killing off the Western hero for global communism. Disney picked the fans for its own survival, and the industry pounced, writing many negative articles against Indiana Jones, hoping to sink the film and punish the studio for not complying with the globalism mandate. 

Ultimately, this Indiana Jones film will be well respected and could have been financially successful if Disney had managed the budget. But it got out of control, and they thought they could spin it into a billion-dollar grosser. But without the support of the industry analysts, who are communist in most of their approaches to everything, the World Economic Forum activists worked overtime to ensure that it would never get there. They would have talked the movie up if Disney had killed off Indiana Jones. But they resorted to punishing the movie because it was a good hero story with a classic character living to see a happy ending. That was a good move for Disney in the long run because Indiana Jones will be around longer than the World Economic Forum. I’m not sure that Disney will make it. I’m telling people to go to the parks now while they are still there because I don’t think Disney will survive what they’ve done to themselves, which they are now the Bud Light of entertainment. When people think of Disney, they no longer think of Mickey Mouse but woke monsters who want to groom children. And once you lose that brand, it’s gone forever in this climate. They played the game wrong, and now it’s going to cost them.   They fixed the Indiana Jones movie in time to save it. But they should have done the same to themselves several years ago instead of committing to the World Economic Forum’s woke agenda of gender desecration, which started to become evident with the killing of Han Solo and that terrible Buzz Lightyear movie. 

It’s not an Indiana Jones problem; over the coming year, most people will watch the movie and like it, whether at the theater or at home on a streaming service. It’s a good family movie, but it’s too late for a course correction by Disney to save it at the box office. Because Disney is having problems everywhere. People are rejecting them as a company. That doesn’t mean that they’ll never have another billion-dollar film again. But they have lost permanent market share because of their woke commitment. And now their woke bosses at BlackRock are punishing them in the trades if they don’t stay committed to the continued desecration of American heroes. So the news isn’t good for Indiana Jones, but it’s not because the movie is bad. But there are undoubtedly many bad characters who are politically motivated on both sides, and Disney mismanaged the whole thing to their detriment. The lesson for everyone is not to pick against the audience, not to feed the everlasting hunger of the trade unions with inflated budgets, and to never align yourself with global activism against good stories and heroes who stand against evil. This is why I said it was a bad idea for Bob Iger to come back. I don’t know what he was thinking about taking a job that was bound to be a loser. There was no way to fix this Disney problem. And instead of being viewed as a pretty good CEO over his years, he’ll be remembered as the guy who let it all fall apart. But the truth is, this started a long time ago when the board started listening to global activists for communism and bending their films toward the China market. All that was a mistake that is showing itself at the box office. And it has nothing to do with Indiana Jones as a movie. If anything, people are supporting the movie more than they otherwise would. The problem is Disney, and I’m afraid that it’s a condition that will never correct itself.  

Rich Hoffman

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My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

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They Killed James Bond: A warning to us all that nobody escapes from progressives

They Killed James Bond

Studios were surprised in Hollywood when the new James Bond film No Time To Die didn’t blow the doors off the box office over its opening weekend.  Like every other underperforming fool these days, they wanted to blame Covid, which governments created to commit election fraud, not that they killed James Bond in the movie.  Who thought that was a good idea?  After 60 years of narrow escapes, they found a way and a time for James Bond to die at the end of No Time To Die. They probably should have taken their own advice given to them in the title. It was just another disappointment that we are all getting used to strong, white, male characters that progressives think they can kill in stories and replace them with women or people of color for the sake of the visual aspects of things and that people would accept it.  Over the last two years, as we have waited for this movie to come out, the rumors of the next James Bond being a woman, a gay guy, or all kinds of other things have been discussed openly.  When the movie finally opened, enough people had enough.  It leaked out that this Daniel Craig James Bond was going to die, and people weren’t exactly in a rush to see it happen.  It’s not enough to make a technically good movie; James Bond is one of those special cases where he’s a hero who always gets away, like Bugs Bunny.  But then again, Bugs Bunny is pretty much banned these days too.  Any strong characters without obvious flaws in the mind of progressives are a danger to their politics, so they look to get rid of them and replace them with flawed, mortal characters who are easy to control by the government. 

This isn’t unique to the Bond film franchise.  I have written many hundreds of thousands of words about the failure of Disney to handle the Star Wars franchise.  It was astonishing that given all the great resources they had in Star Wars left to them by George Lucas, that they screwed it up so badly.  Yet when I saw The Force Awakens back in 2015, it was clear that when they decided to kill Han Solo, the plan was the same as Bond.  Kill off Anglo-Saxon white men in the public’s minds so their rule over mankind will end, starting with stories.  Then replace them with people of color and women, and make them like it.  That was essentially the goal of the new Star Wars films, and people rejected them so severely that the brand is now permanently damaged.  Disney has a new CEO who has been brought in to fix things.  Lucasfilm is also moving people around who like Star Wars to repair the brand, which will take years if possible.  I think they’ll make things better, but the damage is already set.  Some things you can’t tamper with.  If a character has a special place in people’s minds, you better treat them well and not take them for granted.  Otherwise, don’t expect to use them to drive box office results while at the same time appeasing all the anti-capitalist radicals who have infiltrated leftist thinking for communist domination of the world. 

Star Wars is an easy one to see because it’s so obvious.  As big of a company as they are, Disney never understood why people liked the film franchise.  Some of the plotlines they have introduced then rejected over the last several years indicate that Kathy Kennedy never understood why the films she was invited to produce worked, like the Indiana Jones films and all the Steven Spielberg projects she was a part of.  Because she thought she could interfere with what the public liked and that as long as space creatures and spaceships were flying around, that people would buy a ticket to her liberal propaganda.  Well, as it turns out, that’s not how things work.  People want heroes they can believe in.  People worth watching who manage to outsmart the bad guys. That’s why people buy a movie ticket.  Reality is tough enough.  When people enter a darkened theater, they want to see hope. 

I think movie box office results are some of the best votings there are.  People truly vote with their feet.  It’s not easy for Democrats to cheat the vote because they still can’t control what people like.  Ultimately people decide what they like and see and if they don’t want to see James Bond getting killed.  Then they won’t see it happen.  They might catch the movie on cable later, but they aren’t going to pay money to see it happen.  One of the clear political strategies that China has in mind for America and all the Davos insurgents is to rob our culture of hopes and dreams and instead show that even James Bond eventually gets it in the end.  Filmmakers seem to want to praise those types of people at cocktail parties rather than being blamed for being just another capitalist producer who put profits over the party.  The ultimate check on that power is to reject those films at the box office, which happened with the new James Bond film.  They killed Bond.  And the box office reflects that people didn’t want to see it happen. Just as Disney killed off Han Solo and thought they could replace him with some Dora the Explorer character, and they’d still make money.

Yet to continue to hide these things from the public, every time they get caught, Covid is used to hide the incompetence of the participants.  No Time To Die was supposed to be released in early April of 2020.  It has had its release date pushed back many times, finally hitting theaters in October of 2021, really at a terrible time for a Bond film.  This is what the Great Reset looks like, folks.  Incompetent people release their movies that used to be valuable to the public.  The public forgets about them and moves on to other things, and when the results don’t come out the way stakeholders expect, well then, they blame Covid.  Ultimately, governments have interfered with the marketplace, and the bootlickers have wasted more time appeasing them than actually trying to make a movie people want to see.  The governments are the new audience to appease, not the popcorn-eating public, and these projects are flat and boring.   And coming out of a disappointing time when governments tried to completely take over our healthcare with a made-up crisis in Covid, built in a Wuhan lab in China by Dr. Fauci NIH funding, movie producers are trying to take away anything that might be considered good in our movies and entertainment.  Their message to us is, “see, even James Bond gets it in the end.  Not even he can escape our power.” It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any of us, given what we have seen from authority figures in 2021.  The bad guys wrote this latest James Bond film as propaganda for the future they want to control.  That understanding makes me proud to see that people didn’t get suckered into it and decided to stay home.  No Time To Die didn’t come up short at the box office because of Covid.  People are starving for reasons to get out of the house.  They aren’t scared of the virus.  No, they don’t want to see one more icon of western civilization killed in front of their faces, which was the intention of the woke James Bond of this modern age.  People voted in a way that Democrats couldn’t steal, and it shows in the box office ultimately. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Looters of the Lost Art: Hollywood has forgotten how to make an Indiana Jones film

The movie Raider’s of the Lost Ark turned 40 as of June 12th, 2021, and I have to say, it has been one of the most impactful films ever produced.  Not just for me, but science in general.  More happened well in science as a result of that movie than anything ever has done for any field of endeavor.  But it’s a shame; even this movie has come under criticism from wokeness, as I talk about in the video above.  Back in the 80s, they made three Indiana Jones films in 10 years.  Then it took over 20 years to make another one.  Then since Disney bought the franchise under the roof of Lucasfilm, even with all the money and talent in the world, they can’t get a script that everyone likes that is woke enough for modern Hollywood.  We went from a culture that made great movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark then to not to do anything close with no prospects on the horizon in such a short period.  And that is because of wokeness.  I will have to say that Indiana Jones 5 did start shooting this week in London.  It took a long time to get there, and I don’t have high hopes for it.  But you never know. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Angry White Males are Sinking Disney: A bad decision to go to war with half the population over politically progressive ideas

Even if it doesn’t impact you directly dear reader, the civil war at the middle of the Star Wars debate is at the center of the most important aspects of all our lives. As everyone knows by now, the latest Star Wars movie did dreadfully bad at the box office. Solo: A Star Wars Story I thought was one of the best Star Wars movies, if not the very best one, but the fan base was and remains impossibly split on the topic and the brand has taken a hit that I don’t think it will ever recover from. That is very sad, because of all the good potential that there has been over Star Wars. I of course still enjoy it, likely for me that is mostly because of my grandchildren. I have been willing to overlook a lot of the progressive stuff that are now in the films because I wanted to be able to share those stories with my grandchildren. But with Solo: A Star Wars Story being out in the theaters for almost a month now, and its global box office hasn’t even hit $400 million yet, it’s quite obvious that the battle lines have been drawn and the brand of Star Wars has lost its power and that is really bad for retailers like Target, Wal-Mart and Hasbro who have invested heavily in the franchise, but it’s ultimately a killer for Disney who bought Lucasfilm in 2012 only to do what many fans feared would happen, and that was to ruin it for everyone.

Long time readers here might recall the radio broadcasts I did back in 2015 where all this was predicted. Star Wars was never supposed to be a vehicle of progressive ideas, it was always a hot rod version of the space cowboy values of Flash Gordon. There were a lot of white male characters in the story because those were the types of actors who were easy to get on a shoe string budget and everyone made the most of it. While the original films were about ultimately the tyranny of government over individuals which is something all political sides could agree on, the scope of the entertainment enterprise was haughty enough to avoid getting too complicated with details. The target audience was young males 6-12 years of age and the formula worked. It was popular because dads could share the experience with sons and there was enough fun there for the girls if they wanted to come along and make the whole thing a good family event. But Disney and Lucasfilm together sought from the very beginning to change Star Wars into the very toxic realm of identity politics where girls took over the role of males and people of color were purposely inserted into the storylines with an activist intention directed to Star Wars fans that they would accept those types of things or they simply wouldn’t get anymore Star Wars, almost like a parental figure bribing a kid to be quiet or they wouldn’t get any chicken nuggets from a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

The big mistake Star Wars made under the Disney ownership was that they joined in the progressive attack against angry white males and specifically the value that males bring to the world. We are living in an age where boys and men are literally attacked all the time over everything, and many of them are sick of it. The election of Donald Trump has been a boomerang effect that many never counted on, but guess what, men make up half of the global population. Attacking them is probably going to have an impact on the bottom line of any business because once men get the idea that they are being punished for something, they are going to take it personally, and that is exactly what has happened to Star Wars. Girls are girls, they really don’t care about fighting and wars, they have concerns about procreation and being nurturing figures. They aren’t the people who supported Star Wars, they often went along because they were interested in the boys who were interested in Star Wars. Disney’s biggest mistake was in thinking that if they centered the Star Wars films on women that the boys would stick around for the space ships, and that is not what happened at all. The boys and men have just rejected it all together, and by the time that Lucasfilm realized the error and tried to correct it with Solo: A Star Wars Story, it was too late.

I feel bad for Kelly Marie Tran who played the most divisive role in any Star Wars film with Rose in The Last Jedi. (See my article titled, Blame Fat Asian Chicks) for my take on her role in killing Star Wars. It’s not her fault personally, she was put into that role by the producers and the effect was just explosively negative. This past week she has had to remove herself from social media because of all the harassment she is getting which has then led to many of the Star Wars alums defending her which really has only made the situation worse because it keeps feeding the narrative. And now that Solo: A Star Wars Story has lost so much money, there is even more anger at those “angry white men” who simply didn’t go to the theater to see the Disney product—the potential loses here are in the billions of dollars, which is exactly where I warned Disney they didn’t want to be if they stayed on their progressive path as indicated way back in 2012 and 2013. People would not support Star Wars if it went from a story of hope for anyone no matter what sex or color and turned into an “anybody but white males” extravaganza of pointless resistance. The metaphor for The Last Jedi couldn’t be more girlish—all the great men are dead, Han Solo and Luke specifically, and the whole movie is about women in charge running out of gas only to turn the ship around at the end and kill themselves with a big human sacrifice. At least three of the main female characters in the movie sacrificed themselves in the movie for really no other reason than they were being outmatched and dominated by their male counterparts and that was not an exciting message to inspire audiences to spend vast amounts of money on the experience. The Rose character was dropped into the Star Wars story to obviously appeal to people who weren’t Barbie doll beautiful, which is always a concern with square hipped middle-aged women on their last few eggs who feel like their best years of attracting the pollen of a hungry young bee are behind them, so they become angry political activists who start hating men not for what they are, but because those men are no longer interested in them sexually. This progressive radicalism starts to become all they see in everything, and that’s why The Last Jedi happened, and completely divided up the fan base. It’s one thing to allow those emotions to govern your life, it’s quite another when they get mixed up in a multibillion dollar franchise that has the lives of lots of people attached to it. People like Kelly Marie Tran get caught in the crossfire which really wasn’t fair to them, but it is what it is.

This is important because it’s the most obvious sign of things to come in the war between progressivism and traditional white men—and males in general. The desire to turn men into something other than what they are has backfired in the worst way for Disney and they’ve taken something that could have been really wonderful and turned it into a mess. While Bob Iger did a great job setting the table for his company of Disney and the shareholders assumed that he and everyone else knew what they were doing, they made a fatal mistake—they assumed that Star Wars could hold all these progressive messages and that the franchise would still make a billion dollars a picture. Instead they have put themselves on the front end of the down turning progressive movement, and I say down turning because the Donald Trump presidency is changing the nature of politics and the Disney Company is on the outside of that change. Disney instead of truly being an all-inclusive company has chosen to go after the Starbucks type of crowd believing they were the future and they did so at the expense of the Chick-fil-A crowd who are filled with those crazy religious angry white males. But those are also the same people who grow up and have families with expendable income who will spend $10,000 on a Disney vacation in one of their theme parks. And now that doesn’t look to be the case. The Starbucks people are bums, people who loaf around and want things for free, they won’t be dropping millions of dollars on the new Star Wars Land at Disney World. And now because of their actions at putting progressive activism into the new Star Wars movies, the angry white guys who do like to eat at Chick-fil-A, who voted for Donald Trump, and who are typically the type of people who get and hold jobs won’t be participating, and that is bad, bad news for Disney. A terrible miscalculation on their part, which I tried to warn them against. But they didn’t listen, until it was too late.

Rich Hoffman
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The Box Office Trouble for ‘Solo’ is Not the Movie’s Fault: Free advice to Disney on how to proceed forward–I just want it to work

I’d like to thank Disney and Lucasfilm for making the new Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story. I am very sorry that financially it didn’t work out the way they needed it to. It was a bold film for them to make in these highly politically charged times and I’m amazed by the product that ended up on the screen. I’ve seen it many times now and after taking some of the emotion out of it, I think it’s the best Star Wars movie to date. It’s certainly in my top ten movies of all time. Part of that is that Han Solo is my favorite character but a lot of it is that it is a wonderful anthology film put together at a breakneck pace that was very positive. The characters are fun, the scenarios entertaining and the scope of it is just jaw dropping. Its science fiction and adventure on a top-tier level and is on par with the first two Indiana Jones films from back in the 1980s. I think the movie will go a long way to repairing the Star Wars brand which was severely damaged by The Last Jedi which came out just 5 months prior. I hope that Disney still gives Lucasfilm the latitude to continue making Star Wars films—because they are valuable. Solo: A Star Wars Story may have fallen short of expectations financially, but I think in the long run will prove to be one of the most important. It may have taken everyone three prior films to find their footing, but they certainly did—unfortunately the fan base was already damaged which played a major part in the poor financial outing of this latest movie.

The hatred and rebellion that many fans showed toward Disney and Lucasfilm prior to the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story is complicated and filled with many contemporary minefields that are specific to our times. I knew what was going on during the second weekend of the film’s release when Forbes, The Hollywood Reporter and Vanity Fair all did hit pieces on Solo: A Star Wars Story about the weekend box office take before anybody really had a chance to get to the theater. Clearly, they were trying to shape the story as the media picked up and created a narrative that actually contributed to low ticket sales. Many people who I talked to on Saturday June 2nd who had not yet seen the film told me they hadn’t gone because they heard the movie wasn’t very good and was struggling financially, so they were holding out for Jurassic World or seeing The Avengers again. I was thinking that this situation was very much an Ellsworth Toohey moment from the great American novel, The Fountainhead. It didn’t matter how good Solo: A Star Wars Story was, critics intended to torpedo the film due to their own political activism and it was having an impact. People who might otherwise want to see the film weren’t going because they got caught up in the narrative created by the entertainment press that was using the power of their media to instigate more Star Wars films without “white” heroes in them and more gay characters focused on diversity, not unrealistic adolescent popcorn action sequences.

Even with all that against it, a movie like this can still make a billion dollars at the box office, but Solo: A Star Wars Story unfortunately was the victim of a massive rebellion of fan wrath that I was afraid was going to happen. If Solo: A Star Wars Story had come out in December of 2017 and The Last Jedi had come out this past May 25th, the fan base might have been aligned more than it was. But as it stood, the fan base for Star Wars was split and a percentage of fans just were not going to see Solo no matter how much they wanted to. That in itself was complicated as there are many cultural trends locked up in that protest intention—for instance the belief that big companies like Disney should not be in the movie making business to make a profit. But if the real roots of the narrative were explored there was a very legitimate fan complaint that Disney had ejected the previous expanded universe of Star Wars and had stuffed the new era films with political activism that just didn’t fit.

Politics has always been a part of Star Wars, but the vantage point has always been on the big scale. For instance, the Empire was always reminiscent of Nazi Germany and most everyone going to the movies could agree that Hitler and the Nazis were evil. However, these days not even the filmmakers at Disney and Lucasfilm can agree on what a Nazi is. To liberal filmmakers like Jon Kasden and the director Ron Howard, Nazis are Trump Republicans while Republicans from the flyover states see the Empire as the tenants of liberalism. George Soros is the ultimate Emperor in the eyes of the Midwest so there is already a divide in the fan base that was exacerbated by the filmmakers due to their liberal activism, such as Jon Kasden, the writer of Solo: A Star Wars Story letting it leak ahead of the film’s release that the character of Lando was pansexual. I understand why he said what he did—he was looking for a way to appeal to the liberal critics and get better reviews on the Rotten Tomato meter—which didn’t work. But it was worth a shot, I can’t blame him. Then Ron Howard Tweeted nearly the same day a bunch of anti-Trump information that fed into the story of Solo: A Star Wars Story, that the Empire was like the United States and taking over domestic planets against their will. In the Han Solo film, the political activism wasn’t nearly as bad as it was in The Last Jedi, but it was there certainly as a distraction, something that just wasn’t done back in the days of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Once the makers of Star Wars allowed it to be known that they were all liberals, they turned off half the American nation to their product and if the Americans weren’t going to support such a movie then the oversea markets certainly weren’t going to give it a chance.

Then there are the fans who just wanted to protest this film by denying it support. They are angry, and I understand it. I was one of those guys after The Force Awakens. I took a whole year off Star Wars and it was only about a month before Rogue One was released that I decided to give the movie a chance, and it was good and did win my approval. So I decided to give The Last Jedi a chance, which I thought was good enough to enjoy. It’s my least favorite Star Wars movie by far, but it was worth the attention. Solo: A Star Wars Story however won me back. I felt that Lucasfilm and Disney went well out of their way to win back fans, but for many it came too late. So Disney is going to have to keep listening and work hard to build back the fan base. They did for me with Solo, hopefully they stick with it and give people the films they want, not the political activism that they think the fans will just take so they can get a Star Wars fix—which is what I think Kathy Kennedy got caught doing. She and many of the top executives at Disney thought that Star Wars fans would put up with gay characters, progressive plot points, and the complete eradication of 30 years of books and comics just so they could get another Star Wars movie and that turned out not to be the case. Many people just didn’t even give Solo: A Star Wars Story a chance, they were intent from the beginning to protest the film to force Disney to make executive level decisions about the entire franchise.

If I were Disney I would let Lucasfilm make more films like Solo: A Star Wars Story. I’d set a budget cap at a $150 million and force the filmmakers to stay under it. I wouldn’t let any Star Wars film go up over $200 million assuming that the movies will make over a billion dollars each. That may not be the case even when the fans come back to Star Wars, I’d keep the projects down to something reasonable and focus on rebuilding the franchise, because the nostalgia factor is no longer there. It’s time to make movies that make history not ones that remember it. Solo: A Star Wars Story had both elements in it, and if Disney made more movies like it, the fan base would expand, not contract. But its going to take time, I just hope they have the patience to follow through on it. Three Star Wars movies a year with budgets of $150 million each and a box office take of $500 million each globally would do a lot more for the franchise than one movie a year that makes a billion. It’s just simple math, but the fans need to be fed. If Disney is smart, they’ll give the fans what they want, and then everyone can be happy. Solo: A Star Wars Story was certainly a step in the right direction. The fans will agree once the politics of the moment drift into history. But not until then.

Rich Hoffman