This piece will talk about Star Wars and the continued mismanagement of the once beloved franchise. As a lot of you will know I have written a cinema issues piece before about Star Wars and Kathleen Kennedy, but here I want to talk more about the upcoming Acolyte show and how the metrics show that what certain sections of Lucasfilm are trying to do won’t work.
So before we get into it a few disclaimers, firstly I think the shows and soon to be movies under John and Dave’s watchful eye have been mostly good bar Book of Bobba Fett¸ secondly the Acolyte may well be good I could be wrong about it. With that said let’s get into it.
Men and women alike for many decades have both liked Star Wars, however, in terms of traditional gender norms it was always seen as more of a boy brand, rightly or wrongly, than a girl brand. Personally, I think people can like what they like regardless of gender, but this was how the franchise was perceived. Anyway in recent years Disney has tried to make the brand into a girl brand with the idea that the male audience would stick around and they could grow the audience even more, and maybe in a sense they could have done this. However, rather than create new stories that had male and female strong characters in it that could encourage both sides of the audience to stick around new projects like the Acolyte don’t value or want the male audience around, so only focus on creating female characters with the idea that male fans have had it too good for too long. No doubt they will cry that this isn’t for male fans or call them ists and phobes as they often do, again because Lucasfilm wants to keep the male audience around, sarcasm.
Moreover, look at something like Madame Web that thought it could take its male audience for granted and went full force into the idea of tokenistic cynical female empowerment and then got closer to having women being fifty percent of the audience but at the same time lost a massive chunk of their male audience and bombed. If I ran Star Wars that would bother me, and I would know as the research suggests that most of my audience was male so I would question will this show work for them.
I am not saying that men can’t relate to female characters of course they can look at the popularity of Buffy but when you create a show that seems to be from the off, with how the creatives have spoken about it, being fairly antagonistic to a large part of your viewing audience, you can’t really be surprised when this does flop or underperform or just doesn’t get picked up for a second season.
What I want is for common sense to return, for the pendulum to swing back to the middle. You can make a show that is for everyone, that doesn’t have creatives that hate their audience and tells them this show isn’t for them, you can have a show that appeals to men and women, you don’t need to prioritise the female audience over the male audience you can do both. Why does it have to be one way or the other at the moment. You know why something like Dune did really well because it appealed to men and women, the director didn’t do an Instagram post in a car looking like he hasn’t shaved in a few too many years and tell fans that the film isn’t for them it is just for a small section of vocal activists on X who probably don’t even care about the IP.
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