The ‘Star Wars’ Sequel Trilogy Was Controversial Because It Did Something the Prequels Couldn’t
Star Wars is one of the biggest franchises in the entertainment industry, and for a good reason.
The movies resonate with different audiences for different reasons. Star Wars is the spectacle of war between darkness and light and the steps people are willing to take to fight for what’s right.
Before the release of the sequel trilogy, audiences had a sense of security, knowing what to expect. However, they were thrown off balance with the sequel trilogy‘s open-ended ending that allowed them to create their own stories. Find out why the sequel trilogy’s conclusion has created controversy.
George Lucas struggled to find a home for ‘Star Wars’
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When the show’s creator George Lucas first began developing Star Wars, he planned for the story to expand to more than three installments. Lucas tried to sell the show to various studios, including Disney, who now owns the show but failed.
According to CG Mag, studios didn’t understand the show’s story and found the storylines a bit too weird. Finally, after shopping around for a home for his masterpiece, Lucas landed a deal with 20th Century Fox, who reluctantly agreed to finance the film.
The deal limited Lucas to $150,000 for directing and writing as expectations about the show’s success were low. Lucas then cast several unknown actors at the time, such as Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill. Most of the cast hadn’t been in many productions before Star Wars.
However, after the first installment was released, Star Wars surpassed all expectations breaking the record for the highest-grossing movie in history. Star Wars surpassed a record that Jaws had held for two years, raking in more than $775 million in its theatrical run.
The sequel trilogy doesn’t hold up in many ways
The Star Wars prequels might not have had great CGI work, but their storylines undeniably held up as a complete piece from start to finish. When Disney acquired Lucas’s production company, they put Kathleen Kennedy in charge of ensuring the sequel trilogy was up to par with the rest of the franchise.
However, Kennedy and Lucas didn’t share the same singular vision, and so the sequel trilogy ended up being all over the place. The trilogy is full of inconsistencies in the storyline that a true Star Wars fan cannot overlook.
It also chooses to uphold nostalgia and overlooks logic as the prequels did. Anyone who has an in-depth knowledge of Star Wars knows that after the Rebels in Return Of The Jedi succeeded, the resistance should have risen from being a struggling militia.
The sequel has no character arcs, and it seemed as though the writers were making things up as they went. They set up the characters and the character arcs to disappear along the way. Some aspects of the show that were introduced seemed to have come from nowhere, and fans felt like the writers changed the Star Wars universe extensively.
The sequel trilogy did something the prequels didn’t do
The sequel trilogy has faced backlash over the years. A section of Reddit users seems to think that the sequel trilogy was controversial because it allowed people to create their own story from the open-ended finish. In the past, Star Wars had given fans an open-and-shut type of story where they knew what to expect, but, in the trilogy, fans were given a chance to create their scenarios.
Fans reasoned that the prequels were too predictable, and audiences knew what to expect when watching them. One fan on Reddit said, “we were in safe territory. I think what gets people about the ST is that it was open-ended. We’d all grown up imagining what came next, and I found myself in the theatre second-guessing or deciding where I would take the story if I was writing it. It was uncomfortable being in unfamiliar territory for the first time in a Star Wars film since 1983.”
