[COLUMN] Simon Kinberg's Star Wars Trilogy Suggests that Disney Have Learned Nothing| by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Earlier this week, it was announced that Simon Kinberg had been hired by Lucasfilm to write and produce a new trilogy of Star Wars films. This is, to put it mildly, a very strange announcement.

This decision is peculiar on a number of different levels. Most superficially, Kinberg is a very strange choice. Kinberg has considerable experience in the genre and franchise space, but little of it suggests a safe pair of hands for a project like this. Most obviously, Kinberg was the architect of the depressing final years of Fox’s X-Men franchise, ghost-directing X-Men: Apocalypse and actually directing Dark Phoenix. Indeed, Kinberg owns the failure of Dark Phoenix, conceding, “That’s on me.”

That final film was Kinberg’s second failed adaptation of the beloved source material, as he co-wrote X-Men: The Last Stand. The Dark Phoenix Saga is easily the most iconic and influential X-Men comic ever published, it was described by Kinberg as “the most enduring story in the history of this very esteemed saga” and is on a very shortlist of the most important comics ever produced at Marvel, so it is quite something for a filmmaker to fumble the same ball twice.

However, even setting aside his handling of the X-Men franchise, Kinberg’s filmography doesn’t exactly instil confidence. His writing credits include Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four and the McG rom-com This Means War. He followed up his directorial debut on Dark Phoenix with The 355, a bland and generic spy caper that squandered an incredibly talented cast that included Oscar winners Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz and Lupita Nyong'o. Kinberg is hardly a visionary auteur.

Of course, a cynic might argue that this is the point. Kinberg is a writer and producer unlikely to burden his three potential Star Wars films with anything as gauche as a perspective or a sensibility. In this sense, he is perhaps in keeping with Disney’s stewardship of the brand over the past half-decade. Kinberg seems like the kind of creative who can be trusted to generate about seven hours of “content soup” that, like The Rise of Skywalker, will lack anything as trite as distinct identity.

However, even looking past the Simon Kinberg of it all, and accepting that he might be a perfectly reasonable choice given the aesthetic priorities of the larger corporation, there is still a lot to unpack about this announcement. Most obviously, there’s the hubris in announcing plans to make three Star Wars movies, given that Lucasfilm has really struggled to make a single Star Wars film since the end of The Rise of Skywalker.

The past few years have seen Disney announce and then roll back any number of big live action Star Wars feature films from talent like Kevin Feige and Damon Lindelof. Projects from filmmakers like Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins exist in some weird limbo, where they aren’t technically dead, but also aren’t exactly alive either. What is the film development equivalent of “edging?” Whatever it is, it seems to be exactly how Lucasfilm develops Star Wars projects.

To be fair, it seems like The Mandalorian and Grogu might actually make it to theatres. Still, the movie’s twin project – a film focusing on Rey (Daisy Ridley), also starring Idris Elba and written by Steven Knight – is unlikely to begin filming next year as scheduled. As such, the announcement that Disney will produce three consecutive Star Wars movies feels less like a promise of something that will actually materialize and more like a series of cancellations waiting to happen.

However, setting all of that aside, there is a more fundamental question to be asked. Even if Simon Kinberg were a good choice for this and even if somehow Lucasfilm can deliver three consecutive films without any of the problems that have beset their attempts to craft a theatrical follow-up to The Rise of Skywalker, would this be the right way to do it? Should Disney invest in making three Star Wars movies at the same time?

To be fair, there is a certain logic at play here. Like most decisions in Hollywood, this choice is very transparently reactionary. The studio has not landed on this course of action on its own merits, but instead as a direct response to past experience. In particular, the Star Wars sequels were very frequently criticized for not being planned in advance. The arc of the trilogy was not clearly defined or mapped out before JJ Abrams began working on The Force Awakens.

Except this fundamentally misunderstands the problem with the later Disney Star Wars films, as tends to happen in internet discourse when personal opinion gets conflated with demonstrable reality. It is true that Disney’s management of the Star Wars brand has been disappointing, but the issue has nothing to do with the extent to which the sequel trilogy was mapped out in advance. That’s a red herring, which fundamentally misunderstands the underlying problem.

To put it simply: the problem isn’t the trilogy itself, the problem is The Rise of Skywalker. After all, the first two instalments of the sequel trilogy were incredibly well-received. Both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were the highest-grossing movies of their years (2015 and 2017). Both movies garnered rave reviews and an “A” CinemaScore. Of course, there was a vocal online backlash against The Last Jedi – which became a weird culture war artifact – but those were both massive successes.

To any objective observer, the wheels came off the cart with Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Rise of Skywalker. Solo debuted to muted reviews and a lower “A-” CinemaScore, and collapsed at the box office. The Rise of Skywalker was the first film in the sequel trilogy not to top the annual box office, where it was outgrossed by the R-rated Joker, and earned both the worst reviews and the lowest CinemaScore in the live action franchise. This one-two punch was catastrophic.

It's difficult to overstate how much of the tarnished reputation of the sequel trilogy is down to the spectacular failure of The Rise of Skywalker. After all, the film’s one responsibility was to tie up the trilogy. However, the film’s problems are distinctly its own. It was not a satisfying pay-off to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, but that is not the movie’s most fundamental issue. It is a symptom of the more basic problem: The Rise of Skywalker was an awful movie.

The problem with both Solo and The Rise of Skywalker isn’t a lack of “grand vision” planning. If anything, those two films suffered from interference by forces with their eyes too keenly focused on the big picture rather than the quality of individual films. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were infamously pushed off Solo and replaced by professional “safe pair of hands” Ron Howard, to deliver a much more classical and traditional Star Wars movie.

The Rise of Skywalker had a similarly troubled production. Colin Trevorrow was announced as director of the project that would become The Rise of Skywalker in August 2015. He parted ways with the company in September 2017, despite having a fully developed script. While Trevorrow’s pitch was not perfect, throwing it out to start from scratch was a recipe for disaster, coupled with Carrie Fisher’s death and JJ Abrams’ desire for “a pendulum swing” directly against The Last Jedi.

In short, the bulk of the problems with Solo and The Rise of Skywalker stemmed from the studio’s desire to “protect” the brand rather than simply focusing on the priority of making the best possible movie. Lucasfilm’s plans for a functional franchise writer to map out a complete trilogy of films in advance aren’t a defense against the fatal flaws of Solo and The Rise of Skywalker. They arise from the same impulse. The priority should be to make a good movie, then another, and then one more.

After all, the original Star Wars trilogy was not mapped out in advance. George Lucas didn’t know what each of the individual films were going to be until he made them. Darth Vader (David Prowse, James Earl Jones) was not Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) father until late into drafting The Empire Strikes Back. The tease of another Jedi towards the climax of The Empire Strikes Back was meant to point to a new character, before Lucas retrofitted it to apply to Leia (Fisher) in Return of the Jedi.

More than that, Hollywood history is littered with evidence of the hubris of long-term planning. To paraphrase an old adage: “Studios plan and audiences laugh.” Who could forget the confidence with which Universal announced their starry Dark Universe cast? After all, just because there is a long-term plan, there is no guarantee that fans will actually like that plan, which will lead to trainwreck situations like Warner Bros.’ desperate attempts to change course on Zack Snyder’s Justice League in response to the reception to Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Justice League was doomed because the aggressive release schedule meant the studio was committed to Snyder’s take before audiences saw Batman v. Superman. The desire to release a sequel within two calendar years meant that production of one had to roll into the other. There was no “cool-off” time, no space in which the studio could take a moment to consider the direction and vision of the next film. The meter was already running. The same is true of The Rise of Skywalker.

In some ways, this is the culmination of a larger trend in modern franchise filmmaking, the tendency to treat these sorts of properties as episodes of a gigantic television shows rather than as individual films. It is, after all, revealing that the one theatrical Star Wars project on target is a streaming spin-off. Still, The Rise of Skywalker would probably have been a better film if Lucasfilm had bitten the bullet, pushed it back a year, hired a director with a clear vision and given them room to work.

It's very telling that Star Wars’ one unequivocal success over the past six years has been Andor, the show overseen by Tony Gilroy and which seems to exist almost by accident. Demonstrating the importance of creating space for spontaneity, Lucasfilm originally passed on Gilroy’s plans for the show, and only came back to him when their plans for an alternate version “fell apart.” Again, the key is to hire talented creatives, let them create, and develop what works.

Of course, this could work out beautifully. Kinberg’s Star Wars trilogy could move smoothly through production and be warmly embraced by fans. However, based on past experience, it really seems like Disney is planning to fail.