The Death Star Human Resources Department: November 10, 2023
The hottest band in the galaxy, what's happening in the real world, and more
Hello there
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter. We’ve got the hottest band this side of Mos Eisley and then we get into a bunch of stuff happening in our galaxy that affects the galaxy far far away. I didn’t plan on spending so much time in the real world. I write this newsletter as my escape from the real world, but sometimes these things just happen.
As always, thank you for subscribing. If you like what I’m doing, please tell a Star Wars lover in your life there’s a guy out there with a grammatically questionable email newsletter they might like. Now, let’s get to it.
This Is Where The Fun Begins
From a galaxy far, far, away, deep in the heart of Texas, way down in the Rio Grande Valley, comes Iluzol, purveyors of the musical mashup you never knew you needed until now. Star Wars Cumbia. Just listen.
Seriously, how great is that? If that doesn’t bring a smile to your face this morning, I don’t know what will. Per the local NBC station, the band is a bunch of guys at University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley who started out playing just playing music together. One day while practicing, they decided to give the Imperial March a try.
“We were just playing regular music and practicing for the group when Abdiel had the spontaneous idea of just recording our first video which was the Star Wars Imperial Cumbia,” Cortez said.
After Garcia posted the Imperial Cumbia it received 931,000 views, 153,000 likes and 16,000 shares on TikTok.
Look, social media is almost always a giant stinking pile of bantha poodoo, but at the same time if it didn’t exist, the guys in Iluzol would just be a college band playing some Star Wars tunes to amuse themselves and their friends. Instead, they got a shoutout from the official Star Wars TikTok and some other opportunities.
Garcia said they have gotten requests to perform at three weddings and in Oklahoma City at an Airbase for Hispanic Heritage Month.
Iluzol has the chance to be bigger than Figrin D’an And The Modal Nodes, so play us out…
Two Sides of the Same Force Dyad
If you’re involved in any kind of online nerdery, there was a big cover story about Marvel in the latest issue of Variety. I would not say it was extremely damning for Marvel and Disney as a whole, but it certainly paints a picture of a brand and a studio that is struggling and doesn’t know how to fix it.
Marvel’s biggest problem right now is the real world problems of Jonathan Majors. Majors is facing an upcoming domestic violence trial in New York City that is scheduled to start the end of the month, along with a recently announced police investigation in London. He also plays Kang the Conqueror in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and was scheduled to be a main feature in the upcoming MCU phase.
The other problem is the MCU is people just aren’t engaging with and enjoying the movies and TV shows the way they used to.
There are signs that the flood of product is leading people to tune out. “I’m not prepared to call it a permanent fall. But based on the numbers that go with Marvel podcasts, Marvel-based articles, friends who do Marvel-based video coverage, all of these numbers are significantly down,” says Joanna Robinson, co-author of the New York Times bestseller “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” who is a writer and podcaster at The Ringer. “The quality is suffering. In 2019, at the peak, if you put ‘Marvel Studios’ in front of something, people were like, ‘Oh, that brand means quality.’ That association is no longer the case because there have been so many projects that felt half-baked and undercooked.”
If that doesn’t sound like our favorite galaxy far far away, I don’t know what does.
For Star Wars, the worst off-screen actor issue (at least that I’m aware of) they’ve had to deal with was Gina Carano’s shitposting, so there isn’t an equivalent to what Majors is accused of. But on the second point, that sure sounds familiar.
Almost every charge leveled against Marvel in the article can certainly be applied too Star Wars. The one that really hit me, and it’s something I touched on last week, was just the never ending firehouse of content. At some point, fatigue sets in.
However, the source of Marvel’s current troubles can be traced back to 2020. That’s when the COVID pandemic ushered in a mandate to help boost Disney’s stock price with an endless torrent of interconnected Marvel content for the studio’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. According to the plan, there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment.
But the ensuing tsunami of spandex proved to be too much of a good thing, and the demands of churning out so much programming taxed the Marvel apparatus. Moreover, the need to tease out an interwoven storyline over so many disparate shows, movies and platforms created a muddled narrative that baffled viewers.
“The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It’s possible,” says Wall Street analyst Eric Handler, who covers Disney. “The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs.”
Disney bought Star Wars nearly 11 years ago. Starting in 2015, we’ve five movies, one per year for five years. The movies were, to put it nicely, of varying degrees of quality. Disney started off hot with The Force Awakens and then peaked with Rogue One. As as I’ve said plenty of times I like The Last Jedi but it’s got some issues, it kind of drags in the middle, and it retrospect it should have been clear at that point Disney was just making up the Sequel Trilogy as they went along. The backlash from the “NO GIRLZ IN STAR WARS” crowd drowned out any legitimate critique of the movie.
Then we get to the last two movies. Solo, and The Rise of Skywalker. Starting off, Solo is really a better movie than it gets credit for. I like it more now than I did initially. There definitely some not very good moments, such as Han getting his last name. But overall it’s a good heist flick with a good cast and some nice twists. It’s debatable if the Star Wars fandom was really begging for a Han Solo origin story, but it’s what we got. The behind the scenes of Solo were a bit of a mess though. And then we got Rise of Skywalker, where the wheels fell off. I’m not sure it was ever confirmed, but it was pretty widely thought that Solo being a box office bomb1 caused Disney to shift the Star Wars Stories series from movie to TV.
Compared to Marvel, this isn’t a lot of movies. In the same time frame, 2015 - 2019, Marvel released 13 movies! Two each in 2015 and 2016. And then three each in 2017 - 2019. That’s a lot of movies. Even for the Marvel Sickos. I haven’t seen all of them or even a majority of them but just looking at a list, I know that there are some of the better regarded Marvel flicks, both by critics and fans.
The live action TV shows2 followed the same trajectory. You started out hot with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian. It was something new and different. It was a new story that you didn’t need to see all of The Clone Wars and Rebels to understand. Then again we started to see some cracks. Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi were a mixed bag. Good parts mixed with bad. Again it seems pretty clear that both series were originally going to be movies that got stretched into TV shows. Andor was a high point, but then we were back to the unevenness with season 3 of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Both shows had some great moments, and some that made you wonder what was going on and was anyone actually trying to put a show together. The last two shows mentioned also continued previous shows, in the case of Ahsoka it was season 5 of Rebels. Disney started the streaming era with the first season of The Mandalorian where you could watch and enjoy it with comparatively little Star Wars knowledge and the last show they did you needed a knowledge of a cartoon and the Mandoverse. Plus possible some books from the Expanded Universe if you really wanted to get into it.
Also, Book of Boba Fett has what ended up being the most ridiculous choice I can think of in the Mandoverse. No, not all the time spent on the Sand People3, no, not turning Boba Fett into some kind of aging, half-ass Don Corleone. Wasting Cad Bane was a poor choice but not what I’m going with. Instead it was turning the end of Book of Boba Fett into season 2.5 of The Mandalorian. Including an whole episode that’s just about Mando. You know which episode I’m talking about. We get a break from the Tatooine underworld action to check in on what old friend Din Djarin is up to. Then we get an even more head scratching episode where we learn that Grogu decides leave his Jedi training and go back to hanging out with Mando. With pop-ins from both Luke and Ahsoka. I don’t know how many people watched The Mandalorian but not Book of Boba Fett. But I can’t imagine if you skipped Book of Boba Fett and then turned on season 3 of The Mandalorian, only to see Mando and Grogu back together. That would certainly be a little confusing.
I have a solution, both for Star Wars and Marvel. It will never happen, but I believe it would help out both franchises. No one wants to hear it.
Stop. Hit the pause button. Take a break. Go touch grass.
At least from live action shows. You can still do animation and books and comics, the stuff the Sickos are into. But put new live action movies and TV shows on a 3 - 5 year pause. Give fans time to get caught up on everything. Give Disney time to get everyone involved on the same page with the stories. Do you want to continue the Mandoverse, go back to the Skywalker Saga,4 see what The High Republic looks like in live action, or maybe just maybe make a Knights of the Old Republic movie/series.5
Asking the content machine to pause is not likely6, I recognize that. Disney paid a lot of money for Star Wars. They’ve invested a lot of money in Disney+ and are losing both subscribers and money. The idea that Disney would stop producing movies and shows for two of their biggest properties when they are fighting for eyeballs in an ever increasing media landscape in quite frankly unimaginable. Just for even suggesting this, there’s a decent chance that Mickey Mouse is going to come to my house and beat me up, a la Mickey on South Park. But from a creative standpoint and to just give us Sickos a little bit of a breather, maybe a year or two off would be nice.
We’re Not Getting a Captain Marvel/Rey Crossover
Speaking of taking a breather and cutting back on movies, I guess, from a certain point of view, Disney is doing that with their seemingly arbitrary decisions on confirmed and then cancelling movies. The latest film to get cut down by the Inquisitor’s lightsaber was the unnamed Kevin Feige project.
Longtime Marvel boss Kevin Feige says the Star Wars movie he was supposed to make is no more. Entertainment Tonight asked Feige about it during the Las Vegas premiere of The Marvels, and he gave a definitively terse “no.”
I watched the video linked in the quote, you’ll have to click since you can’t embed X/Twitter links. “Definitively terse” is a pretty good way to describe his answer.
The announcement that Feige was making a Star Wars movie came over four years ago. No details were ever released other than that Feige supposedly had an actor in mind for the lead. Poor one out for that unnamed actor never getting an action figure of himself.
Netflix is Not a New Galaxy
Lots of stuff about what’s going on with Disney today. Not my intent, but we are in a bit of a lull for new material. As much as I might decry the never ending content machine over at the Mouse House, I do appreciate having new stuff to write about.
Can we all agree streaming sucks now? Way too many different services. All of them want to have their own exclusives that no one else can get. Old movies and TV shows jump from service to service depending on the contract at the time. And it always feels like you’ve got so many options but nothing ever looks interesting so all you do is re-watch The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia for the 27th time. Maybe you try to re-watch The X-Files but you just give up when you get to the later seasons with Robert Patrick. Or at least that’s what I do.
The other problem with streaming, besides the endless buffet of “meh” shows is that the studios are bad at it. They’re losing lots of money.
Netflix, with a considerable head start, is the only company to make a profit off of streaming. “For everyone else, it’s still dictated by linear TV,” said UBS analyst John Hodulik. “That’s a problem as the decline in customers accelerates and streaming is not a big enough opportunity to offset that.”
One idea could be just cut their losses and license everything back to Netflix. It sounds like Disney has even considered that. But don’t give up your Disney+ just yet. The Mouse is going keep the big guns close to the vest.
“We’ve actually been licensing content to Netflix and are going to continue to. We’re actually in discussion with them now about some opportunities, but I wouldn’t expect that we will license our core brands to them. Those are obviously competitive advantages for us and differentiators. Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars for instance, they are all doing very, very well on our platform and I don’t see why just to basically chase bucks we should do that when they are really really important building blocks to the current and future of our streaming business,” [Iger] said on the company’s Q4 investor call.
Looks like we’re going to have to wait a little while longer to add Star Wars and Marvel to Netflix’s endless scrolling option.
From the Depths of Wookieepedia
Random Wookieepedia entry from the comics today. We’ve got the Temple of Imperfect Repose. From the two part series of Star Wars: Purge: The Tyrant’s Fist, the temple in question on the planet Vaklin. It was a simple building, and the people of Vaklin would leave offerings in memories of the Jedi who had protected them for years.
Unfortunately, for the Jedi-lovers of Vaklin, it’s the age of the Empire and Ol’ Palpy isn’t fond of having a bunch of Jedi hanging around that could cause problems for him. Darth Vader is dispatched to Vaklin to cut down a local rebellion. Bombing the temple is part of his strategy. I always think the idea of the Jedi and the Sith as a religion is an interesting one. But again, that’s a topic for the real Sickos.
News From the HoloNet
SAG-AFTRA committee approves deal with studios to end historic strike
There’s still time to make Skeleton Crew happen in 2023!
The High Republic era enters Phase III
One of these days I’m finally going to start reading the High Republic books. One day.
Star Wars Officially Debunks The Most Horrific Return Of The Jedi Theory
I thought it was going to be the Ewoks are cannibals theory. Is that a fan theory? Or am I just making stuff up?
Anthony Daniels saved the Millennium Falcon from being destroyed
3PO did what Vader couldn’t. Catch the Millennium Falcon.
Dogue One: 12 "Star Wars" Dogs That Are One With The Force
Sure, it’s click bait. But it’s dogs wearing Star Wars costumes.
That’s it for this week. If you like what I’m doing, please subscribe. I’ll catch you next week, and may the Force be with you.
That made almost $400 million. Go figure.
We’re just discussing live action. Animation is for the sickos only.
Actually a cool idea. Just went on too long.
Please no. Let’s leave the Skywalkers a lone for a while
Yes please! Live action HK-47. Dare I dream?
It’s more likely Anakin learns to love sand than Disney putting on the brakes