Today is Force Friday. Have you heard of it? Just kidding, of course you have. You're on the internet right now. Force Friday is a new quasi-holiday for nerds all about showcasing Star Wars toys. Actually, that's not quite right. Force Friday is a new quasi-holiday for businesses to sell nerds Star Wars toys, because apparently people aren't buying enough already. Never mind the presumable spike in sales around Christmas (which will increase more with the new feature-length Star Wars commercial set to release then), or on May the 4th. No, we need a new Star Wars day specifically about selling Star Wars toys to nerds who would buy it eventually just the same.
This is sort of the problem with modern mainstream nerd fandom though .We've become less fans and more a market than ever before. Sure, that's always been the case. That will always be the case. The very existence of the Star Wars extended universe - filled with comics and books and video games - tells the tale of how commercially viable Star Wars is, even when they're not making movies. After all, Star Wars is perhaps the biggest movie franchise in history, despite having only made six movies in the span of 38 years! How has it stayed relevant so long? More to the point, how has it stayed so financially successful?
Even more, there hasn't even been a good Star Wars movie in 35 years! Return of the Jedi is fine and fun, especially for children, but let's not pretend it's something it's not - and that's a "good movie." When The Phantom Menace released, people were struck with how dumb it was. Collectively, we probably liked it at that time more than we do now, but it was still widely considered a disappointment. Yet a few years later, we rushed out again to see yet another crappy Star Wars movie in Attack of the Clones which, on Rotten Tomatoes, indicates that 59% liked. And it grossed almost $340 million worldwide.
Then, of course, despite getting two disappointing (and frankly, crappy) movies, we did it again a few years later with Revenge of the Sith which grossed almost $470 million worldwide. It somehow has an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 65% liking it. Yes, it's the best reviewed and most liked of the prequels, but still pales in comparison to the original trilogy. Even Return of the Jedi - which has a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes - was liked by 95% in addition. And that wasn't even that good of a movie! (I still maintain the reason people were ok with Sith is that it was the darkest of the three. People often conflate darkness for maturity, and by default, quality. In reality, Sith was still a pretty bad movie that lacked any of the maturity - in themes or film making - that the darkest of the original trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, had.)
Here's the Rotten Tomatoes breakdown:
A New Hope - 94% fresh rating, 96% liked.
The Empire Strikes Back - 95% fresh rating, 97% liked
The Return of the Jedi - 79% fresh rating, 95% liked
The Phantom Menace - 57% fresh rating, 60% liked
Attack of the Clones - 67% fresh rating, 59% liked
Revenge of the Sith - 80% fresh rating, 65% liked
How can a film series that has objectively gotten worse and has been widely disdained and disliked still be this successful and financially viable? Well, it's because Star Wars nerds are nothing if not loyal. Sure, there hasn't been a legitimately good Star Wars movie since before most of us were born, but there were some great video games! And those books? Never mind that the books also turned to shit, but hey, they had a good run. For a long time, Star Wars books actually were pretty good and enjoyable. Eventually (and inevitably), the universe got so big and full of itself that it ultimately collapsed under its own bloated weight. Or alternatively, it stuck its head so far up its ass that it couldn't hit the side of a sandcrawler!
To be clear here, I actually am kind of excited for The Force Awakens. I am concerned it is going to go the route of Sith and take itself far too seriously for its own good, but that last trailer still looked like a lot of fun. And don't get me wrong: I love the original trilogy. Yes, even Jedi, which might very well be prequel-level stupid (even though it really hasn't aged well - it's a lot like Phantom Menace in many ways).
As a nerd though, I find all of this a bit problematic though. I didn't take to Star Wars because it was cool science fiction. I loved it because it was good science fiction. All those books and video games? Again, I didn't take to them because it was Star Wars, but rather because they were good. There still is good Star Wars stuff that gets made. Lest anyone accuse me of allowing nostalgia to take precedence in this argument, I'd point out that I've generally enjoyed most Star Wars video games (and let's be honest: Battlefront 3 is going to be awesome!) I enjoyed some of the comics for a little while. And I was reading some of the books into the early aughts. The Clone Wars television show was also quite good and enjoyable. And I have hope that the upcoming films will be good. No, I'm not just a grumpy old man who thinks things are just generally worse now than they were "back in my day."
This is the thing though: what other business or brand do you let get away with producing so much crap, and you actively reward them for it? I'm not even sure the Cult of Apple would let them get away with regularly producing crappy iPhones and iPods and iWhatevers for 15 years. Yet we as nerds just suck everything up. We buy everything. We reward poor creative decisions.
The recent events with the Fant4stic movie are a little hopeful. Word was that movie was terrible (and boy was it terrible), but no one went to see it. For a moment, we seemed to have learned our lesson. We've been burnt by bad Fantastic Four movies before, so we avoided the new one. Except Fantastic Four doesn't have nearly the same fanbase as something like Star Wars, or even other Marvel movie properties. How different would things have been if Fant4stic had the full backing of the Marvel Studios brand? Even Ant-Man did fairly well, grossing almost $200 million worldwide. (Though Ant-Man was actually a lot of fun, unlike Fant4stic, so it isn't exactly a fair comparison. However, it's hard to argue that as a property, Ant-Man has more name recognition than Fantastic Four.)
Warner Brothers seems hellbent on giving us joyless, pretentious comic book movies. They still haven't given us a good Superman movie in 37 movies, but they're going to making the same mistakes, and we're going to keep seeing it and rewarding them financially. Man of Steel wasn't the worst movie ever, and it even did some things well, but it lacked focus and general awareness of what it was doing. It suffered character and pacing issues and had so many plot holes that you'd think it was a New England street in the winter. And that did almost $300 million domestically.
Point being, on this day of acknowledging how easy we nerds are to market to: we seem to be very patient people. (Well, except when someone has a different opinion than we do, in which case we'll rage and harass and exclude.) Why did we become fans in the first place? Was it because something was just mindlessly "cool"? Or was it because we got good comics and watched good movies?
This nerd culture thing? It might as well be a cult or religion. We buy things almost mindlessly because it has the label of the thing we love, but we don't seem to care about the quality anymore. Disney is already planning a Star Wars movie every year for the next five or six years, and we haven't even gotten to see if the first one is any good. But ya know what? It doesn't matter. The Force Awakens could be complete garbage, and we'll still go out in droves to see Rogue One. And even if that is also garbage, we'll still rush to see Episode VIII. And even if that is garbage...et cetera, et cetera.
It's a bit frustrating to be a fan and to want legitimately good materials, but to see the primary focus is on selling toys and other marketing things. If everyone were honest, why do you think A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back were clearly the best Star Wars movies? Well, first, they're actually well written and directed movies. And second, they were the movies that seemed the least concerned with selling toys.
So on this Force Friday, buy whatever Star Wars toys you want. It's fine. Your money is what they're after, and little else actually matters. It isn't about quality, it's about sales. And you're doing the work for them.
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