It’s Sunday afternoon, and as I understand it, there’s going to be some spectacular sporting event taking place today. I haven’t followed American football this season, so I have no idea who is playing. I think I heard that the 49ers were plagued with injuries, so they’re not in it. If you’ve got big plans for the big game, I hope they go well!

There are about ten of us at a coffee shop for Shut Up and Write, and as has become my pattern, I’m starting this writing session with a light and breezy blog post. I have a complicated idea in mind. Let’s see if I can get the words out in the right order, so that they make sense and don’t get people too upset with me.

This all starts with an observation I made at work. My boss, who is about the same age as I am, likes to use movies and media as touchstones. But he’s my age. Often, the younger folk on our team have no knowledge of his references, which frustrates both my boss and the younger people alike.

“How can they not have seen these classics?” my boss will say.

“Because these ‘classics’ were released years before they were born,” I reply.

One day, I landed on this short which explained the gulf between my boss and my younger teammates.

It really highlights the differences in the way we consume media. Growing up, I had to either adhere to a schedule for the broadcasts, or miss episodes. There were years between releases of movies, and there wasn’t an internet to go to for finding communities based around these franchises.

I’m not saying this is better. It’s just different than today. I like that I can go to reddit and find people that are eager to talk about the same games or media that I’m into. I like that, if I want to watch an old show, I can find a streaming service and watch it again with older, generally wiser eyes. I really like that I’m no longer bound to a network’s schedule when I want to watch a show.

On the other hand, we have lost something when it comes to how we engage with different stories in a franchise. Fandoms are toxic. There is a level of expectation and entitlement with these so-called fans that is not healthy for the art or the stories.

Furthermore, there is more nostalgia bait than ever before, which further pollutes storytelling.

When you put it all together, I think we no longer live in a culture where franchises are particularly healthy or good. I think franchises should die and make room for new experiences with less baggage.

Let’s re-examine a couple of big franchises, starting with Star Wars. The problem is not how much the storytelling has changed, but the culture into which these stories are released.

The original Star Wars captivated the imaginations of a few generations and became a cultural touchpoint all on its own. It changed what SciFi could look like. It changed everything.

Years after the release of the original, The Empire Strikes Back pushed the envelope a little bit further. It may surprise you to learn that the actual initial reaction was not great. Fans at the time were not into Luke losing a hand, or the rebellion losing, or Darth Vader being Luke’s father. There were many that thought Luke and Leia should have been the romantic coupling, and not Leia and Han. There were fans with specific expectations about how the story should have played out, and their expectations were subverted.

We didn’t have multipage think-pieces dropped digitally into the inboxes of fans, collecting rage around how terrible this sequel was. We had some SciFi-hating critics post nasty reviews, but viewers at the time easily ignored that, and were mostly unaware of the outcries of “fans” for what George Lucas had done with his universe.

Eventually, ESB became regarded as the best film of the franchise. People still say it’s the best, and that nothing compares to it. But if ESB had been released in the same sort of environment that The Last Jedi had been released, I promise that ESB would not have had the chance to become the classic it became, because the “fans” would have dominated the conversation and lambasted anyone that posted something about ESB being pretty good.

This isn’t to say that Lucas can do no wrong, or that the fans are never right. Lucas dropped tons of stinkers. The Christmas episode. The Ewok made-for-TV movies. Many of these Star Wars projects are forgotten, because the audience at the time ignored them. They weren’t good, and we moved on. We still had the original trilogy. We enjoyed the good and ignored the bad.

The idea of canon was not so sacred. It was more vibes than anything, and we didn’t have to be told that the Ewoks stuff didn’t count.

The prequels hit screens around the time that fandom had found its voice and footing on the internet, and it’s when we really started to see criticism not just from critics, but from the fans themselves.

It was a weird time. We were getting new Star Wars, which we always want. But George Lucas sucks at dialog. This was true as far back as Mark Hamill’s casting, and the bad dialog was on full display throughout the prequels.

On the other hand, we had some of the best lightsaber duels we’ve ever seen. The original Star Wars broke ground with what could be done with special effects, and the prequels continued that tradition. The prequels looked visually stunning, though the effects have not aged nearly as well as the originals.

Unfortunately, with all these fancy new effects and visuals, Lucas upstaged his actors in every scene with complicated backgrounds and weird action. It drew focus away from the things we should have been focusing on. That’s bad storytelling.

The prequels weren’t as bad as the Ewok stuff, but for the most part, they weren’t as good the original movies. The fans tore it apart. Much of the prequels are held in higher regard today, but the feedback pattern was set. Some of the feedback itself was held in higher regard than the movies being critiqued.

By the time we made it to the sequel trilogy, fandoms hardened their expectations, and any deviation from those plans were a sin. For the most part, The Force Awakens worked because it was a retread of A New Hope. The Last Jedi failed because it had some genuinely stupid parts in it, but it made the unforgiveable sin of doing something different, including humanizing Luke. And Rise of Skywalker pissed almost everyone off because it tried to please the fans without knowing how. It was just hot, liquid garbage from beginning to end.

I see fans blame Kathleen Kennedy for the fall of Star Wars. I wish I could hold up a mirror to them and show them who the real villains are.

Now, I’m seeing the same thing with Star Trek. Not all new Trek is good, but it’s not as bad as many make it out to be.

Like Star Wars, we have had terrible Star Trek from the very beginning. If not for Lucille Ball stepping in and saving the series from the very beginning, we wouldn’t have any of it today. There were great episodes of The Original Series, and there were many, many terrible ones. Same with Next Gen.

And the movies! The running joke, which had some truth to it, was that only the even numbered movies are any good.

The original motion picture was ambitious. It had terrible pacing issues, was confusing to many audience members, and — in my opinion — isn’t that good. It’s okay, and not great. I never have a hankering to rewatch The Original Motion Picture.

The Wrath of Kahn… really good! Idealized by fans a bit more than it deserves, probably. Talking to Star Trek “fans” they’ll tell you that The Wrath of Kahn is the best Star Trek movie and nothing else comes close, and I think that they really just like to say that without actually disengaging the nostalgia parts of their brain.

Try talking to those fans about Starfleet Academy and they’ll repeat talking points they read from somewhere else online. Maybe they’ll say something about swallowing a com badge.

I think it would be best for us all if these franchises just died, entirely. The companies that own them won’t let that happen, because they really, really like money. But these franchises are the connective tissue between two sets of terrible people.

First, there is the toxic fandoms that demand regurgitation of prechewed story bits. They insist on consuming what they’ve consumed before. Change is bad. The old is always better. These people will never be satisfied, and they are loud and intolerable.

Then there are profit-over-all-else executives that are all too happy to pull the arm of the nostalgia slot machine and see what happens. These are the business people that prioritize making money over making good art, and they tend to be cowards when it comes to trying something new.

Show runners and storytellers are caught in the middle. A good storyteller knows the power of subverting expectations. A good storyteller is looking for emotional throughlines, themes, and elements that expand on existing material, rather than remain constrained by the past.

Stories are about change. Characters change over time. They may revert back to some baseline, like comic book characters coming back to life, or healing grievous injuries, or having new life partners taken away from them. In between resets, the story is about how those characters handle adversity and change to meet the moment.

Stories are about the setup and the payoff. They should include elements that are both surprising and inevitable. They should have a beginning, middle, and end. They should make us feel something.

That brings us to the unfortunate feedback loop. A storyteller, working in a franchise, tries to tell a good story. They take a chance, swing for the fences, and see what happens. This could be in Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who… it doesn’t matter. They seize the opportunity and try something.

Because it is different, the fandom will reject it. They will say it breaks canon or something. They will criticize it for being different, and they will be loud about it. Loud enough that some cowardly execs will interfere and curtail the changes, disallowing the story from continuing in any unexpected direction. We cultivate stagnation. The next Empire Strikes Back is disallowed from happening.

For existing franchises to take a chance and make a change, the new thing has to be spectacular enough that it attracts an audience bigger than the existing fandom. But when was the last time something like that has happened for any of the franchises I mentioned 2 paragraphs ago?

I believe the larger audience desires new stories. That’s why the biggest movies of the summer a couple years ago (2023) were Barbie and Oppenheimer.

— One moment —

I paused to go look at box office numbers for the last couple of years. Barbie was #1 in 2023, with Oppenheimer coming in at #5. The rest of the years and top tens have mostly been sequels and franchise movies. Last year, the top ten were all franchise movies except for Sinners, coming in at #7.

I stand by what I said before, though. I think the audience is hungry for new stories. I also think the top ten looks the way it does because it’s what we’re getting fed.

That’s probably enough Old Man Yell’s At Cloud for the day. Let me know what you think. Should we just keep retreading the same old stories, or should we take more chances?