The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter: January 31, 2025
Will the last Rey New Jedi Order writer please turn off the lights
Hello there
Welcome back to the Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter. We’re in a little bit of a dead period for Star Wars, the post-show hangover if you will. But, we press on. This week, the Rey New Jedi Order movie gets yet another writer and there’s a little more info about just how many people watched The Acolyte. As always, I appreciate everyone sticking with me. Now, let’s get to it.
This Is Where The Fun Begins
A reminder that Star Wars is inherently political.
I’ve had this half-baked theory for a while now that with The Phantom Menace, Uncle George secretly wanted to write a political thriller like All The President’s Men, The Manchurian Candidate, or Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. These kind of movies were popular in the post-Vietnam, Watergate era of the 70’s. But George also knew that if there wasn’t some lightsaber duels and general Jedi nonsense, people would revolt.
The Rey New Jedi Order Movie Gets Another Scribbler
It’s been almost two years since the Rey movie was announced at Star Wars Celebration 2023. Since then, there still isn’t even a script. Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson were the first writers. After they left, Steven Knight got the job. But he’s been out as of last October. But now there’s yet another screenwriter attached, the latest to pick up the proverbial yellow lightsaber is George Nolfi. Nolfi is best known for writing Ocean’s 12 and writing The Bourne Ultimatum with Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy.
It’s tough to say just when we’re going to finally get the Rey movie. The article isn’t clear if Nolfi is going to start from scratch or if he’s going to work off of whatever the three writers before him have come up with. The movie is supposed to be set 15 years after the events of Rise of Skywalker. It’s been 5 years now since Episode IX. At the way things are going, it might actually be 15 years.
One other thing of note from the article:
Instead, the next Star Wars movie that will shoot will be the untitled project from director Shawn Levy. That one got a major boost by capturing the interest of Ryan Gosling, who is now in negotiations to star in it, as The Hollywood Reporter exclusively revealed this week.
Lucasfilm has confirmed 3 dates on their calendar for new Star Wars movies. May 22, 2026 is already reserved for The Mandalorian and Grogu. That leaves December 18, 2026 and December 17, 2027 as release dates. If the Shawn Levy movie is the next one to shoot, seems like there’s a decent chance it would get the December 2026 release date. Leaving December 2027 as the only remaining slot, as of right now. And there’s a lot of possible movies to fight it out over this date. You’ve got the Mandoverse movie, the Rey movie, and the James Mangold Dawn of the Jedi for starters. The first two seem to be probably be a little more likely to get the reserved dates. The Mandoverse movie because Dave Filoni isn’t going anywhere so there’s no worry about losing the writer and director. The Rey movie because Disney spent a lot of money on the Sequel Trilogy and wants to make fetch happen with Rey. I’m throwing in the Dawn of the Jedi movie simply because while details are scarce, it seems a little farther along than say Lando or Rogue Squadron.
There’s a lot of potential Star Wars movies floating around, and there are only so many release dates and only so much money to go around. It’s going to be interesting to see what actually gets made and when. I have this mental picture of all the writers/directors trying to impress Kathleen Kennedy and undermine each other to make sure their movie is the next one to get made.
Peeking Out at The Acolyte Like Darth Plagueis
Oh boy, we’re here to talk about The Acolyte.
I’m not saying this because I disliked The Acolyte, I’m on record both here at Death Star HR and in the real world saying that while The Acolyte wasn’t perfect, but it was easily the most daring Star Wars - in terms of challenging Star Wars orthodoxy - since The Last Jedi. Another Star Wars property with a disproportionate share of haters. It’s also worth mention it has the best lightsaber duel in all of the live action Disney movies or TV shows.
The conventional wisdom was The Acolyte got cancelled because simply not enough people were watching it. Well, there is also some less than conventional wisdom that The Acolyte was cancelled because it was WOKE but we’re not going to get into that. There is some truth to the conventional wisdom, the numbers weren’t always great. The show started strong and then when the infamous Lesbian Space Witch Coven episode happened, the ratings started to slip and that was the beginning of the end. When the Mouse said there wasn’t going to be a season 2, it seemingly justified the decision with a combination of cost and viewership numbers. Remember the scene in Fight Club where the Narrator explains his job? Yeah, it was kinda like that.
OK, it wasn’t worded quite like that. But close enough:
Disney remained silent about the cancellation until Alan Bergman - co-chair of Disney Entertainment, responsible for overseeing the company’s content creation and platforms - addressed it in an end-of-year review. "We were happy with our performance," he explained, "but it wasn’t where we needed it to be given the cost structure of that title, quite frankly, to go and make a season two. So that’s the reason why we didn’t do that."
It’s worth noting with the following that streaming numbers are notoriously unreliable. All the streaming services are very cagey with their numbers, so third party services like Luminate are what we the public have to go on. So from a certain point of view, the numbers weren’t great.
The show starts strong and slowly tapers off. I’m honestly surprised there was such a drop off for the finale. If you’ve watched the first 7 episodes, who really decides not to watch the finale? Anyway, so when the data was released this week showing that The Acolyte was the second most watched Disney+ show this year, it was viewed as vindication for the most vocal supporters of the show.
I’m am a little confused seeing The Mandalorian season 3 in there, considering the show ended summer of 2023. And while I certainly enjoyed season 3 of Mando, it wasn’t up to the standards of season 1 and season 2.
Anyway, while The Acolyte being #2 in minutes streamed is something of a redemption for it, the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
But their presence in the top 10 indicates something about the health of Disney+ as a streaming service, and it's not good. The Acolyte came second in a year in which Disney+ as a whole underperformed.
It's important to stress that Luminate believe pretty much every franchise struggled last year, not just Star Wars. Their own report points to the MCU, where Agatha All Along and Echo both underperformed when compared to other MCU TV shows (despite appearing in the top 10); meanwhile, Amazon's Rings of Power season 2 saw a 60% decrease in total minutes watched from the show's first season. Some are beginning to speculate that the age of franchises may well be drawing to a close.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily the age of franchises is drawing to a close, it may be (hopefully) the days of too many streaming options drawing to a close. For almost all their existence, the various streaming services have been money pits. It wasn’t until last year that they finally started showing a profit.
Macquarie analyst Tim Nollen categorized the improvements as "progress," but cautioned that even the streamers who have hit profitability don't have enough profits to generate significant margins. Most, with the obvious exception of Netflix, have hit just around breakeven.
If I had access to the World Between Worlds and could pop in and out of timelines, I’d go visit all the CEOs of the major networks and tell them “just put your new stuff on Hulu and license the rest to Netflix. It will save you a lot of headache.”
So what does this mean for The Acolyte possibly getting a season 2? In short, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Besides lower ratings, The Acolyte wasn’t cheap. What was originally a $180 million dollar budget ballooned up to $231 million. That works out to $28.75 million an episode. Yes, Andor had a budget of $250 million, but it was also 12 episodes long, versus 8 for The Acolyte, costing Disney just under $21 million per episode. Plus, Andor was a critical darling along with being loved by fans. If people are saying nice things about you, maybe the studio heads will overlook your price tag.
The other thing I’ve wondered about the streaming numbers, do they take into account people who wait until all the episodes are released and binge, instead of watching each episode weekly. I’m (obviously) one of those who watches every week. Partly so I can write about it here, partly because my internet brain doesn’t believe in delayed gratification.
Looking at this from a bigger picture, it seems the pendulum is swinging back to movies. I did a run down of all the new Star Wars projects a couple weeks ago. The only confirmed live-action Disney+ shows are Andor season 2 this year and Ahsoka season 2 next year. That’s it. Everything else is speculation or just Ewan McGregor and Temuera Morrison trying to will season 2 of their shows into existence through the power of positive thinking. Meanwhile there are way more Star Wars movies confirmed. Or at least they’re as confirmed as anything can be with Disney these days. Maybe we’ll see more animated Star Wars shows. The streaming numbers aren’t as high, but they’re a lot cheaper to make and there’s less pressure to deliver the big numbers. Disney knows the animated shows are for the Sickos, not the Normies.
This Day in Star Wars History
January 31st was a pretty busy day in the galaxy far, far away.
Eddie Bryne was born in 1911. He played General Willard in A New Hope, the guy who greets Leia when she finally makes it Yavin 4. Bryne had a long career in British film, A New Hope was his final live action role before his death.
Star Wars actor, voice actor, and writer Christian Simpson was born in 1973. Simpson got his start in Star Wars playing a Naboo starfighter pilot in The Phantom Menace. He went on do voice work in Rogue One, The Force Awakens (both movie and LEGO versions, and The Rise of Skywalker; along with contributing to StarWars.com. Not a bad gig.
The Special Edition of A New Hope was released in theaters on this day in 1997. Yes, I was there opening day. I’ve mentioned this a few times but if you’re in your mid 40’s like me, you were most likely too young to have seen the OT in the theaters but you’re too old to be a Prequel Kid. So the Special Editions were the first chance for a lot of us to see the OT on the big screen. Yes…Han shooting first was not great. But, overall the experience of getting to see the opening shot of the Star Destroyer going overhead outweighs any questionable CGI additions that Uncle George did.
The Expanded Universe novel Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn was published in hardback in 2006. The Outbound Flight Project was first referenced in the Thrawn Trilogy. This novel gives the background about Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and more on Thrawn’s pre-Empire days.
As I’ve mentioned before, the majority of the daily entries of Wookieepedia are comics being published. Usually I skip these since I don’t really read the comics, but I’ll mention this one. In 2023, the second printing of the Doctor Aphra Omnibus Vol 1 was released. I really need to get around to reading the Doctor Aphra books, I keep hearing good things.
From the Depths of Wookieepedia
I enjoy a good cult. I don’t want to be a member of one. Although, leading one certainly has some appeal to it.
This week we unearth the Cult of Varn. This one is old school, going all the way back to the Han Solo Adventurers series published in 1979 and 1980. And what exactly was the Cult of Varn? Kamarians who liked water.
When Han Solo and Chewbacca arrived on Kamar, they briefly ran a makeshift holotheater. Although their only feature was a dull documentary entitled Varn, World of Water, their business became quite popular. Solo did not realize that the Badlanders had formed a religion around his theater, and thus thought nothing of replacing Varn, World of Water with Love is Waiting. When the Kamarians rioted, Solo and Chewbacca were forced to flee in the Millennium Falcon.
To be clear, Han didn’t mean to start a cult. It just kind of happened. Thankfully, we had well, I’m not sure it was a happy ending but it was an ending. Remember in ROTJ when the Ewoks think C-3PO is a god? Han and Chewie got a little taste of that as well.
In the Cult of Varn's mythology, Varn became the paradise where good Badlanders would live in the afterlife. Han Solo was seen as "Solohan the Deceiver," a messenger of the gods who turned to evil, and was taken back to the heavens as punishment for his blasphemy. Chewbacca was viewed as a sinister, furry demon. Sonniod was revered as a good prophet who renounced his former friendship with Solohan—which was ironic, considering he was the one who brought Solo the replacement feature in the first place.
The books take place right before A New Hope. Tough break for Han to go from a messenger of the gods to a stuck up, scruffy looking nerfnerder.
News From the HoloNet
Star Wars‘ High Republic Is Ready to Take Its Final Bow
One of these days, or maybe years, I am going to get around to reading the High Republic.
‘Star Wars’ TV Is On a Hot Streak, But Does Lucasfilm Actually Know This?
I don’t believe they do.
‘Destiny 2’ Will Let You Be A Stormtrooper In Unprecedented ‘Star Wars’ Crossover
If you play as a Stormtrooper, does that mean you won’t be able shoot anyone?
Ryan Gosling in Talks to Star in ‘Star Wars’ Movie From Shawn Levy
I prefer my Ryan’s to be “Reynolds” instead of “Goslings.”
New STAR WARS Comic Book Seemingly Reveals That Darth Vader Returned To Tatooine To Murder Watto
Honestly, I’m kinda surprised he didn’t kill Watto in the movies. Anakin could have done it when he was there to murder all the Sandpeople. Let’s be honestly, Watto kinda deserved it.
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.
I do not think the "woke" discussion in media is very helpful because it pulls in so many different culture war elements that it ceases to be good literary or artistic criticism and becomes an argument about why you should vote for some political machine.
I do think it's helpful to discuss why so many of our beloved franchises are faltering because it is interesting to a lot of folks. Many of the franchises we grew up with, especially action/adventure franchises were inherently male coded. When these series were reinvented with women at the center or they inject a lot of critique about masculine culture it was a whiplash effect that rubbed many male fans the wrong way. These franchises never really developed the mass female box office or merchandise consumers they hoped (beyond what already existed) but they did invite a lot of political twitter commentary on the importance of representation in media.
This led to a worst of all words situation where you have a bunch of people that don't really consume the product commenting on the importance of the product while people that do consume it are told they are sexist/racist for being nostalgic about what they liked about these stories as younger people.
In the end, I think the biggest problem is just extremely uneven storytelling and a fundamental misunderstanding by business people about what the consumers actually wanted from these entertainment products. It is unfortunate that many good actors and underrepresented groups are having to take the fall for these bad decisions by the money people.
Anyway, that's my two cents. They should focus on telling good stories and stop trying to "develop" audiences through marketing triangulation and pandering.
George actually predicting the tariff-war of 2025 is wild