4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad

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Have you heard the news? After J.J. Abrams' Star Wars Episode VII: We're Using Goddamn Puppets, there will be a slew of new Star Wars films from such directors as Looper's Rian Johnson, Godzilla's Gareth Edwards, and Chronicle's Josh Trank. You know, directors with a track record of making generally entertaining science fiction movies! Isn't that good news?

Well, not exactly. Although we know next to nothing save some very basic facts about these upcoming films, this iota of information is more than enough to ascertain some extremely big conclusions. Namely, that these eagerly awaited future classics are pretty much fucked up from conception, not unlike the way some wizard bacteria got mad horny one day and knocked up Darth Vader's mom.

They're Imitating the Marvel Movies

Disney's new creative model -- that is, simply buying companies more creative than them -- has paid off huge with Marvel's Avengers franchise. So after snatching up Lucasfilm, it makes perfect sense that Disney wouldn't think twice about adopting the same model for Star Wars and plan "at least three" spinoff films to go with the new core trilogy starring Hollywood starlets Lupita Nyong'o and Max von Sydow.

And considering what we know of Disney's record with sequels -- see 2007's seminal Cinderella III: A Twist in Time -- it's safe to say some of those spinoffs will score at least one sequel, right? But there's a problem with that. Take a look at the Marvel universe:

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Marvel Comics

"HAIL MARVEL! Cut a franchise, and two more shall take its place!"

Sure, a bunch of those above superheroes are stuck in movie deals with Fox and Sony, but Marvel Studios nonetheless has access to stacks of decades-old main characters, each with gobs of secondary characters and villains. Now look at the Star Wars universe:

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Lucasfilm

The left side of this is pretty much worthless.

That's 23 faces, and four of them are the same character. Take away the redundancies and assorted Stormtrooper helmets, and we're down to a cast of 16 central and secondary characters total. Well, 17 characters, when you realize that poster is a racist.

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Lucasfilm

"This deal's getting worse all the time."

Our point is, after Lucasfilm threw out the 35 years of stories from books, comics, and TV shows in the Star Wars Expanded Universe -- much of which was admittedly garbage (more on that in a second) -- we're left with three plot options for the spinoff films:

1) Movies about established characters nobody cares about (e.g., Star Wars: The New Adventures of the Guy Who Carried the Ice Cream Machine on Bespin)

2) Movies about entirely new characters (one spinoff will be written by the guy who wrote After Earth, so interpret that as you will)

3) And finally, movies about established characters everybody knows and likes. What could go wrong with that?

They're Origin Stories (For Characters Who Don't Need It)

If there was ever a single smoking gun for the potential shittiness of these films, it's Disney's chief financial officer declaring them to be "origin stories." But there's another word for "origin stories" that Disney deliberately seems to be avoiding: "prequels." That's right -- the new Star Wars spinoffs will be prequels. Remember how awesome that worked out before?

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Lucasfilm

We could spend all day analyzing why the prequel films stank like Jabba the Hutt's bidet, but the undeniable truth is that they sucked because we didn't need them to exist.

Did we need to see, for three fucking films, how Darth Vader got bad? Obi-Wan explains it in one sentence in A New Hope. Was anybody desperate to know where C-3PO came from? Anyway, the names being tossed around for the prequel spinoffs are Boba Fett, Han Solo, and Yoda. This may sound awesome, but what exactly would we gain from seeing Han Solo become a scruffy-looking nerfherder? Isn't A New Hope already his origin story? As for Yoda, do we really want to see 150 minutes of him flipping around like a Muppet on meth?

"But what about Boba Fett's origin story?" you ask. To that we give you this image:

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Lucasfilm

"Hey, kid, do you at least want to take the head out before you start playing with that?"

Remember, the whole reason everyone loves Boba Fett is because he says EXACTLY FOUR LINES in the original films like a waste-no-words badass. Why in the world would we want to see him yapping through an entire movie?

The Studio Release Strategy Is Insane

The J.J. Abrams war of the stars hits theaters roughly 520 days from now, and will continue every two years until 2019, or 1,461 days after the first one. Every other year between that is when Disney plans to release the aforementioned spinoff films, meaning that in those 1,461 days, we'll be seeing five movies, topped off by a sixth in 2020 -- not to mention whatever sequels will inevitably follow. That's one film every 365 days for the next six years or, more likely, the rest of your waking life.

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Tom Pennington/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The episode titles are going to start looking like Super Bowls.

Now combine that with the fact that the spinoffs have also been described as stand-alone films having no character crossover with the numeral films and you see just how fucking confusing this is going to get. Consider that the original trilogy had three years between films. Hell, the prequels had two years between them.

And all you modern-day Star Wars fans? Get ready to see old Han Solo one year, only to witness him turn into young Han Solo the next, before going back to old Han Solo a year after that, or until Harrison Ford demands that Han die of a space heart attack off camera.

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Ian Gavan/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images


At this point, he belongs in a museum.

Statistically Speaking, the Movies Are Destined to Suck

Let's be brutally honest -- since The Empire Strikes Back, there really hasn't been an amazing Star Wars anything in the past 34 years. Sure, we got Knights of the Old Republic, the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoon, and some well-received books here and there. But what else? Right out the gate, there was the Holiday Special followed by a bunch of completely unwatchable television shows, as well as an endless cornucopia of video games of varying quality control, including a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game where it took like 10 fucking hits with a lightsaber to kill a Stormtrooper.

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LucasArts

"Boba's feet!?! Where?"

Aside from the terrible prequels, they also did a Clone Wars animated movie that is currently at 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Hell, one of the last pre-Disney Star Wars projects was a cartoon sitcom for kids that had 39 episodes in the can until it got buried for probably forever. Maybe it's time to admit that Star Wars was just an exceedingly decent science fiction homage to a 1958 samurai film.

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad
Toho

"Try replacing me with CGI'ed Hayden Christensen. I fucking dare you."

We'd be just as thrilled as you if these new movies end up proving us wrong. We really would. But when we're talking about a franchise with a cinematic batting record only slightly better than videos al-Qaida's put out, the smart money is not on the Wookiee.

4 Reasons The New 'Star Wars' Movies Will Inevitably Be Bad

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