The Self-Disruption of Star Wars
With “The Last Jedi” Disney Grapples with Maintaining an Evergreen Brand
Note: This analysis contains spoilers for many of the Star Wars films.
When Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, entertainment industry observers seriously questioned the $4.06 billion price tag he paid for the Star Wars franchise. After mixed to lackluster response to George Lucas’ most recent trilogy over the previous decade, the property was in the process of fading.
Left untended Star Wars could have easily become a nostalgia brand, like Peanuts, Betty Boop or the original Star Trek.
But Iger believed Star Wars could both compliment Disney’s portfolio, and be reinvigorated to engage future generations. He gambled that it could stand the test of time, continuing to renew itself across decades, like Coca-Cola, Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Microsoft. The term for these brands is evergreen.
The challenge would be difficult. The franchise still had a dedicated but dogmatic fan base, certain about what Star Wars should be. But there was also a modern generation with countless entertainment options and no real allegiance to the original Star Wars saga. Could Disney strike a balance between the two?
After meeting with producer Kathleen Kennedy, who had been hired by George Lucas to run Lucasfilm as his second, Iger promoted her to president, and tasked her to make the franchise persist as an evergreen brand.
Supercharging Star Wars Global
The disruption brought on by the rise of the Internet and social media has done a lot of damage to big brands, even destroying some of them: Borders, Blockbuster, Tower Records, Kodak, Sears.
We’ve also seen entertainment properties start to run out of steam: Transformers, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean. Here are some of the factors that contribute to the failure of major brands:
• Brands that don’t adapt to the digital age — from distribution, to product extensions across different media platforms, to the power of the social media conversation.
• Brands fade into obscurity because they stay exactly the same, or become stuck in time (Wheaties, Woolworth’s, Radio Shack).
• Brands that don’t practice what they preach. (Coca-Cola’s Vitaminwater)
• Global entertainment franchises can’t keep repeating the same story, no matter how compelling it has been (see the above films listed).
• Major brand holders must listen to, validate, and celebrate the participation of a global audience, not just North American consumers.
• Brand storytelling must integrate the voices and perspectives of that audience.
If we examine conventional Hollywood storytelling over the past century, we’ll find that most of it falls exactly within the parameters of what kills evergreen. Most movies are exactly of their time.
They draw upon the classic tropes of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey (or Christopher Vogler’s simplification, The Writer’s Journey, found on the bookshelf of any successful screenwriter): the naïve young (male) hero, the wizened mentor, the damsel in distress, direct challenges most often resolved through violence, the polarization of right (good) and wrong (evil). Wash, rinse, repeat, sequel, sequel, sequel.
Like a modern epic poem, Star Wars: A New Hope was the embodiment of the Hero’s Journey, a fairytale that powerfully impacted a generation in childhood. But, if Kathleen Kennedy was savvy back in 2012, she’d have realized that if the world was changing, so must its myths.
It wasn’t just that significantly larger percentages of a movie’s box office were coming from overseas, or that platforms like mobile and videogame consoles were maturing into significant revenue streams. She would have also understood that social media was now giving voice to the voiceless.
Races and nationalities who until now had only seen themselves in the background in movies or as stereotypes were demanding representation. Women were pushing back at a spectrum of oppression. Savvy teens were growing bored with pat answers to complex problems.
In short, a more pluralistic and globalized form of brand management and storytelling was needed.
Two Steps Forward, One Wild Step Back
Kennedy moved quickly, drawing on her experience as one of the most prolific and successful producers of blockbuster films of all time (E.T., and films in the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, and Jurassic Park series to name a few). She lured JJ Abrams away from a dissatisfying experience at Paramount with the Star Trek franchise, and put Star Wars: The Force Awakens into production.
Steeped in callbacks to the original film, surrounded by a “this is the Star Wars you’ve been looking for” campaign, Force Awakens played on the most familiar elements of the series, mixing in likable new characters, and was released to great fanfare.
Although some fans groused about how overly familiar its story was, the film generated over $2 billion in global box office, with hundreds of millions more in toy and merchandise sales.
Lucasfilm then produced Rogue One, a darker prequel story that didn’t fall into the familiar Skywalker saga. The film was a critical success, and pleased fans, particularly with its final sequence of Darth Vader at his most frightening. At a global box office of just over $1 billion, the film was half as successful as Force Awakens, but Disney’s expectations on the “non-saga” movie were controlled. In many ways, Rogue One was “unsafe,” but it was still quite profitable.
But now we have the direct sequel to Force Awakens, the “saga” film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Although critical response has been largely positive, longtime fans were immediately polarized by it.
Not only does the movie do and say things that seem to contradict much of what Abrams’ film established, in the eyes of many The Last Jedi subverts all of Star Wars. The result has been a movie-going experience embraced by some, and wildly rejected by others.
Thus far, The Last Jedi has grossed over $600 million in North America, and it has pulled in over $1.3 billion worldwide. It will sit comfortably in the top ten movies of all time, but it won’t begin to approach the success of Force Awakens. The film failed in China, doing only a fraction of Force Awaken’s box office, closing there after its second week. Toy sales have also been off compared with the bonanza of the Abrams film.
Did Kennedy and director Rian Johnson go too far? Were their instincts right about the counterintuitive direction of Last Jedi’s creative? Did this approach actually damage the film’s box office potential? What do these decisions indicate about the best way to maintain an evergreen brand in the digital age?
The answers point to fascinating new strategies that are being applied to brand narratives and popular storytelling that pull away from the familiar 20th century tropes.
A bold application of these strategies can result in a kind of self-disruption that in the short-term can generate consumer confusion, alienate fans and result in sales drops. But in the long-term they can lead to brand renewal, the kind of change that engages with and meets the needs and aspirations of far greater numbers.
By studying the self-disruption of Star Wars, we can learn both the risks and rewards of maintaining our brands — and our messages — in this chaotic age of pervasive communication.
Self-Disrupting Star Wars
In corporate speak, self-disruption is a series of planned actions — sparks thrown purposefully — to jolt a company out of stasis and jumpstart progress.
Doing this without destroying your company requires a good deal of self-knowledge, inclusive of limitations and specific goals. It also requires an understanding of changing consumer tastes and behaviors, sometimes more so than the customers themselves realize or care to admit.
Steve Jobs famously said that Apple products don’t just give users what they want, they give them what they didn’t realize they needed. To do that, Apple had to constantly reinvent its products without ever abandoning the tenets of elegant design and ease of use. Self-disruption at Apple gave rise to the iPhone and the global dominance of the company.
At Lucasfilm, Star Wars was facing a series of limitations:
• Girls Keep Out: Franchise focus was on ‘tween and teen boys
• Americana: Hollywood export keeps white Anglo-Saxon males front and center
• Toys Gathering Dust: Licensing was down; prequels were not big toy-sellers
• Same Old Sith: Stories were becoming repetitive; story world held status quo
• Skywalker Syndrome: Franchise spotlighted a handful of aging characters
• Jedi Fails: If the galaxy’s Jedi were so great, why did they fail so often?
With these in mind, here’s what Kennedy would have to do (and what she did) to disrupt Star Wars:
Star Wars needed to become a transmedia universe, where every piece of content counts.
Until the Disney acquisition, the only way fans engaged with new Star Wars stories outside of the films was through the Expanded Universe, a dense intertwined body of Star Wars licensed content that included decades of comic books, novels, and videogames.
What was never entirely made clear to fans was that George Lucas didn’t recognize the Expanded Universe as “real”. They never actually “happened.”
In order to bring the franchise in line with the digital age, Kennedy needed to strengthen the bond between the movies and all of the other Star Wars media. She would have to make each story told “official,” a vital and canonical addition to the meta-story of Star Wars.
So, to the horror of hardcore Star Wars fans, she jettisoned the Expanded Universe, and formed a new Story Group to oversee the entire franchise.
By doing this, Lucasfilm was promoting fan analysis and speculation for each new piece of Star Wars content, as if a gigantic puzzle was being assembled between the franchise and the fans in real time.
The result: dozens of hours of fan-generated YouTube and blog speculation surrounds the release of each comic book, videogame, animated episode, or film — an ongoing relationship that thrives upon itself.
Star Wars must move beyond the Skywalker saga and Jedi vs. Sith.
Kennedy then had to address the issue of been there, done that. With The Force Awakens in development, Kennedy was about to embark on a third trilogy that centered on a familiar conflict. With far more than movies as vehicles for the franchise now, Lucasfilm would have to open up the Star Wars universe to many different kinds of stories across multiple subgenres.
This is something that Kevin Feige recognized with the Marvel Cinematic Universe: instead of an endless array of samey superhero origins, he made Ant-Man a heist film, Spider-Man Homecoming a teen high school charmer, and Thor Ragnarok an adventure-comedy.
Pulling away from the tried and true, especially with the franchise in flight, would be a risky move. But most everything about The Last Jedi indicates that Kennedy wasn’t interested in waiting until the latest trilogy was finished before the real self-disruption started.
Many of the film’s most controversial story points are rooted in various characters holding the saga’s most time-honored tropes to task:
• On Canto Bight, DJ points out that the galaxy’s 1% has been profiteering from this endless war, selling spacecraft and arms to both sides: “Good guys, bad guys, made up words. It’s all a machine, partner. Live free. Don’t join.”
• Luke Skywalker tosses his light saber off a cliff, later saying: “The legacy of the Jedi is failure… I’m ending all of this. The tree, the text, the Jedi. I’m gonna burn it down.”
• Of those sacred texts, Yoda says, “Page turners they were not… Time it is, for you to look past a pile of old books.”
• And even Kylo Ren chimes in, telling Rey, “The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi…let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.”
The result is unique in contemporary long-form storytelling.
A massive, sprawling multi-generational saga has stopped in its penultimate chapter to question itself. Why does this same conflict keep happening over and over again? How great can either the Jedi or Sith be if they repeatedly collapse into a spiral of galactic violence? If we truly lived by the values and virtues necessary to maintain balance in the Force, would this endlessly catastrophic conflict really persist?
In The Last Jedi, the saga seems to wake up and realize that this system is dysfunctional, and its characters start yearning for a replacement. By the end of the film, even as Luke and Leia engage their swan songs, there are hints about what that new system might be like. For some fans, the answer will be delightful. For others, well, it’s sacrilege.
In response, the internet exploded, and for Disney/Lucasfilm, that’s a good thing.
Star Wars needed to include girls and women.
Kennedy’s significant narrative risks with Star Wars date back to the selection of Rey as the hero of The Force Awakens. To convey a sense of how radical this was, remember this truism that held all the way through the release of the Abrams film:
For every case of action figures based on a big franchise movie or TV show, female characters or characters or color comprised few or none in the mix. There weren’t many Leia toys made by Kenner or Hasbro up through the oughts, to say the least.
But making Star Wars appealing to girls was an accomplishable possibility, with the upside being the widening of the franchise from boys’ action to four-quadrant (males, females, teens and adults).
As exemplified by the #WheresRey controversy, the gambit paid off. While toy sales are by no means 50/50, a significant number of girls have spilled into the Star Wars aisle at big box department stores.
Then Kennedy would double down. In Last Jedi, women have taken control of the Resistance. Leia and Holdo command, Paige and her sister Rose are prominent in the plot, Maz contributes dire info to Finn and Rose while blazing her blasters, and Rey squares off against Kylo and Snoke.
When an explosion blows Leia into space, no one arrives in the nick of time to save her. Instead, the General (née Princess) taps into the Force and saves herself…however strangely…
To the chagrin of some fans, male bravado, masculine energy, and even mansplaining, are subverted, diverted, or plain shut down:
• Poe’s derring-do is revealed to be misguided at best, treasonous at worst.
• Kylo is taunted for wearing a “ridiculous mask.”
• Snoke is cut down in the middle of a self-aggrandizing speech.
• Finn’s final sacrifice is thwarted by Rose.
• Luke’s final confrontation with Kylo Ren is not the ultimate light saber showdown, because Luke is basically using Force Skype.
Did the film overcompensate by doing this, unduly alienating the alt-right, Gamergate, anti-social justice warriors, or even average dude bros? It can be safely stated that Lucasfilm could care less.
Brands and franchises fail, because they dare not tamper with a cherished formula, even as the world moves on. There will always be a vociferous few who will scream bloody murder if something changes about a thing they love. If it doesn’t change, however, what is loved can easily be forgotten.
And the socio-political evolution of the post-Disney Star Wars should not come as a surprise to longtime fans. George Lucas himself has always woven his liberal progressive politics into the narrative:
• The brash, kickass Princess Leia was a complete anomaly in 1977.
• Lucas also cited the original Star Wars as a metaphor for western imperialism and its various unsuccessful attempts to crush guerilla rebellions.
• In Revenge of the Sith, a now villainous Anakin Skywalker paraphrases George Bush’s absolutist post-9/11 war cry, “If you are not with me, then you’re my enemy.”
Rather than coming out of nowhere, Kennedy is following (and evolving) Lucas’ agenda, not just that of the Walt Disney Company.
Star Wars needed to reflect the diversity of a newly voiced and interconnected people.
It isn’t just that the major new characters in the franchise are played by women, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. In The Last Jedi, for the first time, there is no lone savior, not even Rey.
Instead, the interconnectedness of all the characters (inclusive of darker antagonists like Kylo and DJ), and various combinations of their unique skills and ideas, leads to the escape of the Resistance from the First Order.
Rey turns out not to be a Chosen One, and is instead a woman who is “no one from nowhere.” She calls into question Luke’s cynicism and (with Yoda’s help) pushes him toward viewing his role as a Jedi in a new light. We see the result in the climax and denouement of the Luke Skywalker story:
Instead of leaping into his X-wing, flying to Crait, and pulling out a can of whupass on Kylo Ren — which is what many of us want to see — Luke behaves like an actual Jedi Knight (in accord with Yoda’s original teachings) and confronts Kylo with cleverness, compassion, and nonviolence.
We finally see a Jedi Master, at the peak of his skills, in action. But it’s what Luke does next that truly realizes Kennedy and Lucasfilm’s goals. Gazing at the stars, he dies, giving himself to the Force.
Luke Skywalker concludes his story by becoming the spark of hope that the galaxy needs, a literal story. Symbolically he democratizes the Force.
Until this moment, as so often happens in classical Hero’s Journey narratives, the power of Star Wars flowed like royalty through Skywalker blood. Like Jesus, Luke’s father Anakin was born of the Force itself (parthenogenesis), and Luke inherited that power.
Now we have Rey, born of “filthy junk traders,” but representative of the aspirations the new generation watching her. With no royal blood in her veins, she is every bit Kylo Ren’s equal.
And then we have the stable boy at the very end of the film, another nobody, a slave in Canto Bight who draws inspiration from Luke and finds he can wield the power of the Force.
In sticking with this approach, despite narrative pressure to give the audience the ending it wants, Star Wars is finally practicing what it has always preached. The Force is shown to be with us all.
In terms of the core conflict of the franchise, perhaps Rey envisioned it best on the island of Ahch-To:
If we are to survive, we must move beyond viewing the universe as a cosmic war between good and evil. We must embrace it as a delicate balance between the light of creation and life, and the necessary darkness of decay and death.
The Last Jedi tells us we no longer need a champion to save us, because through the commonality of our greater community and the universality of our underlying values, we now have the ability to save ourselves.
So, by moving from the lone hero to the heroism of the collective, the engine of conflict, the engine of narrative itself in Star Wars has been disrupted — dismantled and transformed.
Why is This Making Some Fans So Uncomfortable?
Many of us want things to stay the same. We yearn to go back to a “better time.” We want our fairy tales to fall into familiar patterns, reaffirming our expectations, reinforcing our sense of right and wrong. The Last Jedi doesn’t always do that.
By not answering or skirting key questions set up by JJ Abrams in Force Awakens (Who is Snoke? Who are Rey’s parents? What are the Knights of Ren?) the film also subverts hardcore fans’ obsession with lore. Refusing to recognize years of YouTube-fueled speculation, the film’s coyness at times verges on being obnoxious.
And the meaning of the film’s ending — Luke’s death, the child on Canto Bight — is not immediately obvious. It doesn’t follow a clear through line of cause and effect, so it is not quite as satisfying for some.
The Last Jedi can feel like a visit with a longtime friend going through some changes. There’s some warmth there, but there is also a certain disjointed quality; a distance.
In the short term, the results amount to what can be construed as minor setbacks: lower box office, middling toy sales. The film’s failure in China might also be directly connected with the film’s disruptive progressive agenda. It is quite possibly (and ironically) the inclusion of Rose and her relationship with Finn that has generated cynicism and rejection.
Filmgoers in China are now more sensitive to the “shoehorning” of Asian characters into Hollywood films to appease them. Some have complained that Rose has little agency in The Last Jedi. The Canto Bight mission goes nowhere, say some, and her kiss with Finn feels forced. Sometimes bold statements (and perhaps underdeveloped story threads) can be costly.
Are These Self-Disruptive Strategies Right for Maintaining an Evergreen Brand?
We have yet to know for sure whether this all is truly going to work. At least a few tweaks will be required to fine tune the approach. Likely, JJ Abrams will pump the lore and give us a more commercially rousing conclusion to the current trilogy.
Retailers will have to better calibrate toy orders based on the latest set of designs and the frequency of releases (a Han Solo movie opens Spring 2018), and Disney will need to discern how much Star Wars is too much.
But overall, polls are indicating that Millennials and their children are embracing the post-Disney films. Kennedy has retrenched Star Wars, in some ways taking it a step back in order to push it many steps forward, and primed it to persist.
What’s most interesting about this self-disruptive strategy is that it flies in the face of critics who expected the Disneyfication of the franchise to result in blander, more childish stories.
By calling the franchise’s tropes into question, and insisting that this new generation (of storytellers and characters) “grow beyond” their predecessors, Kennedy may well have broken Star Wars from the polar cycles of its past. This allows filmmakers like Johnson to push the franchise’s creative boundaries, opening it to far more narrative possibilities.
At the same time, The Last Jedi teaches us the key to success when engaging in risky self-disruptive strategies. Toward the end of the film, we see that Rey has secreted away the ancient texts thought to have been destroyed by the burning of the sacred Jedi tree.
They may not have been page-turners, but they still contain the values and virtues necessary to maintain the balance of the Force: tolerance, diversity, the delicate interconnectedness of all things, the rich interplay between light and dark—all the ingredients necessary for renewal.
These turn out to be the same tenets that have led to the sometimes awkward but largely successful progression we are seeing across the franchise.
Kennedy, Lucasfilm, and Disney understand the essence of their brand, and are doing their best to maintain and refresh it. So long as they don’t forget those messages, the Force will be with them, always.
Many of the strategies employed by Disney and Lucasfilm are reflected in a dynamic new modality of narrative called Collective Journey. Until recently, every agency, company, studio, and writer has relied on the Hero’s Journey as a standard for storytelling.
But nonlinear, trans-platform communication has entirely disrupted that model. To rising generations, the standard tropes of classic storytelling have begun to feel slow, obvious, and dated.
In short, we are now living in a vast communal narrative, which leverages inclusivity and participation.
Those who understand how to employ Collective Journey storytelling to initiate and direct these new narratives will find extraordinary success. Read more of Jeff Gomez’s observations about Collective Journey at his Medium blog.
Connect with Jeff Gomez on Twitter @Jeff_Gomez. Special thanks to Alan Berkson, Adam Lance Garcia, David Baczkier, and the Starlight Runner Entertainment team for their assistance in researching and editing this article.
