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Notes -
I wonder. A narrative like this benefits from selection bias—RLM has no reason to write about years with perfectly normal amount of new IP!
Not that it’s implausible. I’d point the finger at COVID, which definitely traumatized the theater industry. It’s easy to see how that could shake up pricing or risk aversion.
I am, as always, tempted to wax poetic about the shrinking of the world. Drink from the firehose of all human creative endeavor, and it gets harder and harder to be surprised. Pushing the boundaries of the medium helps, but that leads to postmodernism. Push the limits of technology, instead, and blow people away with the novelty. Avatar has to be the poster child for such an approach.
Could Star Wars succeed without a novel edge? Move it to today, after decades of sweet practical effects and unbelievable refinement of CGI, and I don’t think so. You’d get a cult classic at best.
I think on this exact question somewhat often.
Star Wars benefited because Lucas, as he fully admits, borrowed from Samurai and Western films and the success of cheesy Space Adventure series like Flash Gordon.
If made today, it'd be much further removed from those original inspiration sources and have audiences, probably, much less receptive to those tropes? In that sense it would be an even more novel release amidst the current film landscape since it doesn't have as clear a line of succession from previous works.
And let us also assume that Lucas actually deigned to use practical effects, physical sets, miniatures, and minimal CGI in creating the series, so that it actually stands out further from the competition. Would audiences be more or less receptive to a film that eschewed becoming a CGI-fest and harkened back to a much older era of filmmaking tropes to boot?
It's probably as you say, it'd be a cult classic, and more than likely the RoTJ never ends up getting made. It'd probably be regarded close to how Firefly is today.
I would argue that there's something intrinsic to Star Wars, related mostly to the general atmosphere, worldbuilding, and aesthetic, that really does make it unique and both a fun and accessible universe to tell stories in, and thus it really, really lends itself to having a large fandom. Just not clear that it could carve out a space for itself in the current crowded media landscape.
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