Disney has done some amazing things with Star Wars since buying the property. In short, Disney turned Star Wars from a license to print money into a series of disappointments and flops and failures. These are generally well known… how “Solo” was the first Star Wars movie to actually lose money, how the sequel trilogy PO’ed the fans and got progressively less profitable, how “Galactic Starcruiser” shut down after only a year, how the various TV shows have ranged from occasionally quite good to generally awful.
But then there’s “The High Republic.” This was a brand-new income stream for Disney, set 200 or so years before the movies. The Jedi were supposedly at their prime, the galaxy was at peace, everything was awesome, and Disney would make a mountain of money from the books, comic books, movies and TV shows set in that timeframe. Disney spent something like a billion dollars promoting “The High Republic”
Chances are pretty good you’ve either never heard of THR, or you’ve forgotten that it existed.
The video below goes through the sales numbers for the books and, wow, they’re bad. The best seller – the first book – sold over 150,000 copies. The latest book sold less than 10,000. Now, I’d be pretty pleased if one of *my* books sold a mere 9,000 copies. But then, unlike Star Wars, nobody knows who I am. Unlike Disney, a billion dollars wasn’t lavished on publicizing my books.
Even that initial 150K seems pretty sad when you consider that Timothy Zahn’s “Thrawn trilogy,” novels published in the early 1990s which revitalized Star Wars at the time, and which were “de-canonised” when Disney bought Star Wars, have sold five million copies. Specifically, they’ve sold five million copies *since* Disney bought Star Wars. The Thrawn trilogy sold something like *fifteen* million copies before that.
The thumbnail image chosen for the video below is appropriate: it shows what I presume to be one of the main “High Republic” characters complete with a modern Mental Illness Haircut. That’s who they marketed to, not the existing Star Wars fanbase. So they didn’t get the fanbase interested. One of the main authors actually told the potential customers that if they didn’t like her hyperactively leftist politics, don’t buy her books. “Okey-doke” the fanbase said.
Me? If you agree with or disagree with my politics… buy my books and other publications. If you like aircraft and/or spacecraft, you’ll like what I’ve produced. My politics and your politics will barely enter into it.
6 responses to “The Quiet Star Wars Failure”
I keep hearing about lucasfilm being sold to a single, very rich, foreign investor.
this may be nothing, but..
I have a friend who is a UPS deliveryman in the washington,DC area. it’s a regular thing to deliver to the various embassies, and many of the embassy personnel know him by name.
back around the beginning of may he delivered a fairly large wooden crate to the jordanian embassy. he said it was about 4ft high by 3 foot square, and it came directly from lucasfilm. the word from the person receiving it was that the king would be very pleased it had arrived…whatever “it” was.
now, King Abdullah II of Jordan has the honor of being the only actual royalty ever to be in a Star Trek TV show. he had \a non-speaking role, but still. he even had plans for a star trek themed park in jordan. it failed to happen, but the land still sits there unused.
I’m betting if the king was a big star trek nerd, there is a chance he was a star wars nerd too. as much as the hype tries to play it, the 2 fandoms are not really at war with each other.
now, a king wit ha lot of money to blow, land already designated for a theme park, and someone offers him Lucasfilm. I think he might try it. lucasfilm might try to sweeten the pot by sending him a gift or two.
it’s just a theory. but a Star Wars themed park, smack dab in the middle east, owned by a fan of the movies, would be the weirdest and maybe the best thing for star wars.
or, the king of jordan ordered himself an R2D2 replica, and I’m blowing this all out of proportion…..
I saw rumblings of “Lucasfilm to be sold to Middle Eastern oil oligarch” a few weeks ago and meant to scribble about it. To wit:
There are those who actually *like* what has become of Trek and Wars in recent years, and sneer at those of us who don’t. Those of us who have decided that recent Trek/Wars are non-canonical are often made fun of… that “canon is decided by the owner.” OK, fine. So if Star Wars gets sold to e Middle Easterner… it’s impossible to say what the future will hold, but it’s reasonably safe to assume that a lot of the current woke bullcrap won’t survive. Men won’t continue to be portrayed as weak and ineffectual; Mary Sue-level Strong Female Characters will disappear, and LGBT inclusion will either vanish or be switched to “this is evil perversion.”
Will it still be canonical *now?*
if it is King Abdullah II, the man is an AH-1 cobra pilot, and armor officer and airborne qualified by the US, all without letting on he was a prince of anything. if anyone tolerates “woke”, it’s probably not him.
When I was in College, TNG had an episode where an androgynous species “cured” one of their members who had become monosexual. Being old school ST, they actually approached the subject halfway decently.
The topic came up in a history class (I’m a history major, would you like fries with that?)
Anyway, a Japanese exchange student made the point “it’s in the future, won’t someone cure it by then?” About half the class was uncomfortable with the idea, but the room decided that if it was possible then someone, somewhere, eventually would find and offer a cure. This would be a really classic ST thing to play with, but they would never do that now, even if the characters reached the “correct” conclusion.
There is no past and no future, only an endless present where the party is always right..
There were at least two episodes of TOS (Dagger of the Mind, Whom Gods Destroy) that specifically dealt with mental illness. And it was pointed out that for all intents and purposes, all major forms of mental illness were basically cured. Meds and some time in the therapy chair would take care of most forms of serious madness. So… “I don’t know what gender I am” or “I identify as something I’m clearly not” would be taken care of pretty quickly.
Heck there was an episode of TNG where they found a traumatized little kid who glommed onto Data and decided that *he* was an android too. They didn’t celebrate that delusion They didn’t offer him organic-to-positronic transition surgery. They cured him of his “identifying” as something he clearly wasn’t.
It’s remarkable how many of the same channels I follow.
Anyway, after dealing with faculty all day, it would be nice to have some SCI-FI to escape to instead of more drek.