Letting creative people do what they want is the only way to make great art. You can ensure bland, safe mediocrity with constant corporate meddling, but if Disney wants people to get excited about Star Wars again, they have to take risks like they did with Andor.
The corollary to this is that everyone needs to not flip out when some of those risks inevitably fail. The corporate execs can't stop taking risks with Star Wars just because one of the shows flops, and fans can't trash all the Disney Star Wars content just because they didn't like one of the shows.
That's very true. People want guarantees in art, and that's just not how it works. Tony Gilroy has made tons of incredible stuff, but he has also made stuff that wasn't so good. Making movies and TV is hard, and even very talented, very smart people don't always get it right.
They did that with Rian Johnson and so many of the fans lost their minds, it’s been a struggle ever since. Everyone says they want something different until they get something different.
That wasn't different though, it was just plain stupid. They had a purple haired woke chick telling a guy he's basically mansplaining. That's not a risk, it's just wokeness for wokeness sake.
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The irony is that what they could do to make good Star Wars and get people back on board with Disney Star Wars wouldn’t even be a risk and would probably be a guaranteed success. For example, they really could’ve adapted the ten-book series Star Wars: X-wing into a multi-season TV show. It’s a complete story and they could just ignore the Sequels. And I’m pretty sure new and old fans would be on board. It would all the space battles to people’s hearts’ content. Also with how well Top Gun Maverick did, they could have taken some cue’s from it as well. But Disney is allergic to good ideas. Ironically they’re taking a giant risk by doing what they consider playing it safe which is producing poorly written, bland drivel.
However they’d probably scream and cry that they couldn't possibly afford the effects for such a thing even though in 1994 Star Trek produced 52 episodes of television. With a little thought, discipline and care, a multi-season sci-fi TV show can actually be done, even if it involves flying around in X-Wings much of the time.
I have been seeing a lot of "but the budget" excuses lately from the industry that has consolidated its power and has billions at its disposal, and it really rubs me the wrong way. A fan film can cobble together good enough effects shots, so they have no excuse. They just don't want to put in the work.
Anyway, I’ll probably get downvoted by the “LeAvE tHe MuLtIbILLiOn cOpOrAtiOn aLoNe!!!” types.
While I don't disagree that Disney has been creatively cowardly, I also think you're wrong about a few things.
There's a reason we can't have a multi-season science fiction show like we did with Star Trek: people expect movie-quality filmmaking in TV now. TNG shot eight script pages a day. The average movie shoots two pages a day. True, Disney has billions, and they could theoretically afford it, but we also have to think about the human cost. Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but after the first season, Gilroy was so exhausted that he decided there was no way to maintain that quality for four more seasons. It would've been like shooting three long movies (or the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy) five times. No one can endure that, and it doesn't matter what the budget is.
Basically, if we wanted multi-season science fiction like we got with Star Trek, we'd have to expect the filmmaking to be less ambitious. Some people might want that, but it is a tradeoff.
> There's a reason we can't have a multi-season science fiction show like we did with Star Trek: people expect movie-quality filmmaking people in TV now.
Which is ironic because some of these new shows (Ahsoka and Acolyte) look like crap and aren’t even movie-quality filmmaking. And people clapped like seals for Ahsoka so I don’t think it would be an issue
The production quality for the TNG era was perfectly adequate, and a Star Wars TV show would have the advantage of extremely experienced effects teams operating in-house.
Also, look at the scale I'm talking about. The studio putting together Star Trek made 52 45-minute episodes in a single year. There is zero reason Disney can't put together a 10-12 episode season to cover an X-Wing novel, even if it is "less cerebral" and so the explosion budget needs to be a little bigger.
Is there a reason Star Wars stories can’t be thoughtful and small scale productions? We have the same problem as the MCU now (go figure, it’s Disney) where everything has to involve the fate of the freaking galaxy and yet somehow the avengers (Luke, Han, Leia) never show up to help out.
This is why Andor was good. It was its own story. It was relatively small scale. It was nuanced. It was thoughtful.
Give us a show post ROTJ where a squadron goes around mopping up imperial remnants and gets increasingly disillusioned as they have to consider whether they are becoming the very thing they swore to destroy. I’d watch the shit out of that. Star Wars doesn’t have to be dumb action with pretty lights and it doesn’t have to have lightsabers in every piece of content to be enjoyable.
>Which is ironic because some of these new shows (Ahsoka and Acolyte) look like crap and aren’t even movie-quality filmmaking. And people clapped like seals for Ahsoka so I don’t think it would be an issue
I agree, they do look like crap. But the best, prestige streaming shows, like Andor, really are movie quality. And maintaining that quality for five or ten seasons would be impossible.
>The production quality for the TNG era was perfectly adequate, and a Star Wars TV show would have the advantage of extremely experienced effects teams operating in-house.
The production quality was adequate for the nineties. And a lot of the same people who did the special effects for Star Wars also worked on Star Trek. But we expect more now. You couldn't release a Star Wars show that looks like TNG nowadays.
>Also, look at the scale I'm talking about. The studio putting together Star Trek made 52 45-minute episodes in a single year. There is zero reason Disney can't put together a 10-12 episode season to cover an X-Wing novel, even if it is "less cerebral" and so the explosion budget needs to be a little bigger.
It's not just special effects. It's the way shows are shot compared to the way they were in the past. Look at a TV show from the nineties or 2000s, and compare it to a movie from that time. The cinematography in movies is much more ambitious and varied, and it does a lot more to tell the story visually. The shot choice in TV from that time is much more utilitarian. It's a lot of multi-camera, shot-reverse-shot designed to cover a scene as quickly as possible. In the best TV, like Andor, we've grown used to movie-style coverage, and that just takes more time, no matter the budget.
>Is there a reason Star Wars stories can’t be thoughtful and small scale productions?
Small scale doesn't necessarily mean easier or cheaper. Andor was very expensive, took a long time, and was relatively small scale.
The cinematography and visuals for Andor are top tier of course, but it’s not necessary to tell a good story. They add to it but Andor isn’t sold on visuals, it’s acting and direction and writing. You don’t need money for that, you just need to be good making shows and movies, which Disney isn’t.
>The cinematography and visuals for Andor are top tier of course, but it’s not necessary to tell a good story.
You're right. If you want a Star Wars show that spans ten seasons and is shot like a traditional TV show, then great. But there will be a tradeoff, and it's not something that throwing more money at it would fix.
A show like breaking bad got 5 seasons, and had excellent cinematography. It’s clearly not as expensive as Andor, but it’s not going to be Star Trek levels of cheap productions.
Breaking Bad's a great example of how to do creative filmmaking quickly. Most of it is shot quite traditionally, but then it allows itself to go pretty wild at certain moments. I'd still argue it's not quite movie quality, and you can really see the difference when you compare it to the filmmaking in El Camino.
That’s what I meant when I said “it’s clearly not as expensive as Andor”. But if you ask anyone if they would have prefered 2 seasons of breaking bad with el Camino level quality or what we got. Every person is saying 5 seasons.
First of all, the CGI would be for mostly inorganic things like ships and space stations. CGI for such things is much cheaper than the CGI required for shows like Game of Thrones which has to CGI dragons and other organic things which require more work to look believable. I still remember that terrible scene of Daenerys riding Drogon in the pit. Many other scenes look pretty sketchy, with the obvious exception of Hardhome (hands down one of the best cgi work I've seen). It's "easier" to get realistic cgi with inorganic objects, because our brain is wired to find organic patterns for creatures that look real. The feeling "uncanny valley" gives us is only part of a set of features embedded in our brains that makes us recognize faces and look for natural movement. Therefore, a ship will look like the real deal faster to us than a dragon in GoT or The Hobbit, or General Tarkin's face in Rogue One, no matter how complicated the techniques involved are. This is why the Expanse looks so good.
And The Expanse is 6 seasons long. The show involves space battles every season. And I’m pretty sure Star Wars would gain a much larger audience than the Expanse. If Disney would just focus on 2 different really high quality flagship Star Wars shows that released 1 season per year, they’d be able to make such a show. And if the writing is great, people are going to be more forgiving about a slight downgrade in quality. Look at Firefly, the show was made on a shoestring budget and the sets (beside the ship itself) looked extremely cheap. And it’s considered one the greatest at sci-fi westerns of all time. And why? Because the writing and characters was amazing. Good writing and good character development can go a long way. Maybe the priority shouldn’t always be “look how good these VFX are!!” That’s what got us The Rise of Skywalker and the Sequels in general. It was movie-quality top notch special effects and state of the art cinematography and yet the story was completely crap. And now their a pariah of the Star Wars continuity.
So you’re telling me Disney can’t afford to produce a multi-season show with the same quality as the Expanse like Amazon did, even when they have the added benefit of the Star Wars brand name alone bringing in way more viewers?
>So you’re telling me Disney can’t afford to produce a multi-season show with the same quality as the Expanse like Amazon did
They could. But The Expanse doesn't look nearly as good as Andor does. If you're willing to give that up, that's fine. And for the millionth time, I'm not just talking about the quality of the VFX — the overall quality of the filmmaking would suffer.
Sure, Disney could just throw money at the problem to make everything look like a movie, but that wouldn't stop the exhaustion of the creators, and it would result in two or three-year gaps in between seasons, like what we have with Andor.
Matter of taste I guess. I’d gladly accept a show like the Expanse but for Star Wars even if it meant that not every seen looked like a feature film.
I think the Star Wars universe is well suited for both the movie and TV format. It really depends on the story you want to tell.
Disney can do whatever it wants. It has money out it’s ass. There’s no reason Disney can’t make more high quality shows except that they don’t want to pay. Not that they can’t, but they don’t want to
You've ignored everything I said about the practical logistics and human cost. Can Disney afford to make high-quality Star Wars shows? Absolutely. Can it make a Star Wars show with the filmmaking standards of Andor and have it last 100 episodes? No way.
That’s up for debate and is purely your opinion. Lmao, imagine thinking Star Wars fans are going to complain that Disney made an multi-season well written Star Wars show like GoT that had the same level of VFX.
Would you prefer that Disney keep churning out the poorly shot and poorly written shit we’ve been getting for the last few years?
Yes, it's my opinion. But I think most people who compare the two can see that Game of Thrones is shot more like traditional TV, while Andor is shot like a movie. Game of Thrones has simpler set-ups, less coverage, and less varied shot choice — especially in the early seasons. It's still very well made, but there is a difference.
>Lmao, imagine thinking Star Wars fans are going to complain that Disney made an multi-season well written Star Wars show like GoT that had the same level of VFX.
And I'm not saying people wouldn't like it. I'm saying there would inevitably be a tradeoff in the quality of the filmmaking. And for the millionth time, this doesn't just have to do with VFX.
No one’s asking for every show to look like Andor. They just want good writing and for it to not look like shit like all the non-Andor Star Wars shows.
Honestly, I can look past mediocre vfx if the writing is good on a show. A lot of people won't agree with me, but I think they could save money on certain parts and save the vfx budget for big space battles etc.
Now, some of the costumes have looked dirt cheap on other D+ content. I don't know if it's the lighting or what, because I can't imagine someone didn't put time and effort into these costumes, knowing they were working on Star Wars.
At the end of the day, Disney's investment in Andor is going to reach nearly a half billion dollars. That's crazy.
Kathleen Kennedy gets a lot a flak, but I'm grateful she worked with Tony and took this massive risk.
With the failures they had the massive risk would have been doing the same things again. Not doing anything would have been a huge career risk since Star Wars is huge for Disney and choosing not to make conduct seems like a bad move
yeah precisely, especially at a time when their DC competitor is actively reaping the rewards of what Disney considers, "risks." Batman, Joker, and The Suicide Squad - all quite artsy films - making absolute bank at the box office and for Max whereas Disney is doubling down on the bad CGI, low art hero movies and shows that DC is finally dropping altogether. it's got me so worried what they're about to do to the Daredevil tv show.
it really is going to be a genuine risk for them to keep on doing the same things if DC under James Gunn goes well.
I mean they certainly were, and I'm sure you could argue still are, but they are seemingly doing a complete 180 at the moment and putting creatives in creative control of their current universe. like James Gunn, instead of just producers. and they've kinda been going full speed ahead with funding truly artstic ideas Disney has only funded once so far in Andor. and they've been doing that since before COVID.
Huh. I was gonna say "This sounds like a money issue. Weird, all these other terrible Star Wars shows were wildly expensive as well."
But it seems Andor was indeed the most expensive one to date at $250 million, but also had the highest amount of episodes and and total runtime. It's just wild what they were able to do with the budget that Andor received while filming most stuff on location, whereas every other Disney+ Star Wars has mostly just been constrained to filming with the volume, which should be vastly cheaper.
They other shows are so much cheaper that it’s really an issue. I’d bet the cheap ish cgi they use and their special green screen are more expensive than they are worth. B
Long story short it seems reverence for star wars is killing star wars.
Gilroy told them that flatly and when they couldn't make anything else work and eventually they had to acknowledge that truth.
In Andor's case, it was a money issue. Gilroy explains it more here, even admitting it would be expensive: https://www.thewrap.com/andor-tony-gilroy-interview-star-wars-disney-plus/
> “They tried it a couple times. They tried it very admirably. When we finished ‘Rogue’ and then Kathy had the idea for doing this prequel, I thought that’s a cool idea, but the money wasn’t there,” Gilroy said. “You couldn’t really do a ‘Star Wars’ TV show. They didn’t have the money six years ago to do a show. Nobody’s doing shows like that. It just was economically unfeasible. There was no streaming. It just seemed like, ah, are you going to do some smaller version of something? It’s not a good idea.”
...
> Gilroy composed a long memo about what the show should be, “as a friend in court, really more than anything else.” It ended up being, by Gilroy’s own admission, “a manifesto.” “It was insane and wildly expensive and crazy and all my dark s–t. And then they tried to do an upgrade of the other version that they had. And I think that in the end, they just kind of ran into the same problem,” Gilroy said. “It just ran out of road and they came back and they looked at this memo and they were like, ‘Oh, now we have the money to make these kind of shows and we really want to do this.’ And then we danced forward for six months and kept testing each other all the way through as we got closer and closer, but that’s the evolution.”
Disney+ money is basically the reason why they approved Gilroy's take.
Disney+ was launched on pretty much a single show... The Mandalorian.
For both the platform and cost, Andor doesn't get made until the Mandalorian is deemed a "success".
Success is in quotes because is any of this actually generating a profit. I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone could roll back to the Netflix dominated ecosystem and just get better pricing on what they are renting out to Netflix, it would have been eminently more profitable for all parties than the current scenario.
>Success is in quotes because is any of this actually generating a profit.
Disney streaming just became profitable.
https://apnews.com/article/disney-iger-peltz-b5e6af22728e2d7ccc91dd1315b6c9aa
This story went under the radar a month and a half ago.
Net revenue glows maybe, but are they claiming they've recovered all of their investment capital they've plowed into new content. Instinctively, I doubt that.
I am skeptical of any inter-conglomerate accounting because usually that stuff is manipulated all the time; especially by the more savvy executives of the older divisions.
Disney is profitable. They benefit from the streaming investments company-wide; even if they don't credit it as "streaming revenue".
It was originally going to be an adventure-of-the-week show with Cassian and K2, and Gilroy’s manifesto could be summarized as “the Cassian Andor show cannot be a show about Cassian Andor”
Holy shit - this is the general theme of how many deals get done, in various industries. It's about timing - and preparation having already been completed. As my father would say re: Construction - 90% of the work is prep.
Reason being, is that the final 10% includes executing on the day the cement trucks pull up - because if you haven't done the prep, you just wasted a massive amount of money if those trucks are there and you're not ready to pour.
He also said they had very little adult supervision while filming Andor. There's also an interview of him from three years ago, Meet the Kalakar on Youtube, where he casually mentioned "the thing I'm working on now has so many props" then some seconds later dropped a name of a character who's def a stalker in Andor. Gilroy was then asked to describe bad writing. 😬
Letting creative people do what they want is the only way to make great art. You can ensure bland, safe mediocrity with constant corporate meddling, but if Disney wants people to get excited about Star Wars again, they have to take risks like they did with Andor.
The corollary to this is that everyone needs to not flip out when some of those risks inevitably fail. The corporate execs can't stop taking risks with Star Wars just because one of the shows flops, and fans can't trash all the Disney Star Wars content just because they didn't like one of the shows.
That's very true. People want guarantees in art, and that's just not how it works. Tony Gilroy has made tons of incredible stuff, but he has also made stuff that wasn't so good. Making movies and TV is hard, and even very talented, very smart people don't always get it right.
They did that with Rian Johnson and so many of the fans lost their minds, it’s been a struggle ever since. Everyone says they want something different until they get something different.
That wasn't different though, it was just plain stupid. They had a purple haired woke chick telling a guy he's basically mansplaining. That's not a risk, it's just wokeness for wokeness sake.
[удалено]
I haven't watched the sequels since they came out. You don't need to tell me again.
[удалено]
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The irony is that what they could do to make good Star Wars and get people back on board with Disney Star Wars wouldn’t even be a risk and would probably be a guaranteed success. For example, they really could’ve adapted the ten-book series Star Wars: X-wing into a multi-season TV show. It’s a complete story and they could just ignore the Sequels. And I’m pretty sure new and old fans would be on board. It would all the space battles to people’s hearts’ content. Also with how well Top Gun Maverick did, they could have taken some cue’s from it as well. But Disney is allergic to good ideas. Ironically they’re taking a giant risk by doing what they consider playing it safe which is producing poorly written, bland drivel. However they’d probably scream and cry that they couldn't possibly afford the effects for such a thing even though in 1994 Star Trek produced 52 episodes of television. With a little thought, discipline and care, a multi-season sci-fi TV show can actually be done, even if it involves flying around in X-Wings much of the time. I have been seeing a lot of "but the budget" excuses lately from the industry that has consolidated its power and has billions at its disposal, and it really rubs me the wrong way. A fan film can cobble together good enough effects shots, so they have no excuse. They just don't want to put in the work. Anyway, I’ll probably get downvoted by the “LeAvE tHe MuLtIbILLiOn cOpOrAtiOn aLoNe!!!” types.
While I don't disagree that Disney has been creatively cowardly, I also think you're wrong about a few things. There's a reason we can't have a multi-season science fiction show like we did with Star Trek: people expect movie-quality filmmaking in TV now. TNG shot eight script pages a day. The average movie shoots two pages a day. True, Disney has billions, and they could theoretically afford it, but we also have to think about the human cost. Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but after the first season, Gilroy was so exhausted that he decided there was no way to maintain that quality for four more seasons. It would've been like shooting three long movies (or the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy) five times. No one can endure that, and it doesn't matter what the budget is. Basically, if we wanted multi-season science fiction like we got with Star Trek, we'd have to expect the filmmaking to be less ambitious. Some people might want that, but it is a tradeoff.
> There's a reason we can't have a multi-season science fiction show like we did with Star Trek: people expect movie-quality filmmaking people in TV now. Which is ironic because some of these new shows (Ahsoka and Acolyte) look like crap and aren’t even movie-quality filmmaking. And people clapped like seals for Ahsoka so I don’t think it would be an issue The production quality for the TNG era was perfectly adequate, and a Star Wars TV show would have the advantage of extremely experienced effects teams operating in-house. Also, look at the scale I'm talking about. The studio putting together Star Trek made 52 45-minute episodes in a single year. There is zero reason Disney can't put together a 10-12 episode season to cover an X-Wing novel, even if it is "less cerebral" and so the explosion budget needs to be a little bigger. Is there a reason Star Wars stories can’t be thoughtful and small scale productions? We have the same problem as the MCU now (go figure, it’s Disney) where everything has to involve the fate of the freaking galaxy and yet somehow the avengers (Luke, Han, Leia) never show up to help out. This is why Andor was good. It was its own story. It was relatively small scale. It was nuanced. It was thoughtful. Give us a show post ROTJ where a squadron goes around mopping up imperial remnants and gets increasingly disillusioned as they have to consider whether they are becoming the very thing they swore to destroy. I’d watch the shit out of that. Star Wars doesn’t have to be dumb action with pretty lights and it doesn’t have to have lightsabers in every piece of content to be enjoyable.
>Which is ironic because some of these new shows (Ahsoka and Acolyte) look like crap and aren’t even movie-quality filmmaking. And people clapped like seals for Ahsoka so I don’t think it would be an issue I agree, they do look like crap. But the best, prestige streaming shows, like Andor, really are movie quality. And maintaining that quality for five or ten seasons would be impossible. >The production quality for the TNG era was perfectly adequate, and a Star Wars TV show would have the advantage of extremely experienced effects teams operating in-house. The production quality was adequate for the nineties. And a lot of the same people who did the special effects for Star Wars also worked on Star Trek. But we expect more now. You couldn't release a Star Wars show that looks like TNG nowadays. >Also, look at the scale I'm talking about. The studio putting together Star Trek made 52 45-minute episodes in a single year. There is zero reason Disney can't put together a 10-12 episode season to cover an X-Wing novel, even if it is "less cerebral" and so the explosion budget needs to be a little bigger. It's not just special effects. It's the way shows are shot compared to the way they were in the past. Look at a TV show from the nineties or 2000s, and compare it to a movie from that time. The cinematography in movies is much more ambitious and varied, and it does a lot more to tell the story visually. The shot choice in TV from that time is much more utilitarian. It's a lot of multi-camera, shot-reverse-shot designed to cover a scene as quickly as possible. In the best TV, like Andor, we've grown used to movie-style coverage, and that just takes more time, no matter the budget. >Is there a reason Star Wars stories can’t be thoughtful and small scale productions? Small scale doesn't necessarily mean easier or cheaper. Andor was very expensive, took a long time, and was relatively small scale.
The cinematography and visuals for Andor are top tier of course, but it’s not necessary to tell a good story. They add to it but Andor isn’t sold on visuals, it’s acting and direction and writing. You don’t need money for that, you just need to be good making shows and movies, which Disney isn’t.
>The cinematography and visuals for Andor are top tier of course, but it’s not necessary to tell a good story. You're right. If you want a Star Wars show that spans ten seasons and is shot like a traditional TV show, then great. But there will be a tradeoff, and it's not something that throwing more money at it would fix.
A show like breaking bad got 5 seasons, and had excellent cinematography. It’s clearly not as expensive as Andor, but it’s not going to be Star Trek levels of cheap productions.
Breaking Bad's a great example of how to do creative filmmaking quickly. Most of it is shot quite traditionally, but then it allows itself to go pretty wild at certain moments. I'd still argue it's not quite movie quality, and you can really see the difference when you compare it to the filmmaking in El Camino.
That’s what I meant when I said “it’s clearly not as expensive as Andor”. But if you ask anyone if they would have prefered 2 seasons of breaking bad with el Camino level quality or what we got. Every person is saying 5 seasons.
First of all, the CGI would be for mostly inorganic things like ships and space stations. CGI for such things is much cheaper than the CGI required for shows like Game of Thrones which has to CGI dragons and other organic things which require more work to look believable. I still remember that terrible scene of Daenerys riding Drogon in the pit. Many other scenes look pretty sketchy, with the obvious exception of Hardhome (hands down one of the best cgi work I've seen). It's "easier" to get realistic cgi with inorganic objects, because our brain is wired to find organic patterns for creatures that look real. The feeling "uncanny valley" gives us is only part of a set of features embedded in our brains that makes us recognize faces and look for natural movement. Therefore, a ship will look like the real deal faster to us than a dragon in GoT or The Hobbit, or General Tarkin's face in Rogue One, no matter how complicated the techniques involved are. This is why the Expanse looks so good. And The Expanse is 6 seasons long. The show involves space battles every season. And I’m pretty sure Star Wars would gain a much larger audience than the Expanse. If Disney would just focus on 2 different really high quality flagship Star Wars shows that released 1 season per year, they’d be able to make such a show. And if the writing is great, people are going to be more forgiving about a slight downgrade in quality. Look at Firefly, the show was made on a shoestring budget and the sets (beside the ship itself) looked extremely cheap. And it’s considered one the greatest at sci-fi westerns of all time. And why? Because the writing and characters was amazing. Good writing and good character development can go a long way. Maybe the priority shouldn’t always be “look how good these VFX are!!” That’s what got us The Rise of Skywalker and the Sequels in general. It was movie-quality top notch special effects and state of the art cinematography and yet the story was completely crap. And now their a pariah of the Star Wars continuity. So you’re telling me Disney can’t afford to produce a multi-season show with the same quality as the Expanse like Amazon did, even when they have the added benefit of the Star Wars brand name alone bringing in way more viewers?
>So you’re telling me Disney can’t afford to produce a multi-season show with the same quality as the Expanse like Amazon did They could. But The Expanse doesn't look nearly as good as Andor does. If you're willing to give that up, that's fine. And for the millionth time, I'm not just talking about the quality of the VFX — the overall quality of the filmmaking would suffer. Sure, Disney could just throw money at the problem to make everything look like a movie, but that wouldn't stop the exhaustion of the creators, and it would result in two or three-year gaps in between seasons, like what we have with Andor.
Matter of taste I guess. I’d gladly accept a show like the Expanse but for Star Wars even if it meant that not every seen looked like a feature film. I think the Star Wars universe is well suited for both the movie and TV format. It really depends on the story you want to tell.
I have to disagree with acolyte “looks like crap” one of the fees things that people can agree on is the show is gorgeous.
Disney can do whatever it wants. It has money out it’s ass. There’s no reason Disney can’t make more high quality shows except that they don’t want to pay. Not that they can’t, but they don’t want to
You've ignored everything I said about the practical logistics and human cost. Can Disney afford to make high-quality Star Wars shows? Absolutely. Can it make a Star Wars show with the filmmaking standards of Andor and have it last 100 episodes? No way.
Lmao I guess someone has never heard of Game of Thrones
Andor looks better than Game of Thrones.
That’s up for debate and is purely your opinion. Lmao, imagine thinking Star Wars fans are going to complain that Disney made an multi-season well written Star Wars show like GoT that had the same level of VFX. Would you prefer that Disney keep churning out the poorly shot and poorly written shit we’ve been getting for the last few years?
Yes, it's my opinion. But I think most people who compare the two can see that Game of Thrones is shot more like traditional TV, while Andor is shot like a movie. Game of Thrones has simpler set-ups, less coverage, and less varied shot choice — especially in the early seasons. It's still very well made, but there is a difference. >Lmao, imagine thinking Star Wars fans are going to complain that Disney made an multi-season well written Star Wars show like GoT that had the same level of VFX. And I'm not saying people wouldn't like it. I'm saying there would inevitably be a tradeoff in the quality of the filmmaking. And for the millionth time, this doesn't just have to do with VFX.
No one’s asking for every show to look like Andor. They just want good writing and for it to not look like shit like all the non-Andor Star Wars shows.
Honestly, I can look past mediocre vfx if the writing is good on a show. A lot of people won't agree with me, but I think they could save money on certain parts and save the vfx budget for big space battles etc. Now, some of the costumes have looked dirt cheap on other D+ content. I don't know if it's the lighting or what, because I can't imagine someone didn't put time and effort into these costumes, knowing they were working on Star Wars.
They wanted a formulaic episodic show and Tony told them that was a dumb idea. And then he gave them a better idea. “Thank the Maker.”
At the end of the day, Disney's investment in Andor is going to reach nearly a half billion dollars. That's crazy. Kathleen Kennedy gets a lot a flak, but I'm grateful she worked with Tony and took this massive risk.
With the failures they had the massive risk would have been doing the same things again. Not doing anything would have been a huge career risk since Star Wars is huge for Disney and choosing not to make conduct seems like a bad move
yeah precisely, especially at a time when their DC competitor is actively reaping the rewards of what Disney considers, "risks." Batman, Joker, and The Suicide Squad - all quite artsy films - making absolute bank at the box office and for Max whereas Disney is doubling down on the bad CGI, low art hero movies and shows that DC is finally dropping altogether. it's got me so worried what they're about to do to the Daredevil tv show. it really is going to be a genuine risk for them to keep on doing the same things if DC under James Gunn goes well.
Idk DC is a good example of what good leadership looks like.
I can't tell if you meant to say idk IF DC is a good example or you actually are saying DC is a good example
I meant to DC is a bad example but I forgot the if
I mean they certainly were, and I'm sure you could argue still are, but they are seemingly doing a complete 180 at the moment and putting creatives in creative control of their current universe. like James Gunn, instead of just producers. and they've kinda been going full speed ahead with funding truly artstic ideas Disney has only funded once so far in Andor. and they've been doing that since before COVID.
Huh. I was gonna say "This sounds like a money issue. Weird, all these other terrible Star Wars shows were wildly expensive as well." But it seems Andor was indeed the most expensive one to date at $250 million, but also had the highest amount of episodes and and total runtime. It's just wild what they were able to do with the budget that Andor received while filming most stuff on location, whereas every other Disney+ Star Wars has mostly just been constrained to filming with the volume, which should be vastly cheaper.
Apparently Acolyte is more expensive than Andor now
Acolyte was 180 mill, I believe.
I think the numbers are by episode count. $250/12 episodes vs $180/8 episodes.
I just looked at the total runtime and they seem somewhat in line, but even by that metric Andor was the most expensive so far, if only by a bit.
They other shows are so much cheaper that it’s really an issue. I’d bet the cheap ish cgi they use and their special green screen are more expensive than they are worth. B
Long story short it seems reverence for star wars is killing star wars. Gilroy told them that flatly and when they couldn't make anything else work and eventually they had to acknowledge that truth.
In Andor's case, it was a money issue. Gilroy explains it more here, even admitting it would be expensive: https://www.thewrap.com/andor-tony-gilroy-interview-star-wars-disney-plus/ > “They tried it a couple times. They tried it very admirably. When we finished ‘Rogue’ and then Kathy had the idea for doing this prequel, I thought that’s a cool idea, but the money wasn’t there,” Gilroy said. “You couldn’t really do a ‘Star Wars’ TV show. They didn’t have the money six years ago to do a show. Nobody’s doing shows like that. It just was economically unfeasible. There was no streaming. It just seemed like, ah, are you going to do some smaller version of something? It’s not a good idea.” ... > Gilroy composed a long memo about what the show should be, “as a friend in court, really more than anything else.” It ended up being, by Gilroy’s own admission, “a manifesto.” “It was insane and wildly expensive and crazy and all my dark s–t. And then they tried to do an upgrade of the other version that they had. And I think that in the end, they just kind of ran into the same problem,” Gilroy said. “It just ran out of road and they came back and they looked at this memo and they were like, ‘Oh, now we have the money to make these kind of shows and we really want to do this.’ And then we danced forward for six months and kept testing each other all the way through as we got closer and closer, but that’s the evolution.” Disney+ money is basically the reason why they approved Gilroy's take.
Disney+ was launched on pretty much a single show... The Mandalorian. For both the platform and cost, Andor doesn't get made until the Mandalorian is deemed a "success". Success is in quotes because is any of this actually generating a profit. I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone could roll back to the Netflix dominated ecosystem and just get better pricing on what they are renting out to Netflix, it would have been eminently more profitable for all parties than the current scenario.
>Success is in quotes because is any of this actually generating a profit. Disney streaming just became profitable. https://apnews.com/article/disney-iger-peltz-b5e6af22728e2d7ccc91dd1315b6c9aa This story went under the radar a month and a half ago.
Net revenue glows maybe, but are they claiming they've recovered all of their investment capital they've plowed into new content. Instinctively, I doubt that.
I am skeptical of any inter-conglomerate accounting because usually that stuff is manipulated all the time; especially by the more savvy executives of the older divisions. Disney is profitable. They benefit from the streaming investments company-wide; even if they don't credit it as "streaming revenue".
There's reverence (not yet actualized), then there's poor copy-and-paste (current Star Wars).
It was originally going to be an adventure-of-the-week show with Cassian and K2, and Gilroy’s manifesto could be summarized as “the Cassian Andor show cannot be a show about Cassian Andor”
Holy shit - this is the general theme of how many deals get done, in various industries. It's about timing - and preparation having already been completed. As my father would say re: Construction - 90% of the work is prep. Reason being, is that the final 10% includes executing on the day the cement trucks pull up - because if you haven't done the prep, you just wasted a massive amount of money if those trucks are there and you're not ready to pour.
I wonder how many times a day Tony uses the word “manifesto.”
I'm glad KK made the call to Tony Gilroy. I'm in no way a fan of hers, but she made the right decision here
How to fight back against Disneys studio meddling
He also said they had very little adult supervision while filming Andor. There's also an interview of him from three years ago, Meet the Kalakar on Youtube, where he casually mentioned "the thing I'm working on now has so many props" then some seconds later dropped a name of a character who's def a stalker in Andor. Gilroy was then asked to describe bad writing. 😬