Star Wars fans haven’t exactly had an easy time of it. After George Lucas’s excellent Original Trilogy (which has exploded like a jackpot casino), he followed up with the less-well-received prequel trilogy.
The prequels have gone back and forth in popularity within the fanbase. Some fans love it, others hate it, and it’s remained an argument for years since. Then Disney bought out LucasArts and promised to breathe new life into the Star Wars franchise.
Things were looking good even after they released “The Force Awakens”. Sure, the plot wasn’t exactly original, and the new characters weren’t exactly outstanding in any particular way.
However, considering the backlash the prequels got, you could hardly blame Disney, J.J. Abrams, and Kathleen Kennedy (I’ll get back to her later) for wanting to play it safe. And thus, “The Force Awakens” was released and got mostly positive responses.
I guess feeling like they had established themselves, Disney released the rest of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, plus Solo and Rogue One, and successfully managed to create an incoherent mess of a franchise with barely any consistent logic between (except Rogue One, which ended up being surprisingly good).
And it’s clear that the problems the franchise was having were entirely top-down. Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson made it quite clear that neither of them had any understanding of what it was that the fans liked about Star Wars and were instead more interested in pushing certain political agendas than creating a beloved story.
In fact, Kathleen Kennedy infamously said, “Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be.”
I mean, it’s not just that the statement is unfathomably untrue because there are thousands of Star Wars Comics, Books, Video Games, and Extended Universe content they could have sourced from. No, they had even been handed outlines directly from George Lucas about where he wanted the story to go.
To quote Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, “At some point in the process, George told me that he had completed outlines for three new movies. He agreed to send us three copies of the outlines: one for me; one for Alan Braverman; and one for Alan Horn, who’d just been hired to run our studio. Alan Horn and I read George’s outlines and decided we needed to buy them, though we made clear in the purchase agreement that we would not be contractually obligated to adhere to the plotlines he’d laid out.”
So they had all this material to work with. Was Kathleen Kennedy’s team so monumentally incompetent as to run the franchise into the dirt anyway?
A Diamond in the Rough
Well, it wasn’t all bad news for Disney. While the movies might have ended up a disaster, the Star Wars TV shows, headed up by Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau, were an immense success and quite popular among the fanbase.
Then they released “The Mandalorian”, the first live-action Star Wars show- and it was a hit! It was truly a breath of fresh air compared to everything else that Disney had been churning out. “The Mandalorian” felt like a series that understood the franchise it was set in, understood what the fans wanted, and respected said fans enough to not step on the legacy of everything George Lucas had built before it.
“The Mandalorian” wasn’t even a perfect show either. It’s got continuity errors, it’s got nostalgia bait, its got merchandise bait, and it’s got characterization inconsistencies- but none of that mattered to most of the fanbase because the show was fun and felt genuinely like Star Wars, and did not feel like it was shoveling some political agenda down your throat.
Season Two dropped and was just as successful. Of course, I could nitpick at the fight choreography, or the repetitive episode structure, or the dump truck of nostalgia bait, but suffice it to say that I and many fans enjoyed Season 2 as much, if not more than the first.
“We’re Doomed.” – C3P0
So if “The Mandalorian” is so popular, how on Earth could it be doomed, you might ask? Disney would have to be nuts not to pursue one of the most profitable avenues of the franchise at the moment, right? Well, let me weave you a tale, my friend.
Actress Gina Carano played the character of Cara Dune in “The Mandalorian”, a kickass side character who appeared in both the finales for Season one and two. However, Gina Carano was fired after she shared a “controversial” post where she likened today’s political climate to Nazi Germany. Here’s the quote in full:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.”
So how dare she compared today’s political climate to the Holocaust, the Media cried out! I think that’s a bit rich, considering that much of the Media has been calling fifty percent of the country “Deplorables” and “Nazis” nonstop for the past four years. Well, hypocrisy never stopped them before. This outrage mob demanded her head, and Disney cowed.
“Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm, and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” said a Lucasfilm spokesperson in a statement. “Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”
What other “controversial” posts did Ms. Carano share, you might ask? Well, she did put “Beep / Boop / Bop” in her Twitter profile a couple of months ago. No, I’m not joking.
You might have noticed that it’s become trendy to put one’s preferred pronouns in one’s Twitter bio. Even Presidential candidates have been doing it. This farce is to appease the Transgender community, who are so confused about their biology it can be hard for me and you to determine whether they’re male or female.
In other words, it seems like Ms. Carano doesn’t buy into the Hollywood Left-wing Culture, and when she decried hating one another based on their political beliefs, she was so hated she herself got fired.
And you know what’s really telling about these Disney execs? They didn’t even have the decency to tell her she was fired to her face. It’s come out that Disney simply announced that she had been, with no phone call or anything. Gina Carano found out she had been fired along with everyone else when it had already gone viral on social media. What a scummy thing to do.
When asked afterward about the whole debacle in an interview, she said, “Earlier on last year before The Mandalorian came out, they wanted me to use their exact wording for an apology over pronoun usage. I declined and offered a statement in my own words. I made clear I wanted nothing to do with mocking the transgender community, and was just drawing attention to the abuse of the mob in forcing people to put pronouns in their bio.
“That was heart-breaking, but I didn’t want to take away from the hard work of everyone who worked on the project, so I said ok. That was the last time I was contacted about any type of public statement or apology from Lucasfilm. I found out through social media, like everyone else, that I had been fired.”
But… “The Mandalorian”?
So you also might be wondering how this affects the rest of the show. Since Gina Carano doesn’t play a central protagonist, “The Mandalorian” certainly doesn’t need her to continue.
The problem is, Pedro Pascal (the stoic “Mandalorian” himself) got busted too. A while back, he shared a meme that lumped the confederates, the Nazis, and MAGA supporters together as “Losers”. Fans, outraged at Gina Carano being fired for her relatively harmless statement, demanded to know why Pedro Pascal wasn’t fired, but in fact, praised for his post.
There’s been no official response, but rumors have it that Pedro Pascal might end up leaving “The Mandalorian” anyway. YouTuber Grace Randolf pointed out two very interesting articles from Deadline. One which reads, “‘The Mandalorian Actress Gina Carano & UTA Part ways In Wake of Social Media Controversy”. This article was almost immediately followed by another Deadline article, titled, “Pedro Pascal to star as Joel in ‘The Last of Us’ HBO Series Based on Video Game”.
Interesting timing, eh?
So it’s quite possible that Pedro Pascal may end up stepping away from “The Mandalorian” to work on this new project. “The Last of Us” is a very popular video game IP (and even more controversial, nowadays!), so it’s not entirely unreasonable that he’s caught on to which way the wind is blowing.
However, that’s entirely speculation and rumor, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Gina Carano Strikes Back!
Oho, you thought that was the end of our tale! Alas, you were wrong, my friend. It turns out that Gina Carano had no intention of taking this lying down. In a surprise update almost immediately following her firing and “scandal”, the Daily Wire reported that Gina Carano had accepted their offer to develop and produce her own movie for them.
“The Daily Wire is helping make one of my dreams — to develop and produce my own film — come true. I cried out and my prayer was answered,” Carano is quoted saying, “I am sending out a direct message of hope to everyone living in fear of cancellation by the totalitarian mob. I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before, and I hope it inspires others to do the same. They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.”
If you’re unfamiliar with “The Daily Wire”, it’s a conservative news outlet featuring Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and a number of others. This is the second movie that The Daily Wire will produce (assuming they don’t have any others being developed quietly). Their first movie, made in partnership with Dallas Sonnier’s production company, Bonfire Legend, was called “Run Hide Fight” and released a few weeks ago in January.
About Author
