JIM GERAGHTY: The ‘Gayest’ Star Wars? Hollywood Creativity Falters.

The math is complicated, but the gist is that, while the Star Wars movies make a ton of money in ticket sales, they also cost a ton to make, and Disney spends a ton on marketing them, even though they have the best built-in audience imaginable. It adds up to a much thinner profit margin than the general public would expect, although Disney does make additional money through merchandising, theme parks, video games, etc.

That Forbes article notes that, over time, the Star Wars movies’ revenue has declined at the box office. In fact, we haven’t had a new Star Wars movie released in theaters since 2019, and the viewership for the television series appears to be declining over time, too. Last year I wrote that perhaps the increasingly frequent Disney+ shows were oversaturating the fanbase. Or perhaps Star Wars is best enjoyed on the big screen.

Hearing yet another cheerful declaration that the latest offering is “the gayest,” my reaction is that the modern creative class in Hollywood isn’t that creative. We keep getting told that a new character is a triumph for “representation,” and yet the overwhelming majority of those characters come and go with a yawn. Making a character gay or lesbian or trans or any other “identity” doesn’t make them inherently interesting or compelling.

In fact, I’d argue that when characters are created with “representation” in mind, they’re just about destined to be boring because they aren’t allowed to be too flawed. If, for example, you make your television series’ first and usually only gay character a kleptomaniac, someone out there will loudly complain that your series is portraying gays as kleptomaniacs. Any character who is offering “representation” must therefore be nice and safe and pleasant and unlikely to offend or bother any potential viewer. The characters become symbols, not evocations of a flesh-and-blood human being.

Geraghty’s take that “the modern creative class in Hollywood isn’t that creative” is certainly borne out by the Critical Drinker’s look at The Acolyte’s first episode. I’ve got a bad feeling about this…: