Tuesday's announcement that the Game of Thrones showrunners would create their own Star Wars series did exactly what a boardroom of marketing executives anticipated it would do: Create a perfect storm of fan-hype years before the release of any movie. No focus groups necessary. Get David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the guys responsible for the most-popular fantasy TV show of our lifetime, to make an installment of the greatest sci-fi franchise of the last four decades. Easy decision.
I get why people are excited. Benioff and Weiss deserve the utmost credit for taking George R.R. Martin's massive fantasy epic and adapting it into a TV show that exploded in fame—reaching fans well beyond the fantasy genre. The first five seasons of Game of Thrones are incredible television. Benioff and Weiss took Martin's beloved material and HBO's massive budget and made a fun-as-hell fantasy soap opera with gallons of blood.
But, after Season Five—once the show had passed all the material Martin had written—Game of Thrones fell apart. While the action got bigger and more expensive, the plot turned into lazy fan fiction. The characters became flat and stupid. The narrative lost all logic. Complex, well-acted characters like Tyrion Lannister weren't killed, instead they were misused, and abandoned, which is much worse. If there hadn't been some dragons killing zombies, the season would have been an insult to fans.
Now, Benioff and Weiss, who've barely proven themselves beyond Thrones, are in charge of a Star Wars series, and they're writing it. Will they turn it into embarrassing fan service? Will they make a big epic movie that abandons the plot?
These are legitimate concerns that I hope Disney considered prior to hiring them. Fans have every right to be concerned (and just because we'll still buy the Star Wars action figures, Star Wars Legos, Star Wars Tide Pods, you name it, doesn't mean we can't be intensely critical of Disney's decision making around the beloved franchise). Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy doesn't have the best track record of hiring people to make Star Wars movies, considering she's replaced four directors in the last two years.
Here's a question for Disney that writer Martin Cahill raised on Twitter in the wake of Tuesday's news:
Why not, as Cahill asks, put the future of Star Wars in the hands of Guillermo del Toro, Ryan Coogler, Taika Waititi, Patty Jenkins? Why not give the beloved franchise to a critically and financially proven movie director/writer who has handled something of this magnitude? Why give it to two white guys who thought it was a good idea to make a Civil War alternate history called Confederate, while white supremacists were marching through the streets? Why give it to two guys who have a long controversial history of depicting sexual violence? Why give it to two guys who put an Ed Sheeran cameo into a fantasy show about dragons?
Let's hope it wasn't simply to create advanced buzz.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
