Disney's Best Laid Plans

So the Rise of Skywalker came out, and it was not a good movie. I don’t want to get into why here, as that has been covered extensively on every other corner of the internet, but I do want to address something that have seen getting mentioned as the key fault in Disney’s space trilogy.

It’s become a common talking point that Disney did not have an overarching plan for their new batch of Star Wars films, and that the story of Rey, Kylo and the rest would have been better served by meticulous collaborative planning by the creatives in charge. Like Marvel, people say, Marvel had a plan. But did they? People seem to think Kevin Feige had the details of Endgame in mind from the beginning of the MCU, or at least since the first Avengers film. In reality this couldn’t be further from the truth.   

Avengers: Endgame certainly seemed to tie 10+ years and 20+ movies together in a nice little (or actually a very large) bow. But what were the specifics of the plan? That Thanos was going to be the main villain? Ok, that’s not so hard to pull off, what else? I am struggling to think of major story or thematic beats that were set up in previous MCU films that were paid off in Endgame, other than simply assembling all our heroes together in one place for a big fight.

So how did Marvel maintain the all-important continuity? Well they didn’t really. In one film (I honestly don’t remember which) we are told that the infinity gauntlet is being kept in the Asgardian vault, then in Thor: Ragnarok we are told nope, it was a fake all along. Things like time travel and nano-tech are introduced late on in a mostly hand wavy fashion; there are whole subplots from phase one films that are dropped without mention later down the line.    

Hell, Spiderman, who turned out to be one of the most liked and important characters in the whole MCU only showed up at all because Sony gave in and struck a deal with the mouse to have a new version of the character run around with the avengers. Feige didn’t know that would happen in 2012, he probably didn’t even know in 2015, so the idea that Endgames plot, which heavily features the emotional bond between Tony Stark and Peter Parker, was planned in any great detail years in advance just doesn’t make any sense.  

What Marvel were, and still are, good at is not continuity planning, but adaptation, rolling with the punches, going with the flow, adjusting the story of their films to fit new characters or audience attitudes. People don’t like Thor? We’ll radically change his character for the third film, no one will mind. And they didn’t.

This adaptability comes from not committing to strongly to anything in the first place. It’s well known that all Marvel films have this flat, bland visual style that very few directors can make distinctive. This is useful as it allows elements to be added or replaced very late in production. Let’s use Ragnarok again as an example. In the trailer for that film there is a scene in a New York alleyway where Thor gets his hammer broken by Cate Blanchett. In the final product that same scene happens in a field in the middle of nowhere.

                                                         (comparison of the Ragnarok trailer with the final film)

Not a hugely important detail but indicative of the malleability of these films. In Endgame they even digitally replaced certain costumes in post-production. Not committing to anything until the last minute and keeping everything as a blank green slate allows Marvel to adapt quickly, like shoving Spiderman into the climax of Civil War.

The visual stuff isn’t so bothersome though, the real problem for me is the thematic meat of each story. The reason all the MCU films fit together so well is that none of them are ever about anything meaningful. No one ever really changes and the status quo is constantly reset, like a TV show. Dr Strange can’t act “out of character” because he doesn’t have a very strong character to begin with. Ditto Black Widow, Ant Man, Hulk; these people can do anything because they never commit to anything. The Hulk goes through a significant change in personality OFF SCREEN, between films. And no one really cares because “it fits”.

I don’t want Star Wars to have a plan, I’m glad this trilogy didn’t have a plan. The reason ROS is so bad is precisely because they tried to retroactively fit a plan onto a story that didn’t need one. The most recent James Bond film Spectre made the same mistake. By the same token, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was so good because it was allowed to be its own thing, develop its characters in interesting ways, and not be beholden to some overarching masterplan. Johnson could tell the story he wanted, and it gave us something truly resonant.

It worries me that audiences seem to want their future blockbusters to be more producer controlled, more bland and non-committal, made by market researchers and not artists. I fear for a world in which every franchise is governed by “the plan.” I mean, remember Game of Thrones?