Talking About 'Star Wars' Fanmunism

Is Disney destroying Star Wars over George Lucas royalties?

Whatever gave you that idea?

Look. As a Star Wars fan who has seen every Star Wars film (including the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie from 2008) in theaters, there is nothing more mind-bogglingly annoying than other fans who come up with silly theories such as The Walt Disney Company is destroying Star Wars so George Lucas can’t earn royalties.

First of all, just because a vocal and persistent minority of the fandom has obsessively jumped on the Disney ruined Star Wars bandwagon for any of x reasons does not mean that theories such as this one are valid, much less based on reality. The Internet is crawling with toxic fans who hate the Sequel Trilogy - especially The Last Jedi - for a plethora of cinematic sins, real or (mostly) imagined, including:

1. J.J. Abrams ignored the Expanded Universe
2. Too many SJW tropes and minority characters
3. Rian Johnson is a twit who ruined Luke Skywalker
4. Leia Organa = Mary Poppins in The Last Jedi
5. Star Wars is too political
6. The Force Awakens ripped off A New Hope
7. Fuel was never an issue in Star Wars till The Last Jedi
8. Kamikaze hyperspace maneuvers were never used before

And so on, and so on, and so on…..

Second, The Walt Disney Company and its subsidiary, Lucasfilm Ltd., are not destroying Star Wars to screw over George Lucas. Lucas, as a result of his stock holdings in Disney, is now one of the largest stake owners in the company, so even though he no longer owns Lucasfilm or its intellectual properties (IPs), he still makes money when the profits go up. In any case, he is still around, and some of his former staffers and directors he mentored years ago (including Ron Howard and Dave Filoni) still rely on his input, since he is the creator of both the Star Wars saga and the Indiana Jones series.

Third, although Lucas has not spoken of the love-hate relationship that some fans have with him in a while, let’s not forget that the same fringe of the fandom that is now in I hate Disney mode includes individuals who said Lucas was a “hack” who ruined Star Wars when he made the Prequel Trilogy in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Lucas had this to say about how fans have reacted to his post-1980s films:

The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this? They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it,

There’s a new term that I learned the other day from Quora’s Eric Lowe: Fanmunism. It’s a portmanteau of “fan” and “Communism,” and it refers to the mindset that some fans have when it comes to major franchises, especially Star Trek and Star Wars.

Basically, fanmunists say things along the lines of, “I don’t like what Rian Johnson did (or what Ron Howard did, or what Gareth Edwards did, or what J.J. Abrams did), so let’s put a petition online and see if we can get Disney (note that it’s never Lucasfilm) to de-canonize X movie and make another version of X that reflects what we want to see.”

Folks, the film industry simply does not work like that. And Star Wars is not an intellectual property that belongs to fanmunists who cheer gleefully whenever Lucasfilm runs into difficulties, such as when Solo: A Star Wars Story underperformed at the box office in 2018. I was aghast when I saw so-called fans crowing over their “successful boycott” of Solo and claiming that if “Disney” didn’t give them the content they wanted, they’d boycott Episode IX as well to send the company a message: “Give us what we want, or we will starve the franchise by not buying tickets or Star Wars merchandise.”

[Star Wars is] designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, 'Here's the answer.' It's to say, 'Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?'

George Lucas, when asked why he was retiring and selling Lucasfilm, cited many reasons, such as his desire to not make any more blockbusters and focus on smaller movies. He was also no longer a young man, and running the Lucasfilm empire was simply wearing him out. It was he who approached Disney and offered to sell Lucasfilm to them, not the other way ‘round. He believed that Bob Iger and his people would protect the company and its IPs, and he knew Star Wars would go on without him.

But let’s not forget how shabbily fans treated him from the late 1990s till he retired:

“When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it's a source. They don't realize it is just one person typing out their opinion.”