I love Star Wars. I really do. The action, the characters and especially the light sabers: everything about it strikes that perfect balance between sci-fi and fantasy for me, between light-hearted action-adventure and serious socio-political analog. The series is easily one of the best in production today and its very best entries deservedly rank among the very best movies ever made.
But Star Wars has a problem: has had a problem for a long time now, actually. And, no, it’s not Lucas or Jar Jar or any misguided gripes a certain subset of fans have against The Last Jedi. Star Wars has a woman problem.
Or, rather, Star Wars has a problem with a lack of women. It’s not just in front of the camera, either (although the recent movies since Lucasfilm’s absorption into the Disney corporate family have largely solved that particular problem). Despite professing to speak to entire generations of film fans and its emphasis on diversity in front of the camera, the franchise has been lead exclusively by straight, White men.
There’s nothing wrong with straight, White men, obviously. I’m one of them. What is wrong with this picture, however, is how weirdly homogenous one of the most creative and vibrant blockbusters of the past two centuries is despite the paninfinite possibilities that its expansive and wildly varied setting holds for it. The future, especially of film (and especially especially of science fiction films), is as multitudinous and diverse as the people paying at the box office to see them: covering the full spectrum of Human experiences.
And, to their credit, Disney has acknowledged this shortcoming in the franchise. They have pledged to correct it sooner, rather than later. They have committed to incorporating more women and people of color behind the camera — and especially in the director’s chair — to fully bring the property into the twenty-first century. And, on International Women’s Day of all days, they announced that yet another straight, White man was going to take a up the mantle of Star Wars.
More specifically, they announced that Jon Favreau, best known for his direction of the first two Iron Man movies and Disney’s live action remake of The Jungle Book. He will be both planning and helming a live-action Star Wars TV series, although details on specifically what it would be about and how it would tie into the movies (if it will at all) were scarce. They simply announced the project and the guy in charge of it and left it at that.
Now, under any other circumstances, this would have been a gangbusters announcement for Disney. Jon Favreau is an excellent director, who has specifically made landmark strides in the science-fiction and actions genres: the very same cross-section that Star Wars exists in. He has an excellent working relationship with Disney, which combined with his body of work makes him uniquely qualified for this kind of project. And given the relative trickle of Star Wars content on the big screen (at least compared to their Marvel counterparts) and the lack of a tie-in televisual project for the franchise (again, like what Marvel has), it fits a distinct need that the Disney and the franchise currently aren’t meeting for many fans.
The problem is that this flies in the face of Disney’s prior assurances that they were going to vary up the kinds of creators that they put in charge of this particular franchise. It comes in the wake of announcing that The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson will be heading up a new trilogy of films based on his last movie’s success. This also follows the announcement of the Game of ThronesTV series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss writing and producing their own Star Wars series. And the cherry on top is that they did this on no less than International Women’s Day: in what would have been the perfect opportunity to shake up the homogeneity behind the camera.
The future might indeed be female, but you’d never guess that looking at Star Wars.