Star wars

This week, the new Star Wars picture – the first live action film since 2019’s commercially successful but largely ridiculed Rise of Skywalker – will come out in cinemas. Clunkily entitled The Mandalorian and Grogu, it is a big-screen spin-off of the once-successful and now largely passé Mandalorian series. A lot is riding on its success, and Lucasfilm, now controlled by Dave Filoni, will be very relieved if it is a hit. Unfortunately, audiences don’t seem especially interested. Advance word on it has been mediocre for some time now – the words “feature-length television movie" have been used more than once – and the box office prediction for its opening weekend is currently somewhere between $70 and $85 million.

Ever so often, a film project – especially one that never ended up happening – emerges into the public domain to a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. So it has proved with Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film, tentatively entitled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The picture was to have been a sequel to the little-loved The Rise of Skywalker and focused on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia who finds himself torn between the noble impulses of the Force and the more dastardly influence of the Dark Side. Given that Soderbergh is nobody’s idea of a conventional blockbuster director, the results would, at the very least, have been interesting.

The news that the actress Gina Carano has secured a climbdown and undisclosed (but undoubtedly) generous settlement from Disney over her dismissal from The Mandalorian television series in 2021 is sure to have far-reaching consequences that stretch far beyond La La Land. Carano posted a triumphant statement on X, saying, “I hope this brings some healing to the force,” thanked Elon Musk for bankrolling her case and concluded by saying “Yes, I’m smiling.” Disney, meanwhile, released their own, terse assessment in which they announced, “We look forward to identifying opportunities to work together with Ms. Carano in the near future.” It was a win for Carano on every level.

Tony Gilroy’s Andor, having concluded its second season on Disney+ this week, stands as a monumental achievement given the pressures of Disney-era Star Wars leadership and its Kathleen Kennedy authoritarian “The Force is Female” complex.  The excellence seems almost accidental, a trick of timing and opportunity. With Gilroy exercising the authority of an auteur director from outside the world of science fiction, equipped with sensibilities derived from corporate thrillers and conflicts that pit differing clans of elites against one another, the series is the standout of an otherwise unmemorable or eagerly forgotten era of Star Wars creations.

The critical reception to the second series of Andor has been nothing short of ecstatic. At the time of writing, it has a hugely impressive, near-unprecedented 99 percent “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, far in excess of any other Star Wars movie or television spin-off. Its creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, who has been open in the past about his relative disdain for fantasy in general and Star Wars in particular, has been doing the interview circuit and making it clear that he has no interest in fan service. He told the Daily Telegraph, “Some people have a problem: ‘It’s not for kids. There aren’t enough creatures in it.’ Well, I don’t make that show. Sorry.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films represent two of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Hollywood history. After the failure of David Lynch’s ambitious but deeply, deeply flawed Eighties attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi epic, the project was seen as all but impossible, being both vastly expensive and presumed to be of interest mainly to the kind of young men who prefer to watch films in their parents’ basements rather than at their local theater. It also didn’t help that the first film was released day-and-date with the HBO Max streaming service; the fact that it made more than $400 million at the box office was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle.

The death of the great actor James Earl Jones, at the robust age of ninety-three, has been marked with tributes from every walk of society, not least the acting profession. There were many remarkable things about Jones’s career, from his being the last surviving member of the cast of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove to his many and varied Shakespearean roles, all of which he excelled in (save, perhaps, Mark Rylance’s misguided attempt to cast him as a superannuated Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic in London in 2013, which was critically ridiculed). Yet the reason why he has a fame and repute far beyond just about any other actor of his generation is simple: he was the voice of Darth Vader.

Did you see Wish last weekend? Chances are, according to the box office receipts, you didn’t. The latest big-budget Disney extravaganza, with the voices of Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, was expected to be a hit, grossing a decent $50 million on its opening weekend. Instead, to the studio’s chagrin, it came in third with a comparatively measly gross of $31.7 million, bested not only by the second weekend of the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but, considerably more surprisingly, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which soared past early estimates to come in with an impressive $32.5 million. Not bad for a film without any bankable movie stars (sorry, Joaquin), mixed reviews, a B- CinemaScore rating and a subject with which American audiences are not intimately familiar.

A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.

Ask your average man on the street — or at least your average clued-up man with a decent knowledge of modern Hollywood — about the films of William Friedkin, who has died aged eighty-seven, and he will confidently sing the praises of Friedkin’s legendary pictures, The French Connection and The Exorcist. Then if he is pressed on the other eighteen films Friedkin directed, ranging from the excellent and underrated to the dismal, and a look of panic is likely to come over his face before he excuses himself and rushes into a nearby subway (or, if he is in New York, flees to an overground railway in homage to the legendary car chase scene in The French Connection). It is your choice whether you do a Popeye Doyle and head off in frantic pursuit, or leave him be.

For the past several days, the internet has been focused on the astounding Independence Day failure of Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny, which was beaten on its opening day by an anti-human trafficking indie movie starring Jim Caviezel, Sound of Freedom. Of course Indy 5 will, and already has, raked in far more than the Christian-themed film based on the true story of OUR Rescue founder Tim Ballard, but the latter film already made its $14 million budget back while going toe to toe with a $300 million CGI-laden Disney-Lucasfilm picture. But the real question people should be asking is: will this embarrassment finally be the end of Kathleen Kennedy?