Originally Posted by
godisawesome
Actually, demand for Rey toys was much greater than LFL expected when TFA came out, as it was with Finn as well. TFA also set a new record for domestic box office in the US in spite of that, and clearly had the vast bulk of the fanbase enjoying it, with even the criticism being much more passive and irritated rather than repulsed.
Dudes loved TFA. Then dudes loved Rogue One, which also had a female lead. And maybe more importantly for both films, it was shown that, at worst, the fanbase and male demographic was equally enthusiastic about good, epic Star Wars properties regardless of whether the leads were female and non-white, and at best, that reaching out to female and non-white audiences led to significant financial rewards.
The Disney+ shows also followed suit and proved that point.
In point of actual fact… it’s really only the properties in the Disney’s era that reoriented themselves back around white dudes that have underperformed, even if they were still profitable or decent. The Last Jedi isn’t Rey’s movie anymore than it’s Finn’s; it’s a film about Luke and Kylo that uses Rey as a plot tool and observer for that story, and gave Finn intentionally insulting busy-work… and a third of the audience dropped away. And thanks to LFL’s love-affair with TLJ, Rey still had Kylo parasitically taking over much of the story going into The Rise of Skywalker, which ran off more people so that half the audience form TFA was gone…and that half was made up disproportionately of women and non-white audience members.
Solo was just too much money for too modest a story, though, yes, they expected it to make money by centering it on the character everyone believed dudes loved most from the OT… and then everyone walked away talking about how awesome Donald Glover was as Lando instead.
Whenever a choice was made that appealed more to the “traditional Star Wars demographic,” it didn’t pay dividends in the Disney era - even when the traditional white dude demographic stayed more “loyal” than other demographics.
Now, if someone wanted to counter by arguing that TLJ specifically was also preaching some anti-white dude agenda, I could understand their mistake, but it would still be a mistake; just because the film IS centered on white dudes as the main protagonists that matter more than everyone else, it doesn’t mean that it did a good job with them. It may be arguing “You’re white dude protagonists suck compared to my white dude protagonists!” but it’s certainly not any kind of “girl power” movie.
…And tying this back to its very thin relevance to this hotel, it wasn’t that people never found Rey interesting that making her the heroic character of the “Star Cruiser Experience” didn’t help it; it was, if anything, that LFL neutered both her as a character and the entire ST by rejecting the central Rey Vs Kylo conflict in favor of trying to sell Rey + Kylo as the central heroes when Kylo is a repellant protagonist. The Star Cruiser doesn’t do much with Rey and Kylo, it’s true, but what it does is still try to juggle the conflict between them that LFL despises with the male privilege that it wants Kylo to get from Rey.