“The Goonies in space” might be an eye-roll-inducing description of Lucasfilm’s next big outing, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge, as it has all the right ingredients to succeed—if it can get the whole nostalgia thing right.
Let’s face it: 2024 has been a pretty rocky year for the galaxy far, far away. As we’ve seen in recent years, the Star Wars fandom seems just as confused as the upper echelon at Disney is when it comes to deciding what they actually want to see onscreen. Legacy characters and Member Berries … kind of work? But when they don’t, Lucasfilm turns to original stories (à la The Acolyte) only for audiences to agree that no, actually, they’d rather have stormtroopers and Skywalker saga references galore, thank you very much.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that, but all this is to say that Lucasfilm is struggling to replicate the formula that made Star Wars such a popular IP in the first place. Striking the right balance of familiarity and original storytelling is quite the tall order, as exemplified by Disney’s divisive sequel trilogy and those later seasons of The Mandalorian. But is leaning into nostalgia an inherently bad thing? Or will the upcoming Skeleton Crew series prove once and for all that we’re just a bunch of sentimental old fools?
Skeleton Crew could be a much-needed return to form for Star Wars
Skeleton Crew was created by Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts and his longtime creative partner/writer, Christopher Ford. The show, which stars Jude Law as a sort of Jedi, also has an absolutely stacked roster of directors from the likes of franchise veteran Bryce Dallas Howard, Lee Isaac Chung, Jake Schreier, and The Daniels, a.k.a. the duo behind Oscar darling Everything Everywhere All at Once.
During a roundtable discussion uploaded to YouTube, Watts & Co. talked about the inspirations for Skeleton Crew, and it’s full of ’80s Steven Spielberg callbacks—which could be its saving grace when considering just how far Star Wars has strayed away from its roots. Because whether you agree that George Lucas’ space opera is “for kids” or not, a fun one-off story set in the Star Wars universe that recreates the magic of Amblin classics like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial could make Skeleton Crew the kind of crowd-pleaser the studio so desperately needs.
More recently, it’s also been reported that Skeleton Crew will feature a nod to what might be Lucasfilm’s most hated project of all time: the Star Wars Holiday Special. Speaking with The HoloFiles, Watts and Ford highlighted a specific scene from the upcoming show which, from the sound of it, will recreate a moment from the 1978 TV special:
“We had to create this moment from multiple angles, because you see it in various parts of the scene. So we rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. We had to dig up the original designs of the costumes, which were in the Lucasfilm archive … Get all the original specs. We had to redo the music from scratch, because there was no copy of the actual score anywhere, so we had to rebuild that … It ended up being 20x more work than we anticipated, and our stunt coordinator is the main performer in it and he was able to re-choreograph the routine too, because it’s a very acrobatic routine … I will say, without saying what it is, which it is pretty obvious now, it was so much work and it was so worth it. My favorite part.”
Clearly, there’s a lot of care and attention to detail going into Skeleton Crew, with showrunners paying homage to the days of Star Wars past without shoving the obvious, Luke Skywalker-shaped references in audiences’ faces—which is more than I can say for The Mandalorian and the ill-fated The Book of Boba Fett. As for the show feeling a bit “kiddy” on the surface, I think naysayers might do best to remember that the people Amblin films like Gremlins or Jurassic Park were made for are all grown-up, meaning it could be a bit more mature than Disney is letting on, despite starring an ensemble of (mostly) children.
“As a kid, you want to go on an adventure,” said Watts, explaining that Skeleton Crew was heavily inspired by ’20s pirate serials and the “Amblin wonder” that so defined a generation. Again, despite having child protagonists, Watts made sure to clarify: “You’d make four 10-year-old kids your main characters, but it’s not a kids show. It’s not a kids film. You’re still making the stakes really real.”
Like it or not, nostalgia marketing works
I think it’s easy to dunk on nostalgia baiting for obvious reasons: unnecessary sequels, usually in the realm of live-action Disney remakes, spinoffs, and rebooted TV series are rarely as good as their predecessors. Still, there is something generationally unifying about blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Blade Runner 2049—and this is especially familiar territory for Disney, with the Mouse House having all but perfected the art of the billion-dollar sequel (i.e. Inside Out 2).
This year alone, we’ve seen Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—a sequel 36 years in the making—score well over $400 million at the worldwide box office. Meanwhile, Universal’s film adaptation of Wicked, a spinoff/prequel in its own right, is well on track to gross close to $120 million in its opening weekend.
So with Gen Z flocking to nostalgia media like moths to a flame, Skeleton Crew could be a Christmastime hit for Disney+ and, if commercially successful enough, may pave the way for Star Wars to explore something new further down the line. Disney and Lucasfilm can’t always play it safe and rely on familiar characters for content, but hey, if the new series gives audiences that warm fuzzy feeling while simultaneously offering an original pirate adventure, I genuinely don’t see how it could fail.
Published: Nov 24, 2024 09:15 am