Maybe it’s already too late for my brilliant suggestions to rescue Star Wars, Marvel, and the numerous other franchises sucked into the slow-stagnating intellectual property graveyard that is Disney.
Jonathan Majors, the actor playing Kang—the time-traveling central character upon whom a giddily optimistic Marvel intended to build about eight years’ worth of its films—was just found guilty of assault and may abruptly vanish from the fictional timestream. (If the planned 2025 Fantastic Four movie picks up some of those plot threads, I strongly urge Marvel to call it Fantastic Four: Clobbering TIME.)
Speaking of time travel, the most recent Indiana Jones movie was so weak that it feels like it never happened, yet its director is being handed a Star Wars origin-of-the-Jedi movie next. X-Files is being rebooted at Disney without David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, or show creator Chris Carter and being put instead in the hands of the Black Panther director. We’ll see.
Maybe the real sign of hope on the horizon at Disney, though, is next month’s momentous reminder that copyrights eventually run out—after 95 years under current law, barring weird caveats and extensions—enabling any members of the public to sell their own new, possibly far better versions of a fictional character or universe. Next month Mickey Mouse becomes public domain at long last—or at least the first film short to depict him, “Steamboat Willie,” does.
The minefield for people eager to try their hand at these liberated characters is that many familiar elements of them come not from their very first appearance but from subsequent decades of adventures, most of those stories still under copyright. For example, over at collapsing Warner Brothers (who I’ll try to rescue in next week’s column), Superman’s first story becomes public domain in 2033, but rest assured if you fly into action like a speeding bullet and immediately publish a story about him and accidentally use elements from, say, the Justice League—who didn’t appear until the 1960s—you’ll be hearing from Warner’s lawyers. Maybe best not to tug on that cape for another half-century or so.
(In the interests of full disclosure for this and countless other columns, I’ve worked for or done freelance work for, among other organizations, Warner Brothers, Disney, the Washington Post Company, Fox News, government, the Ivy League, Koch-funded organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and other huge entities that I and nearly every other pundit nonetheless eventually end up writing and opining about, but luckily I become exhausted at the mere thought of even trying to keep any of them happy, so I’ll just continue being honest with you and let the chips fall where they may.)
The prospect of frustrated fans going DIY and just making their own versions of all these characters, whether due to copyrights ending or just through lawsuit-evading imitation/parody (see: The Boys), is sort of exciting, if you truly believe in competition (not that I’m dismissing the idea of intellectual property altogether).
I’m not a fawning fan of director Zack Snyder, for instance, but there’s something thrilling about the fact that even as Warner lately screws up DC Comics character adaptations that began to greater fanfare under Snyder and Disney screws up Star Wars while rejecting a pitch from Snyder, Snyder himself just forges ahead and does his own thinly-disguised version of a Star Wars trilogy for Netflix, called Rebel Moon. It even seems to have a feisty orphaned warrior/princess-type main character and weapons that sure look suspiciously like light sabers.
It’s shameless, really, but fans will probably be slightly happier for having the option. Better reckless experimentation than more of J.J. Abrams’ bland, carefully-calculated corporate nostalgia in both the Trek and Wars universes. May the Force be with you, rebels of all sorts.
But then, even within one of these big franchises, there can, ideally, be enough wacky experiments that something works and may prove an advancement. Taika Waititi isn’t perfect, but his rather Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-like comedic aesthetic might be well-suited to Star Wars, for which he’s reportedly working on a film, maybe even better suited to Star Wars than to Marvel’s Thor—though I liked both his silly Thor films.
With Disney also reportedly planning in the shorter term to do one new Star Wars film per fictional era of the Star Wars universe—the aforementioned Indy/Logan director James Mangold doing one set in the old founding days of the Jedi and Sith, Mandalorian veteran Dave Filoni filming a climax to the Ahsoka/Mando/etc. immediate post-Jedi period, and Pakistani-born documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy fulfilling Kathleen Kennedy’s fondest wishes by charting the post-sequels era with a solo Rey movie—they’re bound to do something right, probably, though few fans still trust them to get everything right.
Diversity at least gives them a chance that something will hit the exhaust port, so to speak. And I don’t just mean shallow ethnic or sexual diversity. I mean diversity of ideas, we hope (in an often homogeneous and homogenizing corporate environment and tightly rule-bound fictional universe).
The two forms of diversity blended nicely in one of Star Wars’ best post-Lucas achievements, which is the Japanese-animated Star Wars: Visions series. It plays fast and loose with Star Wars canon—at times implying, I think, that the Jedi, Sith, Republic, Rebellion, and Empire were all sort of ancient and all highly active at the same time, which opens up a lot of crossover possibilities beyond the tight corner into which Lucas wrote himself with his whole Rome-like Republic-into-Empire-in-two-generations little Shakespeare-plot-sized backstory.
Perhaps there’s a Star Wars multiverse, or eventually will be, and perhaps that isn’t such a bad formula for Marvel or DC or any other big, unwieldy franchise to use to keep their aesthetic options open, letting real innovators try something using the favorite tropes and characters from whichever eras they please, and once in an all too rare while doing something beautiful. It beats waiting decade after decade for the Emperor to decree a single formula that yields great results throughout every corner of the fictional galaxy.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
