i feel like George selling to Disn3y, he was thinking, "man, those rabid fans, they HATED me, LOL, who better for them to hate?" it almost is a natural fit. get passes off his IP and they take some of the heat. it was part of the deal.
tbh i and my family has purchased enough SW merchandise in my lifetime that it forms a core part of my personal mythology. i can't go back in time and erase the memory of when i was at my friend Katie's house and they had a VHS of ROTJ and i saw it. or when i was at the movie theater w my family, the one with the Pac Man neon sign, seeing a mid-80s revival. it is burned into my being. maybe i don't have another life after this, this is all i have, maybe this life is all i will experience. these are some of my few remaining memories from when i was a child. SW populates many of them. now they have purchased access to that. not directly, but let's be honest, they are playing with fire here. millions are being psychologically triggered.
surely they know this. but when someone like Rian Johnson comes in and shits on the childhood dreams of millions of people, just to be subversive or edgy, or to tell me things don't always work out, like i haven't figured that out yet, like i need to hear it from some fat pudgy bearded millionaire. no, fuck that. you guy dropped the ball one too many times.
i'm glad they bought it cos now i feel entirely fine shitting on the mistreatment of the property. people have discussed this since it was out in the 70s. the early internet was swapping messages about the movies decades before AOL or Facebook were the twinkle in a rich man's eye. fan discussion & debate has always been a part of the series. they purchased that alongside the franchise. it wasn't just IP rights and character designs that made SW. it was the dreams and hopes of millions of people. the dreams these jackasses farted on.