Will Star Wars lose to a creepy meme movie?

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Hey folks, David Stewart here.

[00:00:03]We're going to talk a little bit about Star Wars as well as horror and the state of the movie industry right now, which I think is pretty interesting.

[00:00:10]Before I jump into it, a little bit of housekeeping. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. And of course, you can join my Patreon down below. You can get some free books there. You can also buy my books on Amazon. You can buy this one on Amazon, or you can get it for free by joining my mailing list, dbspress.com/list.

[00:00:25]This is a sci-fi horror book. A little bit related to what I'm going to talk about maybe in the second half of this video. But, Star Wars is the initial topic. Mandalorian and Grogu, which is a Star Wars movie. I haven't been able to see it or review it yet because, well, life gets in the way of things like that.

[00:00:45]And I also just don't really care that much about seeing it. Like, I I'm, you know, my kids were sick and stuff, but I realized, you know, in the past, I probably would have found a way to go see a new Star Wars movie and at least do a review for you all. And I didn't do that. And it looks like audiences are kind of agreeing. It is the lowest opening box office for a Star Wars movie in history. Now, what I found interesting is that um I saw several media outlets with a headline that was like the lowest of the Disney era.

[00:01:14]Like, George Lucas's movies were not opening good in box offices. Uh so yes, it's the worst performing Star Wars movie in opening weekend yet. And generally with movies like this, opening weekend is where it hits and then it falls off after that. So, it may be surpassed by a couple of horror movies. So, one was called Obsession, which I haven't really looked into. I don't know that much about it. But, the other one is Backrooms. And that's a little bit more interesting. And I don't think I could have written a or I I don't think I had this on my bingo card, however you want to put it.

[00:01:47]I don't think I could have written a story where it's like, "Yeah, Star Wars will get knocked off by a horror movie that has to do with internet memes and was made by a 20-year-old."

[00:01:57]But, that's what we might be dealing with. Now, the first question is why isn't Mandalorian and Grogu hitting?

[00:02:02]Well, it's a spin-off of a spin-off of Star Wars.

[00:02:09]We're in the milking phase, right? We've talked about the milking phase, right?

[00:02:12]Phase one is the creation of the new IP.

[00:02:15]Phase two is explosion when it gets really popular. Phase three's milking.

[00:02:19]And then you were going to have a death phase where things kind of fade away for a while, then you have a reboot phase, and then you hopefully go back to milking. So, we're in an extended milking phase for Star Wars. That's why we have all of these spin-off series, um the kind of return of old characters, uh always kind of retreading the same ground, not pushing anything forward because of the story fizzling that exists with the the Disney episode, uh you know, seven, eight, nine, and just kind of the the travesty of that storytelling. There's just nowhere really to go with those, and not a whole lot to do with them. They're not rebooting them. They're not uh retconning them or anything like that, but you know, there's just not a lot to cultivate there. So, instead, we get a lot of these uh we get a lot of these spin-offs, and The Mandalorian is one.

[00:03:04]And so, The Mandalorian and Grogu movie, I would I would compare it to something like maybe Star Trek Insurrection, which is uh a spin-off movie, right? So, it's a movie of a spin-off series of an established IP. Um Star Trek Insurrection's not a bad movie, but when you watch it, you get the feeling that you're watching a really like a an hour and a half-long episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, Star Trek: The Next Generation being the spin-off of the original Star Trek series and the original Star Trek movies, and then eventually they had movies that came out in theaters. These were never huge box office movies, right? But, they're part of a of a good strategy of releasing movies for fans that make a little bit of money and do okay, and they're in the spirit of of what you're trying to do.

[00:03:53]And Mandalorian's kind of like that. I think it's a series that the fans really liked. I never really watched past the first season because I took a long break from talking about Star Wars on the channel or discussing it or really caring about it. And I don't I don't know anyone else who really cares about watching that series or discussing it. So, I just you know, I'm not really big into TV shows.

[00:04:15]That's part of it as well. But, my understanding for people who've reviewed it early, and I'm sorry if I don't have a review out for you right away here, but a lot of things come up.

[00:04:27]And then we've got to be honest, I don't care that much about the movie. I don't care that much about seeing and reviewing a new Star Wars movie, at least this one, uh enough to do it. Even though like my kids are sick, I have plenty of excuses for why I couldn't have gone to the movie and then done a review of it. Uh but, the early stuff I've seen is like, well, this just plays out like a, you know, a longer episode of The Mandalorian. And so, that would fit kind of in that category of those um the Star Trek spin-off movies that happened at the end of the milking phase of Star Trek where we had The Next Generation and we had several serieses, kind of ended with Enterprise, and things kind of petered out. They just kind of um they kind of went out with a whimper.

[00:05:05]And then you had the reboot movies, which were part of that phase as well.

[00:05:08]So, this might be just the last part of this current milking phase and there'll be some sort of reworking and and retooling of what Star Wars is or what it's going to be in the future, what its next phase is going to be. Uh we've had a long break from Star Wars.

[00:05:23]So, what's kind of surprising about The Mandalorian doing, I guess, as poorly as it's done is that we had a pretty long break in between movies. The last Star Wars movie was Episode 9, and that was in December of like 2019 or something. It's been several years since that came out. Uh so, you would think there'd be a lot of hype for a new Star Wars movie. But, I think people grasped that this was a spin-off and not a real Star Wars movie.

[00:05:49]So, one of the things that happens in box office numbers, box office when you you've heard me talk about the wide mouth and the long tail, right? The long tail's going to be those merchandising sales, it's going to be those super fans who buy lots of things. This exists in many different domains, music, books, whatever, right? The big mouth that captures the most people, that's the Star Wars movie. So, there's nothing nerdy about going to watch a Star Wars movie, it is like the biggest movie franchise in the history of mankind. So, it's totally normal to go see a Star Wars movie. Lots of people go see a Star Wars movie. Far fewer people will see that movie multiple times in theaters, those super fans will go see it more than once. And then, um of them, you're going to have those those people some of those people are going to buy merchandise, they're going to buy LEGO sets, they're going to buy toys, they're going to buy shirts, they're going to buy the DVD later on or or the Blu-ray or whatever it's going to be. Um they collect things that are higher margin and produce more value for the franchise. That's the long tail. So, this isn't just really a big exciting Star Wars thing. It's not marketing to the established audience that much, there's no nostalgia. Hey, Han Solo's back. The Millennium Falcon's back. All the stuff that made, I think, Force Awakens, for example, to be a really big um money maker for movies was that nostalgia. But, when we see Mandalorian Grogu, what's the nostalgia for? It's just it's a Star Wars movie full of characters that no one knows.

[00:07:15]And, you know, Baby Yoda's a big hit.

[00:07:17]Like, if they just called it Baby Yoda, maybe it would've done better. I don't know. Right? Grogu, the little the little his Yoda species, but everyone calls him Baby Yoda. You guys guys know who I'm talking about. Um that's been a huge merchandise hit, but yet people are not going to the movies because they feel like it's not a big event. It doesn't feel like a big event.

[00:07:37]And I think this also held true for the other spin-off movies that we saw, Rogue One and Solo, these didn't feel like big events. They didn't feel like primetime movies. They felt like a milking movie. They felt like something that you do in between the things that matter. It's a spin-off movie and it feels that way. It's kind of like the you know, different kinds of MCU movies that aren't the big heroes like Ant-Man or something like that. So, it feels like one of these like, "Oh, you're pulling more characters out of the hat to have more movies." It's just a milking movie. So, it's not going to do that. Great. Now, the other thing that's interesting though is that it may be unseated by a horror movie.

[00:08:15]It's pretty rare that we see horror movies do really well in the box office to the point where they are like a number one hit movie. They tend to be a little bit more niche and that's good because horror movies are one of the genres that you can make on a really limited budget. I love I don't love horror movies. I'm not going to say I love horror movies, but I love horror as a genre and I write horror.

[00:08:38]Here's the sci-fi horror book.

[00:08:40]Horror book right there.

[00:08:42]deviouspress.com/list But one of the things I really like about horror movies, I mean classic horror movies, is that they were able to successfully tell a story and have it be effective and do lots of honestly really original things, especially if you're looking at kind of the first movies that establish a franchise. They're doing something a little bit different. And you can take those risks and you can do new and interesting things in horror on a low budget. And so, Backrooms is really interesting to me because I think it's a movie that could be made and I don't know what the budget is, but it could be a very modest and low-budget movie. It's something that an independent person almost could make. And in fact, it's based off of that independent little YouTube short horror film called The Backrooms.

[00:09:27]Almost based off of you know, this internet meme idea of liminality, which is something that I have incorporated in my work. It's particularly present in this book uh Demonex Machina, but it's something that resonates with a lot of people. And one of the reasons I'm interested in this movie Backrooms is because not just because I've seen like some the YouTube videos about the Backrooms that there's like a Backrooms video game or something. And then you've seen four chan posts about, you know, getting caught, I got caught in the Backrooms and then I escaped as this weird just kind of memetic horror idea.

[00:10:02]You know, can you make a movie out of a meme? Can you make a movie out of a vibe? Can you start with the idea of the feeling and then construct a story around that that's going to be good enough to carry an entire feature-length movie. Because I think making a 10 or 20-minute little YouTube short film you don't have to do the storytelling stuff.

[00:10:25]You know, you can jump straight into the mood, you can jump straight into the the vibe and let all the questions just sit out there for people to wonder about.

[00:10:35]And it makes it even more effective in a lot of cases. How's that going to transfer to a full-length movie? I'm really curious to see how it how it pans out. And the director's only I think 20 years old, skipped college to do this movie, and he did the original Backrooms YouTube video when he was like 16. So I'm also interested in that because I think young people are great because they don't have a set in their ways kind of way of doing things. They can think outside the box. And I would just love to see what the new generation comes up with for movies that's that's really outside of what we think of as a normal movie experience. Also the normal way that you make movies like within the studio system and things like that. Movies um can get a little stale if you are especially someone like me who has studied story writing, it starts to become predictable. So I I'm really interested to see if they can do something that's unpredictable. And horror movies tend to be really good at this. They tend to do things that are unpredictable. That's how they're able to to be successful as they are able to keep you on your toes and do things that you haven't seen before and shock you in ways that you haven't thought about. I think there's a lot of originality in storytelling that shows up in horror movies and in horror books that doesn't get credited because they're scary and they're they tend to be thought of as a lowbrow experiences, but I don't think they have to be.

[00:11:56]I don't think they have to be that and so yeah, I think it's going to be really interesting and the other one that I guess is on people's radar that's gaining momentum, gaining more traction is this horror movie obsession. So that might be also interesting to to have in there in the mix. So you could be looking at a thing where a Star Wars movie loses out to possibly two horror movies the second week it's out. That's really unheard of and it does it does play into the reality that you know, Disney has really milked and also tanked the Star Wars brand. They haven't managed the Star Wars brand as if it's a prestige brand. They've managed it as an asset which they're continuing to extract value from and the Mandalorian movie is an example of that.

[00:12:41]Does the Mandalorian movie need to make a ton of movie money at the box office to be successful? I don't actually think it does. I think it's more like another way of kind of monetizing or enhancing the value of their streaming service. I think the optionality for them because they they're kind of I guess we we might call vertically integrated, right? They make the movie, they distribute it, then they also put it on streaming services.

[00:13:06]So they're making money at every kind of every step along the way. At the very end it's just like a value add to that.

[00:13:12]So I don't think it has to do super well, but it is indicative that the height for Star Wars has really fallen off after they killed off all the characters, hasn't it?

[00:13:22]It's Why they had this why did they need an Obi-Wan Kenobi show? Why? Well, because we killed off all the characters in like the main continuity of what we're doing and people are just not interested in like Rey. It's just She's just not a big franchise seller, sorry.

[00:13:38]Uh which I could have predicted and I probably did.

[00:13:41]But, anyway, this is where we're at.

[00:13:42]We're at the end of the milking phase.

[00:13:44]Then we're going to end up in a death phase. You may see Star Wars again disappear from the movie theaters for a while and then there'll be a big reboot phase where they bring it back with some new direction, some new idea. And frankly, I think the Mandalorian idea is more interesting to me than what a lot of the stuff they might do with Star Wars is.

[00:14:04]Uh but who knows? Who knows what the what the next phase of that of that IP is going to be. I would love to have your thoughts though. Leave them down below either on the backrooms or on the this decay of the Star Wars franchise. It's very interesting to see something that was considered this unstoppable behemoth that they paid billions of dollars for kind of just not not be a big money maker at the box office. So, leave me your thoughts down below. Love to read them. And don't forget to check out my Patreon patreon.com/davidvstewart.

[00:14:35]There is a new sci-fi story that's out there called the Cattle of Octavius which I hope you will check out and enjoy. Have a great one and I'll see you all next time.