Another clash of art vs. commerce in Hollywood
Directors’ exit from ‘Star Wars’ spinoff reflects long-running tension in industry.
The news was stunning. Four months into production — and less than a year before it’s due in theaters — the Han Solo “Star Wars” spinoff was losing its directors.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller were being removed from the project because of what Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy was calling a difference in “creative vision” and the directors dubbed “creative differences” — even as no one seemed to want to call it that. Old studio hands like Ron Howard quickly were thrown into the rumor mill as contenders to take over the young Han movie, set early and apart from the classic “Star Wars” timeline.
But no matter the fate of the Solo effort, the incident shines a light on a battle contemporary Hollywood can’t seem to end.
Lord and Miller have been among the hottest directors in the studio system in recent years, shepherding “The Lego Movie” and a “Jump Street” renaissance to unlikely blockbuster status.
They were some of the most brazen filmmakers working within that system: “Lego” managed to be a creation of great meta weirdness despite the Warner Bros. imprimatur. And though it could have easily settled into action-comedy genericism, “Jump Street” — particularly “22 Jump Street” — followed an equally quirky template. Fewer directors have found mainstream success by going their own way; few better demonstrated the idea that modern Hollywood can have its auteur cake without eating it at the box office.
The decision to hire the playful pair provided (along with “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson) some of the greatest evidence that the franchise’s stewards were willing to gamble in their march toward global box-office supremacy.
And now the decision to fire them is, seemingly, proving the opposite.
Directors part ways with projects all the time, even late in the game (though very rarely this late). The next few days will yield more about what specifically the clash was about, and with whom. (Trade reports cited differences with Kennedy or with writer Lawrence Kasdan, a Hollywood juggernaut in his own right.) But the very fact that there was a clash speaks to a tension that’s long been percolating in this franchise era.
For all the heat the movie business takes, about serving up homogenized blandness, the Hollywood hive mind in this franchise era stills wants independent voices. Or at least it thinks it does.
But when it comes to actually bringing a movie to fruition, studios often balk at the loss of control those voices tend to require. Consider the two most recent “Star Wars” movies. The industry murmurings of J.J. Abrams clashing with Disney and Lucasfilm on “The Force Awakens” were loud and persistent. Gareth Edwards was relieved of his duties during the reshoot portion of “Rogue One.”
And Joshua Trank’s planned spinoff focused on bounty hunter Boba Fett fell apart before it was even officially announced.
From the first Abrams pin-drop a few years back, the question has loomed over the current crop of “Star Wars” movies: Are these director-driven works that happen to come out under a conglomerate banner? Or corporate entertainment with a big name just happening to sit in the director’s chair?
Trank became a cautionary tale as he clashed with Fox on the studio’s “Fantastic Four” reboot. Michelle MacLaren didn’t end up directing “Wonder Woman” at DC/Warner Bros. And Ben Aff leck dropped off directing that studio’s upcoming Batman movie before we could get a glimpse of Gotham City by way of “The Town.”
Modern Hollywood generally has competing impulses: the desire at once to be distinctive and commercial.
The stakes are especially high for a giant studio like Disney, which houses an unusually high ratio of Hollywood’s most important franchises via Lucasfilm, Marvel Studios and Pixar. Often the movies are more expensive; in many cases, they seek a larger global footprint. Frequently, they also come in a more sprawling universe, with each piece of an interlocking mythology forcing any one director to play an increasingly tenuous game of Jenga.
At Marvel, each subsequent movie seems to add one more block to the tower, deterring freewheeling hands. Edgar Wright, director of the upcoming “Baby Driver,” clashed with the studio over “Ant-Man” before leaving, while Ava DuVernay walked away from an offer to direct “Black Panther” before Ryan Coogler took over.
Lord and Miller were able to navigate a corporate mandate with their previous work. Warner Bros. was not an animation powerhouse when the pair were making “Lego” there, allowing the film to slip through. Sony in those early “Jump Street” days was run by Amy Pascal, who gave filmmakers a relatively wide berth given the studio confines. But the walls gave way on Disney and “Star Wars.”