In an exclusive interview with CineWipe, Mickey Mouse admits to milking Star Wars for all it’s worth.
Every time Disney announce a new Star Wars project, a small part of the child inside me dies. That child is now completely limbless, rendered a human nugget by the studio’s relentless exploitation of a franchise that used to inspire wonder.
In addition to the new trilogy, there will now be seventy-four extra Star Wars films that will all explore what happened in the gaps between each other, which will presumably create even more gaps that need exploring and so on. But the final straw for me was learning that sweaty Marvel man Jon Favreau will be penning a live-action TV series for Disney’s forthcoming streaming service.
How much lower can Star Wars sink? Approximately forty-four per cent of the existing films are already worse than a moderately well-written episode of Battlestar Galactica, but now a significant part of the franchise’s extended universe is going to be written by a man who thinks Tom Holland is genuinely hilarious. That is surely indicative of the studio’s dwindling creative integrity.
But Mickey Mouse doesn’t care. Agreeing to meet me in a London hotel, he expresses his complete lack of concern for the quality of future Star Wars projects, providing they keep funding his and Donald Duck’s debauched nights of cocaine and prostitutes.
“I couldn’t believe the critics liked The Last Jedi,” says Mouse, rubbing his disproportionately massive hands together and laughing. “It was structurally, thematically and tonally an utter shambles. We just filmed a load of random things and then let Rian [Johnson] put them in an order that made the most amount of sense. I still don’t even know what the film is about. A lot of people thought we were trying to ‘kill the past’ and reinvent Star Wars, but more than half of it was quite clearly ripped straight from Return of the Jedi. We couldn’t even decide how dark it should be, so we balanced out all the action sequences with physical comedy and jokes about Hux’s mum. And the best part? If you say you didn’t like it legions of corporately brainwashed social justice warriors will call you sexist. Hilarious.”
“And that’s exactly why we will continue to milk this already arid cow. The perpetuators of mediocrity have a much louder voice than people with standards. I could write the screenplay for the next Star Wars film with my own cock drool and everyone would still queue at 4am to watch it.”
Sitting in the hotel’s luxurious foyer, which has chairs, tables and a floor, Mouse begins to laugh maniacally before grabbing a guest and thrusting them in front of me. “You see this little girl, Chris? She’s going to grow up watching whatever mainstream fluff we churn out and her expectations are going to be watered down as a result. After seven films and two seasons of Favreau’s show, she’s not even going to know what ‘good’ is anymore. And then she’ll be mine forever, another slave to Margaret Thatcher-esque capitalism, blissfully unaware that she’s being deprived of real art.”
Mouse tosses the girl at a luggage carrier and looks me firmly in the eye. “I own you, too, Chris. Whether you realise it or not. You might complain that the magic of Star Wars has been ruined, but you’ll be there, in the cinema, watching my films. Meanwhile, Donald Duck and I will be snorting celebratory coke out of Minnie’s minge.”