Having had to deal with a lot of what I would call the new fan base - meaning, the ones that crave for the prelogy, breeded with clonewars 3D and all that crap and find the original movies dull - I am not sure that we are talking about the same fanbase that actually seems to matter these days. :/
That "new fanbase" didn't make Clone Wars 3D anything more than a moderate success. 
Critics panned it. Longtime fans just didn't care.
What you need for a mainstream success, is to bring in new fans as well as satisfy the devoted. Those things aren't mutually exclusive. The new Spider-Man movie, The Avengers... pretty good examples of how it can be done.
Disney believes there is a desire from the fanbase for new films. They're right. I wouldn't see another "special edition" of either trilogy, but I'd see a new movie (not animated) in a heartbeat. Probably multiple times, depending on how good it was. I wouldn't need 3d, high frame rate, super-high-Def images either. Just a good story, with good acting, and some special effects that make me go 'Wow' and let me forget about the rest of the world for 2 hours.
Oh, and if it can be internally consistent with the majority of the rest of the franchise, that would be really great. 
You sound like you work for disney and know what their true motives really are
Critics matter so much today ? Lucas may be hated for how he turned mid ep6, but the thing is that his industrial empire has not built itself on mere ideals and artistic creation. It has rather been built around merchandising, commercial agendas touching the masses, whatever he has been telling himself all along ("will ep1 be good enough to beat Titanic ?" duh). The thing is that it has worked for decades now. He has made billions out of it, and Disney probably knows it.
If they feel that they genuinely want to do something great and new, fine, I'll be the first to be happy about it, but after so many years of crappy, cheesy, or dull products
on his behalf (i'm not speaking about the good things here and there that came out, like a lot of good comics or a very few novels, or the old lucasart games), and even if this is Disney behind it now, forgive me for not being able to be enthusiastic anymore about that license. :/
The new fanbase is the standard now. I am pretty sure the old guard is what it is : the old geeky guard, a minority. In my experience, it is anyway. Better not to ask to much from the masses, most of them do not have the artistic sensibility to make the difference between a good movie and a bad one (or else, hollywood would be an artistic paradise). As long as they have crappy FX and CGI, action, and perfectly expectable outcomes, they will pay for it. And producers will continue to tell their artists to create the same crap again and again because it works, be it in video games or in the movie industry. At least now, in the video games industry alternate sources of publishing (like crowdsourcing) and new platforms (online publishing and cloud gaming) make that artists can now actually show the publishers the middle finger and do something interesting for a change, but that's another story.
That's not to say that they do not create good things here and there, and I envy your optimism on this matter.
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Topic: Star Wars without Lucas (Read 5621 times)