In recent years, Disney has announced and subsequently canceled a number of Star Wars movies since the high-profile failure of The Rise of Skywalker. One of the most highly anticipated of those films was Rogue Squadron, an X-Wing pilot movie that would have been helmed by Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins. Now, there are reports that the movie is being revived as a Disney+ TV show, but that’s a huge mistake because a series will deliver much poorer special effects, even as it delegitimizes Star Wars’ hottest new IP in the eyes of fans.
This information comes to us from scooper MyTimeToShineHello rather than any kind of official announcement from Disney. That means everyone should take this with a few grains of salt, preferably from the planet Crait. But this scooper has been right about more than a few predictions in recent years about everything from Jessica Jones’ return in Daredevil: Born Again to Doctor Doom’s Fantastic Four cameo, so it’s worth considering that they are correct about the Rogue Squadron film being adapted for a TV series.
Top Gun In Space
Even when it was still in active development, there were no confirmed details about the Rogue Squadron movie, including what era it would take place in or which characters it would focus on. Many fans (myself included) were hoping that it would take a few pages from Michael A. Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron books from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which took place in the years immediately after Return of the Jedi. These books focused on veteran X-Wing pilot Wedge Antilles leading a group of new and familiar faces against the new Imperial threats that threatened to destabilize the burgeoning New Republic.
If the books were so great, then why do I think turning Rogue Squadron into a TV show (one which might be better suited to adapt multiple books over time) is such a bad idea? First, while it might seem like a shallow concern, I don’t think the budget of a TV show would be able to do this concept justice. Part of what made the earlier Rogue Squadron books so cool is that they were filled with the kinds of killer X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter dogfights that made Star Wars so iconic in the first place.
Money Talks, The Acolyte Walks
A Rogue Squadron movie with a proper feature film budget would be a perfect way to re-energize general audiences and restore the luster of the franchise’s tarnished brand. No tortured stories about the Skywalker family or botched cameos killing everyone’s favorite characters…just World War II-style dogfights in space. On the small screen, though, these big-budget dogfights would be smaller in scale and much worse in quality.
If you doubt me, consider this: it cost over $22 million per episode to create The Acolyte, and that was a show that spent so much time in utterly unremarkable ground locations. Just how bad do you think a Rogue Squadron show will look when they try to create feature film-style dogfights with that kind of budget? We’ll be lucky if any given space scene looks better than what Babylon 5 was cranking out in the ‘90s!
Movies > TV Shows
My other major concern with turning Rogue Squadron into a television show is quite simple: general audiences really don’t care as much about Star Wars series as they do about movies. There hasn’t been a new film in this franchise since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, and Disney has been trying to keep audiences excited by drip-feeding us a series of forgettable TV shows. But for every fan-favorite success (like Andor) or nostalgic hit (like Obi-Wan Kenobi), audiences are infinitely more turned off by high-profile flops (like The Book of Boba Fett or The Acolyte).
Long story not very short, a Rogue Squadron feature film with a proper budget has the potential to return the franchise to its roots while finally making fans interested in Star Wars again. But a Rogue Squadron TV show is likely to be a low-budget mess that nobody but Disney diehards will even care about. If the House of Mouse wants to “stay on target,” they need to revive Rogue Squadron as a film; otherwise, they might as well hit the ejection and ditch this IP altogether before it blows up in their faces.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
