Current Events > Titanic media franchise releases in 2019 - is it us, or them?

(+) Yeah! (+)

2019 brought new, and in some cases final, releases to the mega-franchises in each film, TV, and video games. Game of Thrones (TV) capped off a 9-year, 8-season epic, Star Wars (film) also finished off it's telling of the Skywalker saga, and Pokemon (VG) stepped boldly from handhelds into the realm of console gaming.

Despite each of these franchises ranking either at the top or near the top in revenue or viewership of their respective mediums for years or even decades, none was able to escape harsh criticism. For some type of quantifiable analysis (despite it's flaws), I'll reference Metacritic.

Game of Thrones enjoyed stellar ratings in its first few seasons - a decent 80 critic score for S1, and scores in the 90s for S2-5. S6-8 took a step back, with overall season scores in the 70s, however nothing is quite as striking as the final three episodes of the series - scoring 2.8, 3.3, and 2.5, respectively, by far the worst-rated episodes in the series. Seriously, the next closest is actually the 4th-to-last episode at a 4.1, while four episodes in S7 rank in the 4's. Compare that to S1-6, where the lowest score was a 5.0 (even more cringey, consider that S1-6 each had a sample set of 10 episodes, while S7 had 7 and S8 had 6. Woof). A petition was even created to "Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with competent writers", which has garnered over 1.8M signatures.

Then there was Pokemon - the best selling media franchise of all-time. Pokemon as a franchise can basically print money, with a staggering estimated $95 billion in lifetime revenue. Pokemon isn't quite a singular entity however - the franchise operates under the guise of The Pokemon Company, which is comprised of Nintendo, GameFreak (which handles most of the mainline games), and Creatures (which primarily handles the merch, while assisting in development and heading development on select recent spin-offs). 2019 brought Pokemon Sword and Shield, the franchise's first new installment on the Switch. The anticipation was gargantuan - for the first time, a new generation of Pokemon games would be able to be enjoyed not only from a handheld screen, but also from your living room on a true console. A myriad of pre-release leaks however, many confirmed while some overstated, realized many fans' deepest fears - also for the first time ever in the franchise, it would be impossible to transfer your creatures from previous iterations into this one. True, between gens 2 and 3 both hardware and software limitations (initially) prevented gen 1 and 2 Pokemon from being transferred to gens 3 and beyond (this would later be possible with the VC versions of the gen 1 and 2 games re-released on the 3DS) - however the creatures' data files still existed in the game's code. Not true for Sword and Shield. This led to the controversy known as "Dexit". As if that wasn't enough, other leaks either confirmed or appeared to show issues - sloppy animations, poor textures (THE TREES...), and even some instances of the game bricking the console! OK, that last one was pretty much proven to be false, but the leaks caused incredible turmoil within the Pokemon community. SwSh initially enjoyed massive sales and some stratospheric critic reviews (coughIGNs9.3ratingcough), however our source tells a more complex tale. While SwSh has been hanging steady at a respectable 80 critic score, there is one inconvenient truth - this is the lowest a new installment has scored, ever. Additionally, fans are split, and user reviews clock in at a meager 4.5 score.

Finally, Star Wars. You know, that other ridiculously successful ($68 billion estimated lifetime revenue) media franchise. After Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, the franchise hit the ground running with 2015's Episode 7: The Force Awakens. The film achieved mostly positive reviews (81 critic and 6.8 user reviews) and raked in over $2 billion worldwide, making it the 3rd highest-grossing film of all-time (it, and all others would be eclipsed by 2019's Avengers: Endgame). Star Wars was officially back, and nothing could go wrong... or so Disney thought. 2017's The Last Jedi would release to widespread critical acclaim (85 critic score), but split the fanbase in two. Many embraced the radical path Rian Johnson seemed to be paving, while many still rejected the film as not being true to the lore and universe carefully crafted over the past four decades. In any case, the film stands at a paltry 4.4 user review and is split somewhat evenly between positive and negative reviews. But there was still one more tale to tell about everyone's favorite space wizard family, and if criticism of The Last Jedi wasn't enough, 2019's The Rise of Skywalker would even surpass that of it's controversial predecessor. The final film in the sprawling epic would achieve mixed reviews at best, with a Disney-produced low 54 critic score and (again, harshly polarized among fans) a 5.0 user score.

No doubt these franchises had their moments (or years, or decades) in the sun, but none of them was able to escape monumental releases in 2019 without seriously harsh criticism. So my question is this - have we become too critical as media consumers, or are producers and developers like these actually selling inferior products? I don't plan on participating in the discussion, but I am very curious to see where this goes.

Those walls are big enough to sink the Titanic.

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__aCEr__ posted...

Those walls are big enough to sink the Titanic.

The last P is a TL;DR