8 Things WWE Can Learn From Star Wars: The Force Awakens

4. Give Fans What They Want

I'm not one to blindly follow broad consensus opinion on matters of popular culture - far from it. However. The Star Wars prequels were a colossal snafu, in conception and execution. Overreliance on green screen for basic production values and the mise en scène made everything look like a cut scene from a video game. Dull plotting, lumpen pacing and horrible, flat, cringeworthy dialogue conspired to make it impossible to get a quality performance from the brave but unfortunate souls drafted in to make sense of all that mess. As to the characters and tropes of the original trilogy brought into the prequels? It's like this George Lucas hadn't even seen the first three films. He transformed Yoda into Sonic The Hedgehog. He gave Darth Vader a NOOOOOOOOO! moment. For all the Star Wars references and fan service in The Force Awakens, very little mention at all is made of anything from the prequels. That€™s precisely because broad consensus opinion is that the films sucked worse than a vegetarian vampire. Please note that I€™m not saying that the prequels don't have their fans - they absolutely do, and a whole hell of a lot of people love those movies. Hey, it takes all sorts: I still think Hudson Hawk is an underrated gem. But broad consensus is that they suck, and suck hard. And €˜broad consensus€™ is what The Force Awakens is concerned with: creating a movie that the majority of fans will love, that will appeal to casual moviegoers and committed Star Wars nerds alike. As previously discussed, the prequels aren€™t about what a large proportion of their audience wants them to be about. Instead of swashbuckling adventure in a galaxy far, far away, they focus on the melodrama of the Skywalker family's black sheep. Melodrama is binary: it either works or it doesn't, there€™s no middle ground. If it does, it gives us tragedy - TV shows like Sons Of Anarchy, or movies like Casablanca. If it doesn't work, it's hilarious for all the wrong reasons. The Force Awakens gives fans all the cool stuff that made us fall in love with Star Wars to begin with, and takes the melodrama out of the plot, placing it in character beats where it belongs. That's WWE's problem of the last decade or more, in a nutshell - they're too focused on the two or three characters they want to prioritise, to the total exclusion of all else. When Rock versus Cena dominated Wrestlemania for three years running, practically no one else got a look in. The only properly planned storylines these days are the ones involving the main event, and they€™re run through McMahon and Dunn€™s hellish €˜sports entertainment€™ filter. Those of us who chose to watch the professional wrestling show for some proper professional wrestling are in for perennial disappointment€ but we€™re also WWE€™s core audience, the people the Network is marketed to.