DBWI: Space fantasy films becomes a popular genre?

OOC: This is the first Double-Blind What If thread I've posted.
------​
In early 70s, George Lucas, a director known for his films, THX 1138 and American Graffiti wrote a synopsis called Star Wars. The story was a simple tale of good and evil placed in a science fiction setting, about a young farmboy against an evil empire.

However, George Lucas had obligations to his friend, Francis Ford Coppola who was filming Apocalypse Now, an epic war film based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The production was encountering severe difficulties on set. Because of that, George Lucas went to the filming location of Apocalypse Now to assist with the production.

At the intervals between the troubled production of Apocalypse Now and its release, adult-oriented science fiction was becoming a popular genre with mass audiences and respectability with major film critics.
This genre was spurned by the late 60s releases of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and 20th Century Fox's Planet of the Apes (1968). It was a major blockbuster with audiences and critics alike, with praise given to its innovate ideas, thematic complexity and scale unprecedented by any science fiction to date.

After the production of Apocalypse Now, George Lucas unsuccessfully pitched Star Wars to major film studios who were producing adult-oriented science fiction films. The main reasons why it was rejected because Star Wars was too similar with 2001 and Jodorowsky's Dune, lack of appeal to the adult-audience and other reasons related to it.

The main question of this thread: What would happen if space fantasy films like Star Wars become popular?
 
If that Star Wars thing leads to a revival of old-school space fantasy, I could definitely see some of the classics being brought back, to great financial and critical success. Look for stuff like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to get do-overs, and they would probably become even bigger hits than Lucas' film.

And with all the NASA-driven interest in scientific astronomy going on in the 1970s, a lot of that could get incorporated into the revival as well. You might have a film about a spaceship going into a black hole, for example. Could do wonders for popular science education.
 
Wait - space fantasy becoming popular based on the adventures of some dickweed named Starkiller defeating some evil space empire? I read a synopsis of the project and it looked absolutely shitty. So cliche and so morally basic - might have worked as an animated children’s movie. Maybe he should have sold it to Disney.
 
Here's the thing about why Star Wars was rejected by many film studios.
Star Wars was essentially a skiffy space fantasy that was opposite of the adult-oriented science fiction film trend going on at the time.
  • It had a simple, light and child-friendly plot that opposed the complex and/or dark plots of science fiction films that tackled thematically complex tales of dark themes and adult topics, and treated the film audience as adults with intelligence. The original synopsis of Star Wars ended with a straight happy ending unlike other science fiction films at its time that ended in weird (2001: A Space Odyssey), downer (Soylent Green), ambigious (The Thing) or usually bittersweet (Ridley Scott's Alien and James Cameron's The Terminator). Only Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind ended happily.
  • It did not bother to examine the effects of technology and science on its setting unlike other science fiction films.
  • The characters in the synopsis lacked humanity or emotion that made them relatable unlike characterization in most adult-oriented science fiction films.
  • The violence was considered unrealistic and cartoonish compared to Predator, BrightBurn and other science fiction films.
  • Most Hollywood studios are adverse of not going back in time where B-movies of the 50s, Buck Rogers and pulp magazines were the thing that the public thought up when they hear the word "Science fiction". The plot of Star Wars was essentially a low-budget B-movie adapted from a lousy skiffy short story published in a disposable pulp magazine, and many times George Lucas was advised by friends and professionals alike to improve his writing and write adult-oriented science fiction.
 
Top