Proof Disney understands Star Wars better than George Lucas? Every single episode of Disney’s flagship Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, is based on a plot from a video game, Western or Samurai movie/show.
Chapter 4, which Disney describes as, “The Mandalorian teams up with an ex-soldier to protect a village from raiders,” is a literal rehash of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, and the countless remakes and remixes that followed.
In Chapter 2, the Mandalorian must go on a side quest and kill a big monster in exchange for parts to repair his ship, which is in just about every role-playing game ever made.
In Chapter 3, we find out what the Mandalorian uses his bounty for—gear upgrades and the revival of his tribe—standard videogame tropes.
Where Lucas would have focused his sequels on the microbiology of the Force, Disney knew what audiences really wanted was a retread of familiar territory. The same hero myths played out with different people.
And it’s been that way since the beginning. The indescribable element of Star Wars that has so enthralled our world is precisely its familiarity. The reason Lucas called his first Star Wars movie “Episode IV” is because he wanted it to hearken back to old black and white Flash Gordon serials. He was imbuing it with the nostalgia of sci-fi from his youth. Episode IV also borrows heavily from Kurosawa’s highly successful 1958 film, Hidden Fortress, and Lucas makes no qualms about having every Star Wars film match Joseph Campbell’s proto myth laid out in the Hero’s Journey. Everything about Star Wars, from the word “Jedi” being a phonetic reimagining of the Japanese word, “Jidai”, the special effects drawing heavily from 2001: A Space Odyssey, down to the DIY industrial machinery aesthetics of R2D2, is a post-modern pastiche of stuff people loved before. If it feels like we’ve seen it before, it’s because we have.
So instead of a trilogy on Jedi gut biomes, we get space westerns and sci-fi samurai dramas. Disney knew that nostalgia is what we love about Star Wars because its empire is built on nostalgia. Its most successful classic films are all animated fairytales. Before that, Steamboat Willie is a Buster Keaton movie remade with Buster as a mouse.
Disney knows that audiences want the same, but (slightly) different.
And if you take the time to stop and look at super-successful non-Disney properties, you’ll find our desire for the familiar plays out almost universally. Even Martin Scorsese, despite protestations that The Avengers isn’t cinema, declined to make The Irishman a film about an actual housepainter and instead marked his Netflix debut with a 3 1/2 hour biographical gangster flick about Jimmy Hoffa.
And the familiarity principle is something we can use too.
If you’re trying to sell something, first ask, “how is this like something my target already loves?”
If you’ve got a message you need people to take away, ask “how can I express it in a way that sounds like something people already know?”
And if you’re about to embark on a project and unsure if your passion for it will endure, ask “is what I love about it something that people have loved for a long time?”