Before apparently enraging hordes of Star Wars fans with a recent franchise entry, Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson was known for directing a neo-noir film called Brick.
Brick was released by Focus Features and made a ton of noise on the independent film circuit, receiving largely positive reviews from movie critics.
The film carries a tone of a mystery detective novel but is set in suburban California and features a cast of high school students. It won accolades at film festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.
After Rian Johnson’s later success with the Bruce Willis-led sci-if movie Looper , Johnson was asked to write and direct a then-upcoming Star Wars movie, which ended up being The Last Jedi . While The Last Jedi did score big at the box office and received “universal acclaim” from critics, according to Metacritic, and carries an impressive 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a large number of Star Wars fans were extremely angered by the production, going so far as to start a petition to have the movie deleted from canon and remade.
As of yet, those requests have not been honored.
Recently MovieWeb reported on a fan-made movie which heavily spoofs the Star Wars fandom by using the Johnson-directed movie Brick as a template for delivering its narrative.
The short movie is titled “Revenge of the Incels .” It was made in response to actress Kelly Marie Tran, who received so much verbal abuse via social media from enraged Star Wars fans, she felt forced to leave her social media account altogether.
The short, “Revenge of the Incels” takes aim at numerous aspects of the Star Wars fandom, but also brings what some considered to be fair criticisms of Star Wars itself and has a pitch-perfect impression of Brick’ s atmosphere and tone while doing so.
Aside from signing petitions for new movies, Star Wars fans went so far as to edit versions of Star Wars: The Last Jedi removing all women from the narrative, creating what is ostensibly a male-only cast for fans who felt there were too many women in the final film.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi opened in December 2017 and went on to make approximately $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office. It was the highest grossing film of 2017, ahead of Beauty and The Beast , Wonder Woman, Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
The final installment of the current Star Wars trilogy is planned for December 2019 and will be directed by J.J. Abrams, who directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
