*sigh*
It's a legacy property with decades of canon and continuity, with an obsessive fan base. Even if it respected canon, even if it were well written and well executed, it was going to get slapped around a bit. Since it doesn't seem to do any of those things the result is predictable. My advice to Headland would be:
1. Read the room.
2. Don't treat a legacy IP like it belongs to you. If you want to attempt important art, go for it -- but this is an established product, not your personal magnum opus.
There is a section of fandom that sucks. I've met them, I've seen them. But I think it's fair to say the majority of fans want a consistent experience of a certain quality.
Headland needs to either learn -- or admit -- there's a difference between 'toxic fandom' and 'poorly handled and executed product'.
Am not a film expert; but loosely, am hard pressed to think of an era so populated with bad material as the post Harry Potter/DC/Middle Earth (yes, the Hobbit movies made ~ 3 billion globally and I'm a fan)/Transformers/Jurassic Park/MCU era....
It began, insidiously, with Feige hiring low end writers
:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-ca-mn-captain-marvel-directors-20190228-story.html
Unlike many of her predecessors in the MCU with introductory origin stories, Danvers, played by Larson (who segues effortlessly from indies such as “Room” to franchise fare such as “Kong: Skull Island”), arrives on the big screen already a super-being.
..................................
“Captain Marvel” is, notably, a film in which a woman overcoming her harshest, and primarily male, critics — the ones who have said her entire life that she’s too emotional and can’t possibly make it on her own — is key to her self-actualization.
...................................
“That has completely changed today. Not only because, with ‘Captain Marvel,’ we said, ‘We must hire a woman to direct it’ internally, but also because the entire world has changed. And there will be many more announcements to come. Put it this way,” he said enigmatically: “it’s only the beginning.”
According to Feige, Marvel will continue to look to hire inclusively, adding that it “also makes for better movies.”
IMO we won't know for years if Feige was pressured by Disney, who wanted to tap the cash of female, foreign, and "alternative" audiences. Needless to say, CM had a bull-in-the-china shop approach; co-opting better films, better heroes; disrespecting legacy characters, and the biggest success of the film was a cat - to be overused in the next film - and a lot of wood plank acting.
Subsequent D+ efforts, and not much has changed
, with some few bright spots like Loki and Mandalorian (which kept to the lore). It's not whether it's female directors, or writers - it's hiring these showrunners and writers who don't know what they don't know
; and don't step back for a nanosecond to ask themselves if their "fun, edgy, indifferent-to-lore" approach really the right one?
And if it isn't, is it REALLY because of all the ***-cists, or because the material you're mutilating had universal archetypes with classic appeal; and there's nothing appealing at all about watering down or outright denigrating original characters and narratives?
I'm just framing it as "the dark times". Living through order imposed by the Empire
.
Just sayin' an ANIMATED SERIES has better characters, better writing, better music than this *&^%-oh-lyte. Even if some witches showed up.
(And Ezra wasn't a Gary-Sue, he messes up a lot, tempted by the Dark Side, etc,)
Anyway, I figure if nothing else, Disney stockholders aren't gonna keep putting up with it. They're used to big profits. Sooner or later there's gonna be a house-cleaning.