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Baby Yoda represents the dominance of intellectual property over star power

  • The Mandalorian character emerging as the biggest star to come out of Disney+ may be a preview of Hollywood's future. "For the entertainment industry, it marks the culmination of a decade’s worth of trends as powerful as the decline of the movie star and the rise of Netflix, the dominance of IP and the brilliance of a Beyoncé album drop, all wrapped up in one fresh yet familiar package," says Rebecca Keegan. She adds: "Familiar yet new. Baby Yoda may offer viewers a sweet respite from the world, a Dalai Lama in toddler form, but for Hollywood, Baby Yoda is the very embodiment of its modern reality, of all the forces that have shaped the galaxies of entertainment over the past decade and will likely mold it into the next decade and beyond. Baby Yoda is the decline of the movie star and the ascendance of IP, the rise of cord-cutting and the escalation of the so-called streaming wars, the dominance of web culture and the technological leaps in CGI … all tucked into one adorable little package." The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau tells Keegan he got the idea to keep Baby Yoda a secret from Donald Glover while they were working on The Lion King. "We were talking about music and pop culture and he was saying that what people really like now is to be surprised, because it doesn't happen that much," says Favreau. "When Beyoncé did an album, she would just put it online and everybody would react to it. Just putting it out there spurred a conversation that would become more viral and bring more genuine attention than any marketing." The Beyoncé strategy has worked out extremely well for Disney. "We didn't know until we were told, but we were fitting into the corporate strategy," says Favreau. "We were just making a show." As Keegan notes, "that show is the result of the same dynamics that gave the world Grumpy Cat and Beyoncé's secret album drops and made Reed Hastings' DVD-by-mail company grow huge and a titan like Rupert Murdoch feel small. Baby Yoda is the character in the story who tells us exactly how we got here and where we're heading next."

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    TOPICS: Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Disney+, Beyonce, Donald Glover, Jon Favreau (actor/director), Disney, Marketing, Star Wars