>>113345321I think it's because controversy advertising on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube has been super successful. Look at Wonder Woman and Black Panther.
Those two films gave a gentle back rub to the subject of gender and race respectively. They were actually both pretty dumb movies if you think about everyone's motives, and ordinarily movies like that shouldn't do well. It's mediocrity and people should be cringing at Killmonger's "let me die like the slaves, pushed into water" line because he was the fucking King of Super Land. But instead people tried to have "dialogues" about the films even though they had such minimal substance.
But that shit is fickle, and social media changes their algorithms. Fast forward to now and people stopped "opening dialogues" about how important it is that Rae is a woman and Finn is black. Who the fuck ARE these characters? They weren't anything. And once you lost the dumb "dialogue" angle the only controversy you could make is by shitting on the franchise itself and trying to act like that's moving forward. Something to make people angry so they market your movie online.
They won't admit it but there were maybe a dozen or more films trying to market with online outrage last decade.