Star wars vs LOTR movie franchise & the downfall of the film industry

It can be said that George Lucas is one of the greatest names in film, especially in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, for his brilliant work with the Star Wars franchise, and, to all appearances, releasing a sequel before the original. Lucas starts his story from chapter 4, seemingly in the middle, completes a story – a trilogy, then goes back and adds the original backstory. Admittedly, he may not have always planned to start with chapter 4 as A New Hope was not retitled until later, however, it’s evident the story was always there, and that brilliance and foresight should be commended.
Alternatively, another movie franchise that does something similar is The Lord of the Rings. However, despite also amassing a cult following, Peter Jackson is not often held to the same regard as Lucas for his work on Tolkien’s films. Some might even go as far as to say that Tolkien’s work was never meant to be canonized on screen, and the movies “ruined the experience”. It is unarguable that Star Wars grossly outnumbered the LOTR franchise in the box office, amassing a total of $973,698,615 opening for the first 6 movies, contrasted with LOTR + Hobbit’s $109,303,470 (IMDbPro). Is it that Star Wars is objectively better than LOTR, or is there something else?

For one thing, it’s important to look at the dates on which the 6 movies were released. There are fewer than 30 years between the time the first Star Wars movie was released and the last movie in the second trilogy. Some might say that the time between the movies allowed everything to age gracefully, and introduced a new fanbase of different generations, while providing a sense of nostalgia for older viewers. Whereas The Lord of the Rings only spans 13 years between The Battle of the Five Armies and The Fellowship of the Ring. However, I raise another alternative – the years in which they were made.

A key point is, Star Wars was created right as the Golden Age of Hollywood was ending. The standard for films was much higher in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s than they are today. When Star Wars first premiered, everything was handcrafted with the utmost care and precision. If a monster or alien needed to be created, artists, sculptors, and special effects specialists worked endlessly to create a model for the screen. If there was a high-speed chase, backdrops were painted, models were flown in front, and then brought up to scale. By the turn of the 21st century, filmmakers had strayed from the more traditional approach to “movie magic” and, with the aid of computers and CGI, began animating the creatures of their stories, using motion capture and green screen editing. The second Star Wars trilogy and the first Lord of the Rings trilogy were released within the same time period, when Hollywood had begun to grow lazy when execs began prioritizing profit and automation over people and talent. Makeup artists and fx masters were no longer being consulted, aliens and orcs didn’t need to be sculpted or played by humans, all you needed was a green screen and a suit. Obviously, as we’ve all seen, the quality of movies has since continued to deteriorate as producers rely more heavily on computers and AI, instead of actual human contribution. The end credits are getting shorter and shorter; there are fewer eyes on movies, instead, we get The Hobbit, where the dragon looks really cool and realistic, but the overall story falls flat. The entire budget goes into computer animations, and not into human relations.