I was talking to a friend of mine who like me is a fan of the pre-disney expanded universe books and comic books and I was telling him that when Disney bought it, they could've easily made their own stuff but at the same time hire some authors to keep writing stories in the EU/Legends universe. Also, since they knew they were doing a streaming service they could've adapted some EU books to do non-canon animated movies like DC has done.
He told me that the problem with that is that it would make Disney look very bad if they did an animated mini-series or movie adaptation of something like Heir to the Empire or New Jedi Order and people enjoy those much more than the sequel trilogies. I figured that since Disney owns the rights to it they wouldn't care since they get the money.
In hindsight it is probably best Disney didn't try to bastardize the EU with an adaptation although they are doing Heir to the Empire I hear.
Do you think that would've made them look bad to have an EU adaptation on their streaming service that was more popular than what disney star wars produces?
I still will never understand why they didn't at least continue it. They had a built-in fanbase, and you need the hardcore fans because normies will leave once the next popular thing comes around.
The EU did get a little silly, convoluted and contradictory at times. They had a good model with the MCU, which was to mine all the greatest comic arcs and carefully craft a single narrative out of it, that could have easily been replicated with SW. Dave Filoni would have been the man for that job. He cared about SW the way Kevin Feige cared about the MCU.
The reason they couldn't do that, or even use the EU straight up, was KK. Disney the company wouldn't care about doing an about face to make money—they don't even care about upending their content to not make money—but it would have required firing all the hardcore progressives who would try to use their media/finance/NGO allies to burn it all down.
But the good thing about about the EU was that was not everything was canon. You could have wild stories or video games that just made up shit and it was fine.
But now everything down to every game is canon, hell even galaxy's edge is canon(and stuck in a day to day loop), to the point that they can't even keep up with what is canon and things are already contradicting each other.