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Meanwhile, J.J. Abrams, who is already in charge of the new Star Trek franchise, has been tapped to direct the first of the new Star Wars sequels, of which there will be at least five -- three sequels, plus multiple stand-alone spinoffs (Disney wants a new Star Wars movie every single year, like clockwork). How much money in production and promotion do you suppose will be tied up in just the projects we mentioned up there? $10 billion? More?

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"We're using three of that to create new state-of-the-art lens flare technology."

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And It Has Happened Before ...

Star Wars and Jaws are called "the beginning of the end" of New Hollywood (by Wikipedia, anyway) because they created the blockbuster, but the real end didn't come until around 1980, with the release of two legendary flops: Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, and Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart.

Both cases were highly regarded auteur filmmakers at the peak of their career, fresh off a huge success (One from the Heart was Coppola's first film after Apocalypse Now). In both cases, the studios allowed their crazy, ambitious filmmaker to go way over budget with a deeply personal film. And in both cases, the results were disastrous: One from the Heart bankrupted Coppola, who had tried to start his own studio with George Lucas, and Heaven's Gate drove United Artists straight out of business.

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And in keeping with modern Hollywood, they tried to reboot the studio decades later. It failed.

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When the New Hollywood era ended, Hollywood changed how it does business. The blockbuster era began, and high-concept, family-friendly franchises dominated. Now look at the timeline: Bonnie and Clyde kicked off the New Hollywood era in 1967, and Heaven's Gate brought it crashing down in 1980 -- 13 years later. X-Men came out in 2000, so ...

Why not wash the taste of Hollywood's failure out of your mouth with the trailer to Cracked's new Star Wars mini-series?

J.F. Sargent thinks you should tell him how wrong he is (with lots of swearing!) on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

For more on superhero movies, check out 8 (Pointless) Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow and The 7 Least Faithful Comic Book Movies.