I think it's unfair to lump episode 3 together with the other two.
Regardless, it still blows my mind how one of the biggest, most iconic franchises in the history of cinema spawned such terrible movies.
I mean, how did that happen? How did those scripts get approved? How was such terrible acting deemed acceptable? Was the person in charge of casting drunk?
It failed so hard on so many levels that it almost feels like it was on purpose because I can't wrap my head around such a monumental fuck up actually happening.
George Lucas had been retired for decades, and rode on the success as the creator of Star Wars, but remember- He didn't direct ESB or ROTJ. There is also some who say that he got massive help for the first film and that the 1AD did a lot of the directive. I don't know if that is true.
But what happens is that George Lucas become known as one of the most legendary directors. Yes, American Grafitti and HTX gave him credit, but he did not have the legacy that of his ULCA colleagues had. George Lucas empire grows with the franchise. He was very smart by not giving all the toy endorsement away.
So when Star Wars returned, he was in a position of being able to do completely, fucking what he wanted, in a field he had not engaged in since 83. Nobody could say things to him. No executive producers who come in worried and demands all these press screenings. You're surrounded by "yes, people".
IMO that was the difference between peter jackson doing the LOTR and the Hobbit. People were pissed when he got LOTR. People said he would fail, he was abysmal, he could do nothing but special effects, he would crack under such a large production, only spielberg or cameron could handle such a big production.
And that questioning, that doubt, that desire to prove himself must have done a hell of a lot for LOTR to be as amazing as it was.
For the Hobbit its the opposite. nobody says anything. sure, dailies are shit and production is chaos, but its peter- he knows what he is doing! we're not gonna doubt the guy who made one of the biggest miracles of cinema.
So in my mind- This is all just the failures of not having coworkers around you who dare tell you when you're stuff is shit. When you only hang around "yes, your awesome" type people, you yourself begin to change, and your entitlements and your own picture of your self changes. And a lot of the time, what emerges on the other side, has a unrealistic unhinged attitude towards one own work.
That is basically what I think happened.
George Lucas needed a big dedicated bright team of writers. But it was his baby. He had these darlings that needed to be slayed. He needed someone else to tell him what star wars meant to the public. I promise you that something like midiclorians would have gotten slayed in the writers meeting on day 2 or 3. There was nothing- Absolutely nothing sound about that choice.
Lastly, timing. All late 90s movies completely (save the matrix) underestimated the value of CGI. Had the prequels been released in 2015, and had another franchise taken star wars place to show the problems of a 90% CGI fest, I don't think Lucas would have made that mistake. But then again. Gollum in TTT was the best realization of a CGI character, and Jackson and friends completely forgot the lessons learned with the hobbit.
I feel that the Hobbit trilogy is a much large offense. It's a much worse realization. You can see what George Lucas went for. He failed on a lot of that execution, but the Hobbit is just small. It has nothing to say. It's like Robin Hood. It's completely formless.