Why did Star Wars, GoT, and others not live up to expectations?

Head canon is a hell of a drug.

Same reason The Vols keep failing at football

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Regardless of how people feel about those franchises, the rabid fanbases will never be satisfied

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The “you can’t satisfy everyone” crowd loves to overlook that Avengers set a bar impossibly high and they satisfied the masses and then some. It’s a cop out for a shot product.

Writers and producers decided to personalize the story for themselves instead of continuing for the sake of the viewers.

Game of Thrones failed largely because without the book material to fall back on, the show writers struggled to write the dialogue that made the series so compelling. GRR Martin wrote excellent dialogue.

In addition, budget constraints changed the pace of the show. Past Season 5, as the show ran out of book material, HBO put increasing pressure to wrap up the story in just 8 seasons. They also cut the number of episodes per season in the final 2. Game of Thrones made its living as a slow burn, full of great dialogue, beautiful world building, intricate plots, and excellent character development. It basically lost all 4 of those things during the course of the final 3 seasons. In my opinion, the final end conditions of Westeros weren’t terrible, but the way the show rushed to meet that end cheapened all of the payoffs which we should have received along the way. It felt like we read 2/3 of the way through a novel and then rushed to wikipedia to read the ending spoilers.

Star Wars was a victim of “fast track construction”. In the construction world, many design-build projects are built “fast-track” style, where construction on early phases begins before design of the later phases is completed. This can result in a faster and cheaper building process or can result in a massive clusterf$&k of critical path delays where much of the work must be redone over and over. Basically, the Disney Star Wars Trilogy was built without a clear plan from the start with the idea that the later phases would be designed while the early phase was being built. However, by changing architects twice midstream, a lot of pieces didn’t fit, but rather than go back and tear down the previous phase so that it fits the new design or fix the new design to fit the old one, they just slapped it all together and told us to like it, and that if we don’t, then we must hate women or something like that.

Lost, as a tv series, has a similar issue to Star Wars in that the entire story isn’t written before they start working. Maybe the first couple seasons were written with a cohesive story line, but as they kept getting renewed, the writers had to keep finding new ways to keep the story going. Eventually, they just ran out of tropes and wrote themselves into a corner they could not easily escape from.

The Hobbit failed for two reasons: trying to stretch too little source material into too much screen time, and over-reliance on computer-driven effects over conventional makeup, costume, animatronics, and pyrotechnics. What results is a bloated trilogy that is true to the books, but way too long (the hobbit is a short and sweet novel), and just straight up looks bad.

While the writing shouldn't be let off the hook, expectations for these massive properties weren't met partially because of the expectations. Once it's decided that something is unimpeachably great, it's hard to maintain that level of quality.

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Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Lost,

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Star Wars:
Prequels- Lucas way past his prime and should have stayed away from scripting and directing. Other than the first Star Wars (retroactively retitled "A New Hope"), the original trilogy was scripted and directed by other people with consulting and guidance from Lucas. SHouldve handled the same way for prequels.
Episodes 7-9 were just desperate attempts to appeal to younger audiences. Always gonna make for a shitty product.

GoT: The showrunners ran out of source material and got a synopsis from the author/creator. With less to work on, they realized they had a LOT of loose ends to tie off. Then, due to budgeting or their desire to be done with the project, they went too far too fast in resolving the loose ends and did not allow time for the late character arcs to gel with with viewers. Examples - the one big battle to end the White Walker threat (which felt empty) and Dany's "quick change" to evil, murderous dragon lady. The foreshadowing was definitely in place for her turn and her actions completely made sense with her established character, but the showrunners' follow through was rushed and clumsy, making it unbelievable for many, especially those who didnt see it coming (I did, yet still felt the way in which it was done was questionable).

Lost: The allure of Lost, other than fun characters, was all of the mystery/conspiracy/supernatural stuff that led to more and more questions. It created a mythology that was compelling. After a few seasons, though, it became clear that the writers had no goddamn idea what the resolution was going to be. They were obviously making it up as they went along. The dangers of TV success. You create a pilot to get your show picked up and then have a good idea for the first season or two. Then, as success continues, you have to keep it going and don't want to plan for a definite end because lots of money is getting made by keeping it going so long as people are watching.
Then, by the time ratings are down, so are original ideas and you've created a bunch of storylines that make no coherent sense for a satisfying overall resolution.

Don’t forget that Lost started before the writers strike. Back then, hour long tv dramas had 26 episodes in a season rather than 10 or 12. That’s a lot more time to fill each year.

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Battlestar Galactica

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What, exactly, caused them to fail?

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Did not fail. Did it get shaky there for a moment? Yeah. But the show ended up sticking the landing and is now remembered fondly as one of the greatest science fiction shows of all-time. Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Lost all failed to stick the landing and are not remembered as fondly as Battlestar Galactica. In fact...the way Star Wars and Game of Thrones ended their stories destroyed any rewatchability those two franchises had.

You can't say the same for Battlestar Galactica. While it did drift a little in season three, it still had solid episodes throughout that season and I feel like it recovered well in its fourth and final season.