'Solo' Will Lose $50+ Million In First Defeat For Disney's 'Star Wars' Empire (hollywoodreporter.com)

Zorro shares a report from The Hollywood Reporter: To borrow one of Han Solo's lines from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, "That's not how the Force works!" It's an apt way to sum up the troubled performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story. In one of the biggest box-office surprises in recent times, Solo is badly underperforming and will become the first of the Star Wars movies made by Disney and Lucasfilm to lose money. Wall Street analyst Barton Crockett says Solo will lose more than $50 million. Industry financing sources, however, say that figure could come in at $80 million or higher, although no one knows the exact terms of Disney's deals for home entertainment and television, among other ancillary revenues.

Comments

It wasn't a terrible movie

[mykepredko]

I'm not really sure where the negative vibes came from; I thought it was better than "The Last Jedi" and a lot better than "Infinity Wars".

Ron Howard did a credible job as director (you can see what was done before him).

I think it really comes down to "Jedi Fatigue" and a really stupid release date (against "Infinity Wars" and "Deadpool 2").

Re:It wasn't a terrible movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I actually really liked it, in fact, I liked Rogue One a lot too and I'm beginning to think maybe the spin offs are going to be consistently better than the mainline.

As such, what bothers me is that the poor showing for Solo is because of the utter cluster fuck Rian Johnson made of the last film that was out in December. I sincerely hope they don't scrap the good films due to poor showings like this when the reason was the shit film that came out in December.

I suspect if this film had been out in December, and Rian's shitfest had been out now, they'd both have done well as Solo would've been much appreciated in December and would've led to people being excited for another release now (only to be disappointed because it'd still be Rian's shitfest).

The real problem here is the utter fuckup that is Rian Johnson ruining people's interest in December, not because Solo is a bad film in itself, on the contrary, it's quite good.

Solution: Take that trilogy you've promised to Rian Johnson back away from him and don't hire him ever again and focus on actual good directors. Don't give up on spin offs because the mainline ruined people's interest in the subsequent film when the real problem was the director doing a shit job of the mainline film.

Not Surprising

[quantaman]

Telling a completely new story in a great universe? Great idea.

Telling a derivative story in a great universe? Good idea.

Shooting a remake of a great movie? Decent idea.

Shooting a movie with an iconic character, defined by an iconic actor? Terrible idea.

The Star Trek remakes got away with it because the roles made the actors more than the actors made the roles (though they're still boring movies).

But Han Solo was cool because Harrison Ford is a top-end actor who absolutely nailed the character of Han Solo. A Han Solo movie without Harrison Ford is basically a movie of going "Boy, that character isn't nearly as interesting as I remember. And that guy still isn't Harrison Ford!"

It's not like there were a lack of stories to tell in the Star Wars universe.

Re:Yawn ...

[supremebob]

Yeah... once you factor in BluRay sales, video service streaming fees, TV broadcast rights, and branded products (Toys, T-Shirts, etc) they'll still make a small fortune on this movie.

It's just going to take more time to become profitable than usual.

Re:There are none so blind

[AmiMoJo]

Star Wars fans would have thrown money at the franchise forever without a second thought if they hadn't put social evangelists in charge and allowed them to burn it down.

Doubtful that had anything to do with it. Look at the list of top grossing films in the US we can see that number 3 is Black Panther, a film almost entirely made up of diversity hires where an SJW forces a bunch of conservatives to adopt his agenda and culminates in the creation of a reverse-racist outreach centre targeting poor black kids.

We also have Avatar, about an SJW enviro-mentalist who thinks a primitive native tribe is more important than unobtanium that could bring prosperity and wealth to several rich white guys. Force Awakens is up there, which as we know is the ultimate Mary-Sue anti-male crapfest. Even the Last Jedi is in at number 8, right above proper fan favourite manly man film The Dark Knight.

Worryingly, even femoid romantic crap like Titanic did really well. Even AmiMojo couldn't sit through that one. Somehow Wonder Woman, a feminist nightmare of a movie, did better than all the other DC universe stuff.

I know everything is SJWs' fault, but in this case maybe Solo is just a bad movie or people are fed up with Star Wars now.

Re:Yawn ...

[Wycliffe]

gonna take a long time for 250 million+ loss

No worries, with current copyright laws, they have at least 95 years. And that's assuming Disney/Star Wars doesn't extend it again.
You have to appreciate the strange irony of calling a movie a failure if it's not profitable within a week of release yet having copyright laws that extend for many thousands of times longer than that.

We should change copyright laws to a max of 20 years or 5 years after profitability, whichever is shorter.

Re:No it won't

[hazardPPP]

This was of course a movie made for streaming. It's almost the definition of not worth a movie theater trip.

I disagree. Actually, I think that "Solo" is by far the best of the Disney Star Wars movies. I think the problem is that The Last Jedi was the worst Star Wars movie ever (yes, worse than Episode I) and that pissed people off. They will watch Episode IX since they wan't to know how the story will end, but they won't bother with an "anthology" movie outside of the main storyline since they don't feel like they are missing anything important.