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'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.
Nonsense! Solo will never be profitable because neither were most of the original trilogy.
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The costs:
Initial production budget was 250 mil. The movie was 80% done when the directors were fired and the new one re-shot most of the movie. So I'm adding 150 mil. The promotional budget for these movies is about the same as the production, so another 250 mil. Totaling 650 mil.
The revenue:
264 mil so far, not likely to go up by much. The second week's drop was quite heavy, so I expect 300 mil in total. Of which Disney's share is anyone's guess. Roughly half, 150 mil. Pathetic. Toy sales, TV rights, DVDs? Can't be much, judging by what The Last Jedi did. It basically broke Toys'R'Us! No one but ultra-geeks and collectors were exited about those toys. The regular fans, the general public, kids... are either "Meh" about it or actively hate Disney's Star Wars. The Last Jedi killed the golden goose.
The big picture:
Disney paid cool 4 billion for the franchise. A completely safe long-term investment in index funds will bring 5-10% annually. Therefore, Star Wars needs to bring 600 million to 1 billion every year to be on par. Disney needs The Force Awakens kind of film every year. So far, the investment has been a colossal failure. Disney can eat the loss because of the Marvel movies, theme parks, etc, but Star Wars will be a case study in failure for years to come.
I wouldn't place the blame squarely on Rian Johnson's shoulders. Part of the issue is that J.J. Abrams was given the first film and he's never been able to write a story from start to finish which you really need to do if you're making a trilogy. Look at something like Babylon 5 where J. Michael Straczynski had the overall story arc planned out in advance and was able to create something much more narratively satisfying because there was a point and purpose behind the different characters and events that occurred earlier in the series.
For Star Wars, there were no character arcs planned and in usual J.J. Abrams fashion he introduced plenty of unresolved and mysterious plot threads that he had no solid plans for resolving while essentially remaking Episode IV. Maybe that works great for something like Lost where you can jerk the audience around for 6 seasons, but for a Star Wars trilogy you need to know where the story is headed.
I suppose you could pass the buck to Disney who could have done a much better job of managing the Star Wars property. Why they didn't have an overall script or plan in place is beyond me. If you look at the Marvel cinematic universe they seem to have that much more planned out and I think that's why it's doing so well.
That's not really true. It is *TOTALLY* doable. In fact, the prequels (as badly-written as they were) provide a perfect counterargument.
Ewan McGregor seemed like he was channeling the deceased spirit of Sir Alec Guinness. He *was* Obi-wan. I'm amazed at how good his delivery was given the crap direction that Lucas provided (as seen how otherwise awesome actors like Natalie Portman were rendered like, well, petrified statues with hot grits).
If they'd searched long and hard enough they certainly could have found someone who could *be* Han Solo.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Alec Guinness himself made a pretty good Hitler, and Bruno Ganz was flat out iconic. Nobody complains that they're not as good at being Hitler as the real Hitler.
If that was the goal, they did it wrong.
Luke faced torture and certain death to save his father, who he barely knew, from the darkside. And here we have that same Luke about to murder his own nephew, whom he has known his entire life, in his sleep! For just starting to fall to the dark side.
Character motivation MATTERS when telling a good story. There interest here wasn't to show us how characters react in this drama, it was to take a widely-loved hero and turn him into a coward that just shrugs his shoulders and abandons his friends and family during their time of greatest need!
So, it makes zero sense that Luke would behave this way, so the story is dumb. And it doesn't stop there. Poe, formerly an elite and devoted hero of the resistance, is now a mutineer that just wants to blow everything up, and is directly responsible for getting the entire resistance wiped out. Fin is selfish and obsessed.
All our male heroes are having their characters destroyed, so their female counterparts can show their superiority, in each case. As if the bad plot wasn't bad enough, being beaten over the head with this man-shaming is just icing on the cake.
Fuck star wars.
Infinity wars was down a few million a day. It did not explain Solo theaters with 22 tickets sold.
Solo suffered from the pansexual comment. Audience demographics showed families attendance was down 80%. What parent wants to discuss pansexuality with their 12 year old. Awkward. yea... I know... it really wasn't in the movie.. it was a forced error on the part of the writer who gave a bad off the cuff response to a question.
Solo suffered from fan anger over TLJ. There's no way around it. Many of the peple the angriest were the ones who typically see films opening night and then repeatedly afterwards. I've seen A:IW 5 times and Deadpool II, 3 times. (BTW: I'm hearing good things about "Upgrade" a little independent Sci Fi film and I'm going to see it before it vanishes from theaters).
I was angry because TLJ humiliated and ruined Jake Skywalker (as Mark Hamill called him). And generally because the film humiliated males (Poe, Hux, Kylo, even Snoke) without any corresponding humiliation scenes for females.
TLJ was independently a really dumb film that repeatedly broke my suspension of disbelief so often that I had none left for the last half hour. I was just debating.. "do I leave and wait in the lobby or do I just sit out the last bit to see how this shit show ends?". And I went into TLJ in a very positive mood. It had a lot of my good will and had burned it all by the 45 minute mark. By the time I walked out, I'd decided not to see or buy any star wars material based on TLJ canon.
So.. I'm going to Avengers and the Solo trailer came up (1st trailer) and I literally felt sick at my stomach from leftover anger at TLJ.
EU is my canon. To say it's not canon is like Disney buy the rights to shakespeare and saying Hamlet is no longer canon. It was canon for 40 years. Some dumb soulless corporation isn't going to tell me what canon is.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.