diversehighfantasy:

actualreyofsunshine:

thelastjedicritical:

devillikeme:

kingofjakku:

Opinion: In the short term, 1.3 billion for The Last Jedi makes it look like it won big again. But it really didn’t, and they are clearly stumbling with the results. This video perfectly explains why.

The movie is a financial failure beyond what they expected. Numbers don’t lie. Damage control is at an all-time high with the Star Wars franchise, now with the upcoming release of “Solo” and the decreased anticipation for Episode IX.

It’s so important to remember that money talks. This video will help you understand why they’ve been much more aggressive this time around on buying this episode for the “feature-length” documentary, additional bonus features and for the sake of “collecting it”. They can insult and reduce the unhappy fans all they want, but at the end of the day you will always have the high ground 😉 as a consumer if you were truly displeased with it.

Boost this if you are critical of TLJ.

I’ve been saying this since the box office locked in but I’m not good with numbers and this is a great job of showing how the movie failed financially. 

And there is another thing I’d like to point out: there were quite a few movies just last year and now with BP there will be another who have made similar amounts of money at the Box Office. This is nothing special for a blockbuster anymore, wheras TFA was special, it was in another league. This position was lost by TLJ.

So logically Disney/LF should now try everything in their power to stop this downwards trend. And that means they can’t continue like this …

What the video says about the new characters is harsh. But it is the truth. Rey is now bland, Kylo is bland, Finn and Poe were turned into jokes and no one cares about Rose … so how do you sell these characters? Bc everybody else is dead!!

Honestly though, Disney/LucasFilm is a shitshow at the moment, and they’ve done some really fucked up things with the Star Wars franchise that have raised a ton of eyebrows.

1. All of the reshoots needed for Rogue One, which were rumoured to cost somewhere around $30 million. Granted, reshoots aren’t entirely out of the ordinary for big productions like Rogue One. But the price tag attached to these reshoots is what makes them unprecedented, and it really doesn’t make LF look good when you realize that this is just one example of how enormously disorganized they are as a company.

2. Speaking of reshoots–all of the reshoots that they apparently had to do for The Force Awakens. Of course, that turned out perfectly fine, but there were other issues involved with the release date for the movie. Apparently JJ Abrams wanted to release it in the summer of 2016, but LF pushed for December 2015 instead, which gave him a really tight schedule to finish the film. Both of these are just rumours and I can’t find any sources for them except heresay, so take it with a grain of salt.

3. How they got Rian Johnson to start writing TLJ when TFA was just entering production, as opposed to waiting for the final cut of the movie. I’m pretty sure that this is what explains the inconsistency between the two movies. If it seemed like TLJ was just an entirely separate movie, divorced from the continuity of TFA, that’s because it was. That’s literally how Rian Johnson approached writing this film, and it shows.

4. Starting on the sequel trilogy without adequately mapping out where the story is going to go. I mean, I think anyone who watched TLJ and has decent taste would be able to tell you exactly why this was another bad idea.

5. Kathleen Kennedy playing fast and loose with directors. This comes with another caveat where the whole issue is framed through a ~feminist~ perspective, where Kathleen Kennedy firing her directors left, right and center is a good thing because it means that she’s unafraid of taking charge and going up against condescending male directors when it comes to her vision for Star Wars or whatever.

The official reason for firing Lord and Miller from Solo (and Colin Treverrow I guess) was that their vision didn’t line up with what Disney/LF wanted. But given that Rian Johnson and Gareth Edwards were allowed to make significant departures from what is generally expected out of a Star Wars movie, it’s really really strange that she chose to work with both of them, but couldn’t get along with the others.

It’s even weirder when you consider her actions in light of the fact that she doesn’t think female directors can helm a big production like Star Wars. It’s clear that for Kathleen Kennedy, it’s not about feminism or taking charge, but rather the fact that neither her nor anyone else at LF seem to have a clue what the fuck they’re doing at any given time.

6. Everything to do with Solo: A Star Wars Story. Literally everything. The fact that she fired the directors and replaced them with Ron Howard, with a month left on their shooting schedule. The way they waited to start promotions, and didn’t even release anything, not even a poster, even when they had five months left on the release of the movie. The rumours that the script is terrible, that they had to hire an acting coach for Alden Ehrenreich. There’s so much about the movie that doesn’t bode well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney/LF is bracing for it’s first flop tbh. It’s a shame that it had to be the fucking Han Solo movie though.

I would add that making Solo: A Star Wars Story instead of Lando: A Star Wars Story was a major misstep, and if Lando, as played by blerd icon Donald Glover (whose failed Spider-man campaign in 2010 wound up having a huge impact, inspiring Miles Morales among other things – even though a lot people thought the idea of Donald Glover as Spider-man was a hilarious joke) doesn’t have a shit ton of screen time in Solo, Disney should clean its Star Wars house once and for all. They’ve already wasted a massive amount of potential by making it about Han Solo, who, unlike Lando, has had a lot of screen time. Then they disregarded or minimized one of the best new New Canon characters from Han’s past, Sana Starros. Why? Because fans got so upset that Han had a life before Leia? Or because Sana wasn’t another white brunette? The casting suggests the latter, another huge mistake that I hope won’t be lost on Disney as they light their cigars with Black Panther money.

If any of these decisions were on Lord and Miller, it sure doesn’t look like they remedied them after they got the boot. 

Their firing is especially confusing after TLJ. Apparently, they were fired for too much irreverent “Lego Movie” style humor. TLJ comes out and you have Hux as this slapstick bad guy like something out of Hogan’s Heroes, and Johnson didn’t lose his job? His script wasn’t compatible with TFA, characters were not consistent, Mark Hamill hated how he wrote Luke, and he didn’t lose his job. I can’t imagine anything Lord and Miller could have done that would have been less compatible with Star Wars than what Johnson did. It really makes me wonder what kind of politics are at play, because after TLJ it can’t be because L&M’s humor was a bad fit.