Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Hollywood in general has had a hard time making movies that have equally strong appeal to both Chinese and American audiences. The Marvel movies are the only ones to have done it with some consistency. Most other US made movies that do well there tend to be heavily tilted towards the foreign box office in their results and less well received here. If they started changing Star Wars movies to help them crossover a lot of core fans, including many here I'd wager, would be up in arms over it and decrying the death of the franchise even more loudly. And if you're Disney where would you prefer your movies to do well, if it is a largely one or the other kind of choice; the domestic market where you get 70% of the box office with higher ticket prices or the Chinese market where the take is typically 25% with lower ticket prices and questionable reporting practices run rampant?

Royal said:

Hollywood in general has had a hard time making movies that have equally strong appeal to both Chinese and American audiences. The Marvel movies are the only ones to have done it with some consistency. Most other US made movies that do well there tend to be heavily tilted towards the foreign box office in their results and less well received here. If they started changing Star Wars movies to help them crossover a lot of core fans, including many here I'd wager, would be up in arms over it and decrying the death of the franchise even more loudly. And if you're Disney where would you prefer your movies to do well, if it is a largely one or the other kind of choice; the domestic market where you get 70% of the box office with higher ticket prices or the Chinese market where the take is typically 25% with lower ticket prices and questionable reporting practices run rampant?

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I'd put money on that is what they'll do with Rian Johnson's new trilogy. Just imagine: EU is gone, all the original characters won't matter and we'll get broom boy as Star Wars Peter Parker. He's an orphan, but smart while shy. He'll start off stopping petty crime in nearby alleys, make himself a home made costume, do some training montages where he discovers his powers, and blamo, Star Wars force super hero without any of the baggage of jedis.

You know, I was wondering why the Leia scene bothered me so much. It wasn't just that it looked stupid, it reminded me of something--but it was so absurd I think my brain couldn't make the connection. But the other day my kids were watching animated Dark Knight and I realized where I'd seen it before.

So I immediately get on the youtubes, and it appears others have made the connection well before me.



Rian Johnson is a fucking hack. Leia can't die even when the fucking actress died, and so she becomes Super Leia. But Luke sputters out doing a force projection.


Man, this movie just finds new ways to piss me off.

.

LennyLeonard said:

I'd put money on that is what they'll do with Rian Johnson's new trilogy. Just imagine: EU is gone, all the original characters won't matter and we'll get broom boy as Star Wars Peter Parker. He's an orphan, but smart while shy. He'll start off stopping petty crime in nearby alleys, make himself a home made costume, do some training montages where he discovers his powers, and blamo, Star Wars force super hero without any of the baggage of jedis.

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I REALLY hope they don't go with younger core characters.

Lithose said:

Rian Johnson is a fucking hack.

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Just another thought to throw on the Johnson dumpster fire:
I know there's a lot of JJ hate here, but at the very least, you have to give him credit for trying to stay somewhat true to the directing style of the OT. He understands that style has as much to do with the feeling of Star Wars as character and story do. This Leia scene is so far gone from anything you'd ever seen in the OT, that you can only feel "oh ya, there is a completely different set of people making this movie". A scene like this takes you out of the Star Wars universe. But Rian Johnson doesn't give a shit about that; he just thought it would look cool (it didn't)

kegkilla said:

At this rate it looks like TLJ will just barely limp across the 1.3 billion market. Maybe not even. Just a pitiful performance.

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Yeah.

At $1.3B it will be in the top 10 all time total box office, will have to earn enough to get top 5 domestic, and be only the 6th movie to cross $600M domestic and probably the second fastest to do so. This movie not making bank isn't on the list of concerns at Lucasfilm.

You can parse it's box office results in specific ways to suggest it's under performed on some level, usually through unrealistic comparisons to TFA, but to call it pitiful in any broad sense is just ignoring the data looking for validation in your opinion of the movie where none exists. People used to be content with just saying a shitty movie can still make a lot of money and just moving on when one they hated did so. The mental gymnastics people are going through to try and paint this one a box office failure are comedic.

Jive Turkey said:

I REALLY hope they don't go with younger core characters.

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I really hope they do. SW is now a parody of itself, so the more shit they show us, the more i laugh.

ohkcrlho said:

I really hope they do. SW is now a parody of itself, so the more shit they show us, the more i laugh.

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I'd rather they just made a good movie *shrug*

I've started this film with my touring cinema this weekend and have sat through two shows of it so far today, the first since I actually paid to go see it.

I was interested to see it again with no expectations compared to the high expectations I went into my original viewing with. I've come out of it feeling exactly the same - there's some nice moments but ultimately its a big pile of shite. I won't repeat everything that's been discussed ad nauseum here but the biggest issues it has is the timeline, the retarded humour and Leia being a fucking superwoman.

By my count I could rack up another 7 viewings over the next 3 weeks.

/wrist

A fat ugly Asian chick kisses a black man on purpose. That alone killed any chance this movie had.

kegkilla said:

the damage to the Star Wars brand done by this movie

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This is the most important factor and I hope Lucasfilms has taken notice. The real test is going to be how the next movie performs in light of the backlash to this one. Maybe they should talk to Paul Feig to find out how seriously to take it

Jive Turkey said:

This is the most important factor and I hope Lucasfilms has taken notice. The real test is going to be how the next movie performs in light of the backlash to this one. Maybe they should talk to Paul Feig to find out how seriously to take it

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That's important, the reaction to this movie is so harsh. The normal action would be to reboot the franchise. But Disney can't do that they are locked into a 300 million dollar part IX. That may well pull half the audience of The Last Jedi. They know they burned the fans with this movie and two years is not enough for them to forget and forgive.

kegkilla said:

these numbers mean nothing out of context since they don't consider the massive production budget, enormous marketing budget, the $4B Disney paid to buy Star Wars, inflation, the damage to the Star Wars brand done by this movie, the brand's complete and total rejection by what is soon to be the world's largest movie market, etc.

sure, on paper the movie made money. did it make as much as it was supposed to make given all the resources sunk into it? did it meet the firm's benchmarks for return on capital? was this the kind of performance Disney wanted given their $4B acquisition of the Star Wars franchise?

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Context huh? That all seems less like context and more like muddying up the water so you can toss your NOPE out there on the floor like a dead fish. You wanna apply all of that context to it then show how you're doing it. And put some of Disney's other movie properties in that same context for comparison.

For simplicity's sake I'll make a more low calorie comparison with one of Disney's other $4B flagships; Captain America: Civil War. Made a very comparable $1.2B though more of it was from overseas so there's the less favorable splits to consider. And they spent quite a bit more to make it ($250M budget vs. TLJ's $200M). We don't know what the promotional budget was. These discussions always thumbnail that to a percentage of the production budget but the way Disney promotes their movies they do a lot of taking money out of the left pocket to put it in the right anyway. Let's just assume they spent about the same.

Where was all talk here of under performance and imagined-hand wringing over the disappointment within Disney after the numbers for that one were tallied? Oh yeah, there wasn't any because everyone knew better.