I understand that, but YOU are also ignoring a bunch of revenue coming in.

No doubt...My point it is is clearing 1 Billion and probably 1.4, aint the worst thing in the world & my guess (!) is by the end it will pay for itself many times over. I understand everyone is crying now and they say they wont see the next one but most of them will. And if they don;t kids will...kids are the cash flow not angry pinheads!

EDIT: too true on ESPN...man I remember watching it religiously before and i can;t stand it now besides maybe 3 shows & one of those if football.

Are you really arguing with a straight face that Disney produced a movie that results in zero profit to their shareholders with $1.2b in global box office? Who would ever greenlight that? Justice League (the "highest grossing box office bomb ever" according to your guy over at Forbes) was a failure at $650m world wide. But TLJ has nearly doubled that number and is still bringing in money. It likely failed to meet projections, but it is objectively not a "bomb."

As for your profit/cost numbers, none of us appear to really know what we're talking about, but a guy earlier said Disney's actually getting 65% of domestic box office for TLJ through strong-arm deals with theaters, which would tack $100m onto your domestic take number. It seems plausible that Disney negotiated better deals in at least some foreign markets too. As for marketing costs, do you really think they spend as much on a SW flick as the average blockbuster, when they've got all that free advertising from their licensees (which they're being paid for to boot)? I've seen way more car and video game ads featuring Star Wars than I have TLJ ads this winter.

Disney will ultimately turn a sizeable profit on TLJ (box office plus licensing/merchandising). It is unavoidable. The creative team may well be shuffled or flushed, but the franchise is neither endangered nor dead (as the guy from Forbes seems to imply). And they're going to be making SW movies, shows, rides, toothbrushes, and underpants for many years to come.

None of which has anything to do with the artistic merits of the TLJ. It's just odd to see people bending over backward to argue that Disney won't get paid on this venture. ESPN might have been a crap purchase, but the Lucas properties at $4b were a steal.

If the movie fails, so will the downstream revenue products. Who wants to buy loser toys? Walmart is still trying to get rid of Ghostbuster figures and there is plenty of Star Wars items in the clearance racks too.

And this is a serious question- Who wants toys from an uninspiring mess of a movie? The original Star Wars actually inspired kids imaginations, what is inspiring about the current movie? Combined that with toy companies struggling in this day and age of digital kids and the picture starts getting ugly. Star Wars is still cruising on past reputation but the wings on that plane looks like they are losing some lift.

1) Have three kids, none aside my daughter bothered to see the movie. As an aspiring writer she was horrified in regards to the writing and she liked The Force Awakens. "Good Spectacle" she said and I have to agree JJ is good for that. Han Solo is one of my favorite SW characters, no interest in seeing the SOLO movie.

2) ESPN? Destroyed by SJW, they wipe out all they touch.

In closing I hope Disney really takes the criticism to heart and fix what they need to fix. I want to see some great Star Wars movies and would be more than happy to throw a wad of cash in Disney's direction. Lucas did some great stuff outside of the movies (books and video games) and there is a rich mine of stuff there to be had that would be some winners for Disney.

Nothing like it was for our toys no doubt, but they are still SW toys. You have to think less "Leae with Force Grip" and more "Star Wars Legos."

gdonovan sounds like your kids are grown past the action figure/lunch box crowd that minted Lucas his billions. I've got a 4 and 6 year old and they and their friends are obsessed with SW. They received SW shirts, hats, and Legos out the wazoo from relatives for Christmas, all unsolicited. The boys are too young to see these movies, and I doubt the relatives buying the stuff have seen them either, but they're all affected by the marketing blitz (which Disney doesn't pay for much of). And even if real world toys are a shrinking market, it's not like SW is absent from the world video games and apps. There's still plenty of gold in them there hills, and Disney knew it when they bought out George.

1) I did the math, was something not clear? In all fairness though the theater run is not done but Forbes projects it will struggle to break 1.4 billion. Forbes is also not the only source who is projecting this. Fairly easy to look up the box office returns on BoxOfficeMojo and project the numbers to some degree.

2) They were projecting to gross $2 billion, someone will have to explain where the missing $800 million went.

3) They will make a profit, the question is how much? There is a lot of costs to be covered in a SW production.

Example The Force Awakens: Production $250 million, Advertising $250 million, residuals $250 million, Studio overhead $30 million.

So right there is $780 million in costs before The Force Awakens was shown on a single screen. One can assume TLJ won't be far from those numbers.

Toys, Disc and download sales, books, clothing, shampoo and other consumer goods will of course fatten up the bottom line but a Star Wars movie is pretty much expected to stand well on its own, the rest is tasty, tasty gravy.

As I pointed out, the number varies from 30-60% depending on how long the run is. It doesn't stay at 65% and some theaters even declined to show the movie, which I will assume is a fairly small number.

Feel free to cite a source, Star Wars is not that great a draw in some markets.

Losing to a local Chinese comedy in China has to be a hell of a shot in the nuts to Disney.

Disney is notorious for flooding the zone in marketing, the number of $250 million for TFA for example is reported to be accurate.

It is.. till it isn't.

The Forbes article had examples of several franchises that were profitable till one or two movies ran them into the ground.

Lets face it, its is a rare movie franchise that continues to make money. They all die sooner or later with the profit trailing off each entry till it becomes unprofitable to turn out another movie.

The last Terminator movie was actually profitable.. But the studio still killed the new Terminator trilogy it was to launch as it was not profitable enough.

No one is arguing that, unless I missed a post or two.

People are arguing that the movie was not so good and this is showing up on the bottom line.

Disney projected to rake in 2 billion in ticket sales and that doesn't look like it is going to happen.

Frikkin Tripod really? Man I bet the move over from Geocities was a doozey

All they had to do was not f$&k up Luke. They couldn’t help themselves and took a huge sh!t on Luke and the rest of the OG characters. They could have left every other crap decision and dumb plot point how it is if they just handled Luke right. Everyone (even the defenders of this hot mess) wanted to see Luke kicking some ass as a Jedi Master. We’ll never see that now. Instead we got to see him almost murder his twin sister’s son, drinking sweet space manatee milk, and sulking like a bitch.

It writes itself really. They should have had Luke showing up to save Rey, killing all of Snokes guards single-handedly, before facing off against Snoke himself in an epic lightsaber duel. They want to kill him, fine...let Snoke do that in epic fashion only to have Kylo bitch-kill Snoke as a result and his conflicted feelings. Hell, let him force push an AT-AT onto its side...SOMETHING cool!

They paid a writing team millions for what we got. Luke hologramming like a bitch from the safety of the island and dying pathetically because of over-exertion??? Weak.

Amen brother!

If I was ever blessed enough to have a random encounter with Mark Hamill somewhere, I would love to give him a hug and say "I'm so sorry Mark". I'd like to think his response would be "I'm sorry too."

Such a disgrace.

Sorry, Disney may not have wanted to call this a series reboot, but to me it is nothing but.
They placed the Episode 7 and 8 labels on it and dangled the return of the original beloved characters like some ersatz homecoming.
Instead we got clear diversity quotas, feminism, and hackneyed story telling.
Anything the original heroes stood for character wise, all of their growth and trials were summarily dismissed.
Like what you want, hate what you want.
This movie played like millenial fan fiction to me.
Simple answer is to just shovel these fecal abominations into the theaters but have it be in the future well beyond anything we saw in Star Wars through Return of the Jedi.

625F233F-AEF1-4B00-9C09-005D4FBB95C5 (resized).jpeg

Your math looked great, right up to the point where it led you to conclude that "best case scenario" Disney "just broke even" on TLJ at $1.2b world wide box office. And that Disney's "best case scenario" is now to clear $100-200m (assuming $1.3-$1.4b world wide). Doesn't pass the smell test. Something's off with your calculations unless you're doing the kind of "movie accounting" that also classified the Harry Potter and LOTR films as losers to avoid paying out on back-end deals. In which case I agree, TLJ will probably "lose" hundreds of millions, just like every other blockbuster film in history.

Roll the tape!

"$448,741,521 Disney's cut. Disney has not even gotten back what they paid to make the movie and marketing yet."

This is 100% correct based on the math, Disney has not got back their investment money on making the movie YET.

Production and marketing are $500-$600 million bucks projected.

The movie still has not finished its theatrical run and some of the numbers are open to interpretation but as far as guestimates go it is based on solid research based off the known numbers from The Force Awakens and commonly used percentages.

The numbers are actually worse than that as the $500-$600 million costs does not reflect the residuals which are paid out too, TFA was $250 million.

So just on movies ticket sales (which people are tossing around as a metric of success) I stand by what I said.

I'm looking at the movie as a stand alone item "the movie supporting itself and making a profit from ticket sales" which is a benchmark most studios use. With Star Wars the license fees, toys, DVD sales, etc fatten the bottom line but that as I explained in an earlier post pure gravy.

Also as you mentioned the toy sales will suffer, the repeat viewer numbers will be greatly reduced. You can also reasonably project ho hum numbers for other collateral earnings such as dvds, on demand and merchandise licensing of the TLJ title. Then again you don't have to look too far to see how Disney feels about TLJ than RJ being shown the door and old bland Mr. Lens Flash brought back for Ep 9 to do damage control. I'm just waiting on Solo to hit the fan.

Yeah man they rewarded him with his own trilogy. But again whatever...they can shitcan him anytime which is standard these days.

I can't imagine his trilogy ever seeing the light of day. I suspect it will just die off with no announcement.

Whom knows....we live in a world where they make new Fantastic 4 movies...anything is possible

Hey, The FF would be as awesome as The Avengers if the damn movie company would stick to the comics and the timeline of the comics. That last FF movie SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUKED. Give it back to Marvel and let them make a good one. I do get that the first two transferred over to reality a little bit on the gay side but they could do better. Give us some shape changing scrulls or some negative zone or something. That attempt at Galactus was gay as shit.

Man you must be a fan if you actually watched it. What a shit show from beginning to end production wise. Han Solo is almost getting as bad as this was

Oh I see them doing another trilogy, just not with Johnson at the helm.

It all depends on how well TLJ and Solo shakes out.

If both movies are not as profitable as projected I don't see how Disney can't do some housecleaning.

Lot of products are downstream of the movies, if the movies suck the downstream products will suffer and that is where the real money is.

The brand is everything, don't muck up the brand.

Your math shows that Disney needs a $1.2b gross to see a profit. This checks out IF we assume that your (guestimate) inputs are correct. But given that the output of your equation is illogical -- in that it insists that TLJ must double the box office of the highest grossing bomb in movie history to show any profit -- I must conclude that your inputs are significantly flawed. Of course they're probably still better than the usual pinball BOM and profit margin numbers that fly around Pinside, so maybe I'm giving you too much guff about it. [EDIT: looking back at my last few threads, I've said my piece and then some, so I'll shut up about TLJ being box office gold going forward]

I thought the plan was always for JJ Lens Flash to come back and direct Ep. 9, and then RJ to write and direct all three of the following trilogy. (I hear the force is strong with Ackbar's son, but will his lust for vengeance turn him to the dark side? And can a major motion picture staring a goldfish man succeed?)

If there's a shakeup, it would be in RJ losing Eps. 10-12. Will be interesting to see if that happens. It'd be fun if they could get Christopher Nolan involved, he might have some fun with the SW Universe now that the reigns are loosened.

At least they didn't cast Shia LaBeouf or the new Mr. Fantastic as Han Solo. I kind of like that Hobie Doyle kid, even though I fully expect the Solo movie to suck. Who grows up to be Harrison Ford? Harrison Ford, obviously.

Actually it was originally going to be Colin Trevorrow, but he was sacked and replaced by JJ. No doubt Colin displayed signs of directorial backbone to Kennedy.

Have to 100% agree ... this movie , after all this time waiting , was very disappointing. boring.. ughh Give me a new Star trek movie -much more fun and plot driven just imho. I'm done with Star Bores

My memory is REAL fuzzy but there was an early draft for the movie where Luke was on his island there with Rey and Kylo shows up with the Knights of Ren. Rey proceeds to duel with Kylo and Luke... Well he goes all Jedi master on their ass and stomps a dozen of them a new mudhole, force choking, lightning bolting and sabering them to bits.

People may disagree on TLJ's qualities as a movie but financially? HUGE SUCCESS.

But if you're waiting for a car crash to gawk at SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY could be it.

1) A movie nobody cares about, replacing an actor everyone loves, telling a story we don't need to hear.
2) Shot 90% of it before realizing directors were a bad choice (but in actuality they were probably the fall guys for a shit script)
3) Hired King of Bland: Ron Howard, who spent 3 months doing reshoots which is enough to make the movie a second time.
4) Another 3 weeks of reshoots inbound = Disney not happy with rough cut.
5) Massively blown out budget will be compounded by compressed VFX schedules to make a May release date.
6) Can't move Solo to X-mas 2018 because Wreck it Ralph 2, Nutcracker and Mary Poppins 2 already there (and Mary has been in the can for ages already)

Disney is releasing so much stuff they don't even have breathing room for their own movies, let alone absorbing Fox (will Star Wars / Avatar trade alternate years)

That’s what they get for buying up everybody! #firstworldproblems

http://www.slashfilm.com/rian-johnsons-star-wars-trilogy/
There is no trilogy....not even an outline. Also I’ll eat my hat if he helms anymore SW films.

Who told you this? (A friend spoke to Arnold and he said there WILL be another Terminator film)
I've been in the business for over 40 years. TLJ will make over 2 billion. (It's approaching 1.4 billion and not even done with world theatrical)!
Trust me, Disney is fine. The Star Wars franchise is fine.
Was TLJ a great film?....maybe not, but guess what...I have many friends in high places in the film biz that think the original was shite!
There are also people that think Citizen Kane is boring as hell and Deadly Spawn is a classic. If you like it, it's fine...it's good for YOU...and that's all that matters. .....It's like art...some people think a painting of a soup can is priceless...I like Salvatore Dali.... Everybody just chill and have a cigar and a shot of tequila! Dilly Dilly!

They do this to NFL coaches all the time. Give them long term contract one year and can them the next

They can spin it however they like, but he wasn’t “sacked” for “being difficult”.

He had a vision for episode 9, which he & Mark Hamill discussed & were on the same page. Obviously Luke was a huge part of it, and when Rian Johnson decided to kill Luke, Trevorrow said you’ve left me nothing to work with, this is shit, I’m out.

Who can blame him.

Ted I don't know what blue milk you've been drinking but there's no way in hell TLJ makes it to 2 billion worldwide.

So ghost Yoda can blow up a tree from beyond the grave. And he can't be killed because he's already dead. So why don't the dead Jedi just kill off the Sith from beyond the grave?

Terminator rights were acquired by Annapurna Pictures in 2011 and is responsible for Terminator Genisys, which erased prior movie plot lines via time travel setting up for a 3 movie arc. The movie unperformed and all parties involved got cold feet about moving forward.

James Cameron regains Terminator Rights in 2019 due to copyright law changes and is planning on doing a sixth Terminator film which has nothing to do with Terminator Genisys and the 3 movie arc planned by Annapurna Pictures and Paramount.

So if you wish to quibble we both are correct but you are taking what I said out of context. I said Terminator Genisys under performance killed the *trilogy* planned by Annapurna Pictures, which is 100% factual.

A new movie by Cameron is a different story and isn't connected to Terminator Genisys and in fact ignores most of the prior movies aside from Terminator and Terminator 2 and will be a direct sequel to the second movie.

I wonder how the hell they will do that. Arnold will need a walking stick by the time that happens...wait a minute, a walking stick shotgun sounds like a great idea...I’m in.

I'm cautiously optimistic Cameron is back at the helm, Cameron of the 80's and 90's isn't the same as the Cameron of today. Technically he has moved movie making forward visually but Avatar was a heavy handed poop show story wise.

James is on record stating he has told the story he wanted to tell in the Terminator movies and had nothing left to add... So he came up with a new angle or its just a cash grab. Both T1 and T2 are such awesome movies they are hard acts to follow.

Wrong! This movie ruined my lyfe! And yes, I do have Star Wars sheets! So what! ......

Considering it is losing to a local comedy in China and domestically to JUMANJI with INSIDIOUS on par with it, The Force Awakens numbers of 2 billion are a pipe dream for The Last Jedi..

Don't take my word for it.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/daily/chart/?view=7day&sortdate=2018-01-09&p=.htm

Speaking of blue milk..

5a3e8e0ee357e (resized).jpeg

http://www.starwars.com/news/these-thala-siren-milkshakes-are-worth-a-trip-to-ahch-to

Thala-siren Milkshakes

What You’ll Need:

2 straws
2 (2-1/2 -inch tall) thala-siren cutouts
2 glasses
4 ounces white chocolate
2 ounces silver sanding sugar
½ cup whole milk
Whipped cream
Ice Cream Ingredients:

2 cups heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
Green food gel dye

Step 1: In a bowl, stir together the heavy cream, milk, sugar, vanilla, and almond extract. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

Step 2: Stir in 1-2 drops of green food gel dye to get a light green color.

Step 3: Pour into loaf pan and freeze for 20-30 minutes. When the edges start to freeze, break up the ice cream by mixing it up.

Step 4: Return the pan to the freezer and repeat in 30 minutes, smoothing out the surface of the ice cream. Keep in the freezer until ready to use.

Step 5: Using the photo from StarWars.com, print out two thala-sirens, 2-½ inches tall. Cut out and tape to straws or cup/glass. Set aside.

Step 6: In a small bowl, break up the white chocolate and microwave in 15 second intervals until melted and smooth. Dip the rims of the glasses into the white chocolate, then into the silver sanding sugar.

Step 7: Scoop the ice cream into a blender. Add ½ cup milk and blend until smooth but still frozen.

Step 8: Pour into the prepped glasses and top with whipped cream. Enjoy on those especially hot days on Ahch-To! (Or even in our galaxy in the freezing cold.)

Cool...did I mention my hat is a Porg?

36FC5F21-5BA7-4CE7-922D-375B46C0503A (resized).png

I’m sure they make ‘em. I got a Porg shirt for Xmas.

9C9CFB6B-DFA6-4F3F-AA2D-B0732E096399 (resized).jpeg

But...”just look at all that cheddar!!!!”

One of the greatest lines ever spoke onscreen.

Avatar is a complete and utter piece of shit from the first frame forward. The ONLY thing it had going for it was Stephen Lang.

https://www.cosmicbooknews.com/star-wars-last-jedi-editor-regrets-death-admiral-ackbar

Woopsie.

Sorry I killed your fish kid.

Well obviously Avatar didn;t hurt your but so much so I understand.

Yeah...what a waste. Same with Luke and Han, they could have killed them both off in a much better way but alas they were born with penises and had to go. Chewie better get a perm or he’s next.

Pics of Chewbacca in the new Solo movie just leaked:

6C7AC0AA-BC1F-48AB-956E-EF051EF6D4DF (resized).jpeg