NBC Universal, Warner Media, Fandango, Yahoo.... on & on. It a huge conglomerate. Basically the companies that make the movies & sell the tickets control the reviews. The critics generally obey & try not to bite the hand that feeds them, and negative reviews (even honest reviews that are not troll based) are rejected. Sham sham sham.

RT is owned by Fandango. The current president of Fandango is Paul Yanover, a former executive Vice President and (I believe) board member of Disney.

It’s getting difficult what to believe in the media anymore.

Speaking of shams, all the TROS headlines I keep seeing are "biggest pre-order numbers ever", "huge opening weekend", "passed $500M worldwide", "huge Christmas day ticket sales" etc etc.

It isn't until you read the details a few paragraphs in where the true details emerge. How TROS opening weekend was below expectations. How it made less than TLJ. Only 3rd biggest opening in December. How it's made practically nothing in China. These bloggers just find any way possible to shine the perfect light on it.

RT does its part to freeze the audience review ratings to give the film all the help it can get for next weekend's grosses. If the audience reviews were close to the critics (as it should be), it wouldn't come close to a billion dollars. The general movie going public are generally action loving lemmings with short attention spans. This film plays right into those tendencies. Look no further than the Fast & Furious movies as an example. All action, no story, no problem.

That said, now I think TROS will have some legs & pass a billion easily. Which I was pretty much rooting against, because I wanted to see Kennedy shown the door sooner than later. I wanted to see these people knocked down a few pegs. I don't think that is likely to happen now. And I think JJ & Kennedy will emerge from this trilogy with there heads held high, which is just maddening from my perspective that this trilogy is complete garbage storytelling. It what is is I guess.

ding-ding-ding!

winner!

And Fandango sells.. movie tickets. Don't want any bad reviews cutting into ticket sales.

I'm not positive of that- China it did abysmal numbers, like 3 or 6 million. Like change in the couch cushions for Disney.

Factor in the multiple re-shoots and other extra costs associated with several different edits/cuts.. going to be one ugly baby on the Disney spreadsheet.

I'm really looking forward to a close analysis & breakdown of the film itself after the theatrical run. It's a poorly constructed film that moves so fast that most people don't realize how bad it is. Close examination of how poorly the story was put together. How poorly it connects to the previous films story threads.

It felt like it was edited over & over, with parts removed or switched around. Gaping plot holes, multiple mcguffins & side plot points that go absolutely nowhere. Just bad storytelling.

One that briefly comes to mind is Fynn's "Rey! I have something to tell you!" line before sinking into the sands. What was he going to say? I love you? I can feel the force? JJ didn't bother resolving that one. I mean come on dude. And if there were worm tunnels underneath those sinking sands, why didn't the sand just flow through the holes to begin with? Ever seen sands flow through an hourglass JJ? Apparently not. I digress...

This has already been acknowledged. Three different versions are known to have been screen tested.

In one the Falcon with Lando is destroyed at the final battle. It scored very badly.

Also the "girl stormtrooper" Lando is seen at the end with is his daughter. That is why he was on the desert planet, he was looking for her, she was kidnapped by First Order as a child. This was cut from the movie and the final scene is vaguely awkward.

In an interview he states Fynn was going to say "I'm force sensitive" ... which makes absolutely no sense at all. Everyone is laughing JJ actually stated that with a straight face.

I had the same thought, not a single pebble on the tunnel floor, was extremely retarded. Was about that point my brain started shutting down.

Both Luke's ship and the one on the desert planet just fire up and work perfect after being shut down for decades? GET OUTA TOWN! Or the First Order towing the Falcon back to the Star Destroyer? Was there not an order by Kylo the ship was to be destroyed on sight? And once they had it in their hands they didn't put a tracking device on it?

So. much. stupidity.

There you go, follow the $.

What do you mean "getting difficult"?

TROS will probably come in under expectations. But it will still easily top $1 billion, and there’s no way in hell Disney doesn’t turn a nice profit on it.

Regardless, will be interesting to see where they go next with SW. They’ll for sure be doing lots of shows to drive Disney+ subscriptions, and sounds like Kevin Feig is producing a future SW movie project, which is promising.

Just finished it, it was ok. Better than TLJ. I had pretty low expectations for it, and nothing really surprised me overall. There was just too much to try and undo in one movie. In the end, the entire trilogy was kind of a mess. The first movie was all setting up to find Luke, then that turned into a mess and zero setup for the 3rd movie...and it kind of shows as there's nothing really compelling here to resolve.

Damn straight...too many of these talentless hacks pushing shit for $15 a pop on the general public. The saddest part is what you said, they'll emerge with their head held high and with fat paychecks. Makes me want to puke....JJ ruined ST, he did the same for SW (As i had predicted) such low grade, lazy, visionless storytelling... somebody ought to make a documentary about these losers and how they dropped the biggest ball in modern cinematic history.

Disney was at the head. I hoped for more, but am not surprised by how wretched this crap has been. Sans Lucas, this was all going to be a crap pile. As mediocre, or completely competent as the Marvel stuff has been, at least it never had to live up to much of an existing Marvel catalog.

Lucas actually set Disney up to look good with the prequels, which were a steaming pile through even the thickest of rose colored lenses. Not that Disney has impressed particularly, because they haven't, but I have no faith that a George Lucas final trilogy would have been anything to write home about either.

It is without a doubt the most expensive SW movie to date, doubt it will make a nice profit. It will not be admitted but I wager they broke 400 million with the re-shoots. Solo was north of 300 million, a "tent pole" that was re-shot 3 times with a large cast is going to exceed that.

Plus what was spent on marketing of course which I can't opine on having been exposed to little of it. No idea what was spent on TROS, though I was vastly amused to see GE refrigerators with TROS advertising on them in Home Depot this week.

They might get their money back but studios are not in the business of breaking even. The expectation is doubling of the expenditure, minimum.

Yes, I love all the success articles, this is just more than SW, this is about Disney stock, if word gets out that SW money machine is cooling Disney stock can lose a lot more than just the cost of this movie... TFA was 250 million to make without all the consulting fees, Lucas and all the reshoots. I'm guessing this has cost them north of 350 mil and add another 75-80 (if not more) mil for marketing. They'll need over 400 mil to break even. this will end up grossing less than the previous episodes.
Just for comparison...Joker cost 55 mil to make, add another 30-50 mil for marketing, for a total of let's say 85 mil....it has grossed over $1,000,000,000 so far.

https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Joker-(2019)#tab=summary

Also some industry inside info: Disney twisted all sorts of arm in regards to a cut theaters make on ticket sales in regards to TFA and TLJ. It was pretty much agree to our terms or get locked out.

For some reason this did not happen on TROS, it was offered at standard movie rates as far as I know.

Remember as a rule of thumb, the studio only gets 50% of the ticket sales, overseas much less.

NYT says Disney is getting its traditional 65% SW cut for TROS, vs the standard 55%.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/business/media/star-wars-box-office-opening-weekend.html

NYT does agree with your $400m total cost number (including marketing).

Note they say "roughly" the NYT has no idea either how much it cost either.

Between shooting 3x and marketing over $400 million easy. Hell they were still cutting the movie a few weeks before release!

Solo was over $275 million, without marketing.

TROS is performing worse than TLJ, it is going to struggle to beat TLJ's 1.3 billion haul and it cost more to make than TLJ.

Making the billion dollar mark is going to be a tough slog.

FYI the NYT article references a story from WSJ 2017, there is no evidence it applies to TROS in regards to ticket percentages.

-------------------------------------------------------

For comparison sake:

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Thursday Previews: $57 Million

First Friday Gross: $119.1 Million

First Saturday Gross: $68,294,204

First Weekend Gross: $247.9 Million

Worldwide Gross: $2,068,223,624

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Thursday Previews: $45 Million

First Friday Gross: $104.68 Million

First Saturday Gross: $63,993,205

First Weekend Gross: $220 Million

Worldwide Gross: $1,332,539,889

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Thursday Previews: $40 Million

First Friday Gross: $90 Million

First Saturday Gross: $48 million

First Weekend Gross: $177 Million
-----------------------------------------

Edit: On reflection Disney might do ok, it depends on how well the movie does word of mouth and how badly the fans were alienated by TLJ. I'm in the camp of not giving Disney another dime so have a built in bias from that point of view.

Still the current numbers don't support TROS being a raging success, it is tracking worse than TLJ and cost more to make. Disney might be satisfied with moving ahead with that and putting the whole fiasco behind them and focusing on Star Wars streaming as I speculated the other day.

This has been standard practice for decades, and is why independent theaters have such a difficult time continuing to exist. In addition, they forced theaters to keep the films long after attendance has peaked.

To each their own of course, but I loved episodes I and III, did not care so much for much of episode II (but it had its positive facets as well). It certainly is the hip thing to dislike the prequels and there are literally a couple hundred of thousands of rants about them on the internet (Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, everywhere) so I get the position.

Be that as it may, the prequels succeeded in universe building and expanding the lore of the Star Wars fantasy world. The rich landscapes alone really felt like they belonged in the Star Wars universe. Episode I is easy to attack due to the prominence of Jar Jar and a child actor, but it had an incredible sound track, superb villain, high stakes with a meaningful death that rippled with its impact throughout the series, and introduced us all to a functional Jedi order and the master student relationship.

The prequels also had a plan from start to finish and told a story. The emperor was great, Obi Wan was great, Qui Gon was great, Darth Mal was great. Watching the Clone Wars cartoon really adds a tremendous amount of depth and intrigue to the time period, something that does not exist with the sequel trilogy. The Clone Wars animated series based on the prequels is (running away) the best Star War animated series.

I think there are a lot of games being played at the theaters. Our local theater at the shopping mall has 42 showings times between all of the screens. 42 showings. Last weekend on Friday, 30 of the 42 showings were reserved for TROS. Jumanji was in its second week, and was reduced to 3 showings. Frozen II has been a blockbuster, reduced to 4 showings. Jumanji and Frozen II sold out all showings. I can't imagine the theater would have wanted to voluntarily restrict Jumanji and Frozen II sales to push ROTS so hard.

I wonder how many people watched TROS this weekend because there was nothing else showing?

I have somehow avoided all online reviews and spoilers (along with the content in this thread) until I could see the movie. I finally watched it last night, and here are my initial thoughts:

1) There was a LOT of action. It started with a fight scene and it seemed to never stop. There were tons of battles, duels, and starship fights...and CGI. I enjoyed the action sequences, but they felt forced (pun intended).

2) It was incredibly formulaic. Good vs Bad...turn to the dark side...blah, blah, blah. I get it. I love star wars...i think we ALL do, but when is enough...enough?
Rogue one was new and fresh (even with knowing the ultimate outcome). This wasn't.

3) What is the deal with people running, fighting, and standing on space ships while they are flying...throughout space???? I understand that it is a movie and I have to suspend some reality...but come on!

4) Did we really need the two ladies kissing at the end?
I'm sure this has been touched on by someone online already (once again...I have looked at ZERO reviews thus far)...but why do we have to have minority BS agenda in EVERY movie and tv show these days??

I thought the movie was overall watchable, but not as entertaining as I had hoped. I feel that it is hard to compare these to the original trilogy because the first 2 (technically...4 and 5) were just so terrific.

I am a sci-fi fan and I really think highly of Star Wars, but I think it is time they consider another approach.

I agree TROS won’t do anywhere near as well as TFA (which to be fair made a frickin’ fortune). And if TROS underperforms whatever Disney’s internal expectations were, jobs may well be lost (and fair enough, they’re running a business). I just don’t see any risk that they fail to make hundreds of millions in the end, just like they did on TLJ.

Will be interesting to see what they do next, but I doubt they’re going to abandon SW movies just yet, even as they push into streaming. As Mark Hamill told an interviewer after TLJ, “It'll go on forever, believe me. Long after both of us are gone they'll be making these films from here into eternity.” You’ve got to love that guy!

To each their own! But while it may be the hip thing to trash the prequels now (sometimes the mob has a point, right?), I got in on the ground-floor, first in line for opening day of Episode I with my little cousin. I still remember walking out of the theater just shaking my head, what a nut-punch after all those years of waiting! I know some of you guys had that same reaction to TLJ, but George got me good back in 1999 and I’ve never forgiven him.

What he should have done was to do the next three movies in the saga after ROTJ ,not the prequel shit. That was better left to our imaginations.

Kennedy and a writer have already been pushed to the side, I think. Kennedy still has her job because Iger was backing her, she will be eased out of the picture sooner or later. Damage has been done.

All franchises die sooner or later, they stuck the fork in the new J.J. Star Trek after three movies.

If you had someone competent like Marvel had for the last ten years running the franchise, yes I would agree with you. With the universe they had to play in they should have been able to turn out movies for some time.

But the Marvel superhero movie string has been a large exception rather than the rule in Hollywood. Most franchises are dead after the second or third movie. Harry Potter was another exception, but JK Rowling is busy crashing that into the ground at the moment.

They have been trying to bring Terminator back to life for decades now, failed again. Aliens? Failed. Predator? Failed.

A lot of fans have been alienated by the last three "Skywalker" movies, I don't see them coming back any time soon.

I agree with this a million times over. Those "Mr Plinkett" reviews really opened my eyes about the prequels as he rightfully tore them to shreds. But I always loved Ewan McGregor's performance, and Episode III was pretty damn good IMO. It was only after watching the Clone Wars series that I truly appreciated this time period & the the time they took to flesh out all the characters. Some may say "I shouldn't have to watch a cartoon to appreciate the movies", but they did their best after the fact to enrich this period & fill out the backstory. It's the reason so many fans love Dave Filoni. I'm really looking forward to the final season on Disney+ next year.

I'm hoping that someday in the future, after some time passes to honestly reflect on this new trilogy, that Lucasfilm might do something similar. I think thinkering with the Ep 7-9 period is a lost cause, but they are already exploring that fertile post-ROTJ period with the Mandalorian. There is a 25 year gap between Mando & Episode 7, so there is potential here to explain what happened to the Empire loyalists, how the new Republic began, and bring back a de-aged Mark Hamill & give him the time in the spotlight that the fans were always craving. Movies or TV show, doesn't matter to me.

That stuff won't even be concidered until JJ & Kennedy are long gone though. If they are going to do more movies, it has to set in the Old Republic period. Fertile ground for new characters & a wealth of Extended Universe stories to draw from.

Plinkett's videos on Star Wars is the best you can watch if you are interested in a crash course on film making.

The Clone Wars animated show is better than the prequels IMHO. I watched all of them with my kids and the quality level week after week was amazing. Last movie we caught at a Berlin drive in before they closed was The Clone Wars movie I think and it was fairly good.

FYI Clone Wars director Dave Filoni is now writing and directing the Mandolarian.

Marketing for these big movies is frequently in the $100M+ range. Add that to the cost of production at (probably well) over $300M+. After theater cuts and taxes, they make about 50% of ticket sales as profit. So $800M is the minimum for breaking even on TROS. I imagine that $900M to $1B is probably closer to the minimum this movie has to make to not be a failure. Projections would say that this movie will end right around $1B but I wouldn't be surprised if bad word of mouth, bad reviews and fewer return viewings leave it short of that. The saddest part is that I doubt Disney will (publicly) acknowledge that TLJ is the cause of this failure. I own quite a bit of Disney stock and it is holding tight as of now. Disney+ and the Mandalorian are probably making up for it.

Saw the movie on Christmas with my kids and we all enjoyed it. It wasn't exceptional, but it was fun. I wish my kids could have had the experience I had seeing Return of the Jedi in the theater as a kid, but that just wasn't going to happen.

I actually thought they did a damn good job of incorporating whatever footage they had of Carrie Fisher to make it work in the storyline. They were in a pretty difficult position there (and if they had planned everything out years in advance as we all thought they obviously should have, they would have been even more screwed by her untimely passing).

At the end of the day, a sequel trilogy to a beloved franchise was never going to meet the impossibly high expectations. We all wanted to recreate the original magic, and that just wasn't going to happen with the original actors in their 60s and 70s. However, they've now broken free of those constraints and can tell new stories with new characters that people don't have a lifetime of expectations attached to. I don't know if they'll have billion dollar blockbusters going forward, but there will be new star wars content in one form or another for a long time to come.

I look forward to movies where the directors have more freedom to explore different characters without having to hit the same old beats to make sure everything properly connects. I honestly don't really want movies to all become a paint by numbers exercise like Marvel has become; planning stuff out 10 movies at a time is great way to make good commercially successful movies, but isn't going to produce great movies. Giving more freedom will mean some busts, but possibly some really great movies as well. I'd really like to see what a director like Rian Johnson could do when he doesn't have to start with characters that we already have decades of preconceived notions of how those characters would behave. TLJ was actually a beautifully directed movie, but it didn't fit the marvel model of working well with all the other movies in the series. If instead it was a one off movie that just tangentially connected to the overall universe, similar to the recent Joker movie, it probably would have worked much better.

I'm hoping for a 60%-70% box office drop for TROS this weekend.

I don't subscribe to the "all Marvel movies are the same" theory, some movies were interesting and off formula if you will.

Ant-Man worked well as a stand alone comedy, even the slightly goofy Thor and Hulk movie could stand on its own. Captain America Winter Soldier was an interesting political thriller in itself. Doctor Strange while in some ways a re-tread of Iron Man (Rich arrogant narcissistic asshole is humbled and has to lift himself up to be a hero) had very different material to work with that was treated well and was enjoyable, even for me a non-magic fan. GOTG was unexpectedly hilarious, who would have predicted a dance off in the script?

Some of the tent pole movies followed a formula to be sure but were generally entertaining. You are buying a ticket for a Marvel superhero movie and some things are expected. Like Transformers, you know what you are buying going in.

As far as the movies woven into a final chapter.. Thanos & the Infinity Stones could have been told without several characters who appear but lets be honest, fans of "X" would have been bent their guy didn't make a showing.

I appreciate what you're saying, but I see this excuse thrown around quite a bit in regards to this new trilogy. The only expectations they had to meet, were to have a coherent story across 3 movies, with characters were dont hate, doing things that make sense in regards to that story. And they failed at that.

And really, did anyone really have any sort of expectations after the prequels? I think most people's expectations were ground level, which makes it that much more amazing that they shit the bed this badly.

Yeah, I think they got the mesaage either way, but it wall fall probably closer to 50-60%.....KK will be gone, Kiri Hart is gone, gone,.gone...so is RJ and his trilogy, and so will JJ after this...trust me. JJ will not be afforded another golden franchise ever again. He will have to get back to making original material after this....I will bet anyone

Everyone had the same basic expectations for the prequels. To see Anakin Skywalker trained by his good friend Obiwan, turn to the darkside & become Darth Vader. Along the way we get to see the Clone Wars in all it's glory & the backstory to the birth of Luke/Leia. Lucas delivered all that, just not the way fans minds were theorizing & daydreaming for those 16 years between ROTJ & TPM.

I think many people were expecting to see the version of Vader from the last 5 minutes of Rogue One over the course an entire movie. Not an entire movie focused on a 10 year old Anakin. Not a painful-to-watch love story over half of another film. And not a Vader/Luke/Leia reveal in the last 5 minutes of the last movie.

Like Ep7-9, you could say that Ep1-3 was a squandered opportunity as well. But least we got to see an excellent depiction of young Obiwan though.

I'm hearing the last episode of The Mando delivered. Looking forward to watching it tonight

See, I have no problem if the story I end up getting is completely different from what I expected. Just deliver said story well. The problem with the prequels isn't expectations. It's that we got a jumbled shit show that was just plain bad on every level. This is why I hate the "expectations were too high" excuse so much. There hasn't been a truly great star wars movie since 1980. That was 40 years ago. Every movie since then has been steaming hot garbage, with a couple bordering on mediocre. The good to bad ratio for star wars films ain't leaning anywhere near good at this point. How anyone can have expectations for this franchise is baffling to me.

Season 1 of Mandalorian is better than Awakens, Last Jedi, and Rise of SKywalker combined for $7. I have spoken!

baby (resized).JPG

Well Ep 8 was not that great to be honest....the battle scenes were really one sided and the ending was a bit weak. Oh well, I had high hopes for Favreau. Geez, I thought pinball was hard.

Ok, you win....I just checked Box Office Mojo....Last night was -70% over the opening Friday night, you were right on the nose!

I don't understand the background or reason to root against the Imperial. That's a big issue for me. He plays the role well, but should I care enough to dislike him? Maybe he enjoys tea and chess on Sundays?

I'm surprised by how competent and effective this show turned out to be. It doesn't really add much to the universe for me, mined a lot of Star Wars sentimentality and baby luv, but overall was really decent, and surprisingly so given these last four years of Disney Wars....

Compare the Mandalorian and it's effectiveness to season one of the Witcher, and I appreciate it all the more. The Witcher was savagely treated.........

Doesn't mean much. The opening Friday BO always includes the Thursday previews so it's a very frontloaded number.

More importantly TROS had very good dailies all this week including a huge Christmas day. It's now pacing about the same as TLJ despite a much lower opening weekend.

So, I actually just saw the film today. My biggest complaint: 30 minutes of previews and commercials before the movie. Ten minutes into the film and I'm already about to piss myself.

Saw it yesterday and all things considered it was pretty good. TLJ screwed things up so badly it was actually pretty impressive. It still had some real garbage that just should have been cut. It's funny everyone is pissed about how all the original guys are treated in this trilogy. Leia was no better she went from a take no shit, beautiful, powerful young women to a boring old spinster,. Leia was never going to go half monk and become a Jedi. Killing off Luke and Snoke didn't leave them any options. Hopefully in a few years they reset the franchise and take everything down about a thousand levels. This whole the force can do anything just makes it so uninteresting.

I never understood the enamouration with Leia from the OT. She's boisterous, and aggressive, without any particular charm. Kinda like Carrie Fisher herself, who got a free pass in life, rich talented megastar parents, yet still became a total life fuckup (Postcards from the Edge...ugh) and even after death. Hell, her career had dried up so much just prior to this new trilogy, that that throwing Harrison Ford under the bus in that second autobiography of hers, was necessary to boost her remembrance.

Ford isn't really much of an interesting character as Solo, once he get his nuts all tangled up chasing Leia. The two of them, aside from the middle chunk in ESB, are just kinda...there. When push/pull romance is the sole facet of two characters, for me, that gets old really quick. Same thing happened in the Prequels, but at least Anakin had a dual trajectory, fathering twins, and becoming a monster.

Luke, his Dad, and the Emperor are always what I focused on from the OT, side frolicking adventures aside. And the Emperor seems largely an afterthought till the last film, which really lives and dies in that last scene between three of them, all else is narrative fluff.

Boooo! Next you’ll say Karen Allen in Raiders wasn’t the best Indiana Jones heroine.

Double Boooo!!

I’m beginning to see how you enjoyed the prequels though, if you didn’t care for the actors and characters that gave the OT all of their charm.

Karen Allen is awesome in that role! She does more than Leia really did in three movies, and has almost a soothing, complementary rivalry with Indy, more so than have him morph into being a wimp.

Though I did mistake Margot Kidder for Karen Allen while watching Black Christmas the other night....... Kidder is amazing in that role!

I love Ford. He just got lost, character wise in ESB, and really in Jedi. He was on a leash in Jedi, thawed out anyway. He started to exist solely to feed into Leia's ego/world. He really doesn't exist on his own terms after that scene where he says, "A guy like me, and a gal like her......".

Don't get me wrong, the two of them have really solid onscreen charisma, and it works in many ways, but she's an overbearing ass, and he's a devout follower.

Thank god Luke did his own shit. Well, tried to.

Karen Allen was def the best. She was also great in Animal House and Scrooged.

THE DARKSABER! Boy I was not expecting that surprise at the end of the season finale. What a great episode.

The same one fro Star Wars Rebels?