Were "fan expectations" the problem?

Yikes

 

It’s a personal opinion. Walking into TFA - everything felt like magic again, a great plot, refreshing new characters, brilliant returns of old hero’s, everything. Then you hit TLJ - that build up, that spark that was TFA was blown to blast with what they did. You can’t tell me a piece of you wasn’t disappointed in what they did? Idc that Rey came from no named parents - it’s more of make it at least a bit more interesting. A One Liner explaining her past was the most anti-climatic thing they could have done. Then Snoke being a joke - even after surviving what seems like multiple assasination attempts - can’t seem his apprentice turns on him? Again, anti-climatic.

Idk, maybe I just had higher hope sleep for TLJ after seeing TFA.

 

Nope. The Last Jedi is currently my favorite Star Wars film. It was a success with critics, at the box office, and with the audiences. I'm not harboring any disappointment 15 months later.

Stating that parts of the film are "poorly thought out" is certainly an opinion, but it's a tad too much on hyperbole side to take very seriously.

Another good example of someone's expectations getting in the way. Snoke is barely in the first film. Did people complain that Palpatine didn't see Vader turning? Palpatine should have been more concerned about Vader than Snoke and Kylo. Palpatine was killing Vader's son. Snoke was expecting Kylo Ren to kill the girl he had known for a couple of days. After all, Kylo had just killed his father.

It's fine, you don't like it. There's no accounting for taste, but you're not going to convince me that it wasn't an amazing scene when so much of what happens in the TLJ is perfectly in line with what we've seen in Star Wars.

 

The Emperor tested Vader's loyalty in ROTJ when Luke grabbed the Lightsaber and tried to kill him.....and Vader blocked it. Then Vader went after Luke almost stalking him, baiting him about his sister, and that set Luke over the edge. So at that point, The Emperor had no worry about Vader's loyalty (compared to earlier in the movie where he actually asks him when he didn't sense Luke, yet Vader did). It was all setup perfectly for that point to happen (It showed Vader was conflicted to the audience, yet he was still loyal to The Emperor). It was only when Vader saw his son getting blasted with Lightning and crying out for help (for many minutes) did he finally turn and kill The Emperor.

The TLJ throne room scene just happens because it's a plot point (Snoke) that RJ wanted to move on from as it had no over-reaching arc like ROTJ (where that essentially was the arc of the whole OT, and eventually the PT/OT). TLJ was more built on shock than drama simply because they were (so far) copying the OT in TFA, and many assumed they would do it again in TLJ. So it is a bigger twist that Snoke died instead of The Emperor, yes. But does it hold the weight/depth of the ROTJ Throne Room? Not at all. And it really shows the difference in storytelling in the OT and ST, in that the drama drives the OT, where familiarity, nostalgia, twists and subversions drive the ST at this point.

If you like that type of storytelling, that's fine with me as I can't argue one's tastes (as you said, there is no accounting for tastes). I don't like when I get headfaked just for a cheap twist, as I feel duped. This happened in Game of Thrones in Season 8 (I won't say what specifically in case anyone reading for spoiler reasons). But they played the audience regarding a few characters and their motives and it was all ruse to make the audience believe it was going one way, even though it went the other way. I love Game of Thrones, but I sort of felt the same way I did with many plot points in TLJ, they subverted us just for the sake of subverting us. You may like that type of storytelling, I hate it with TV and movies cause it feels cheap.

 

While I found Snoke’s death shocking, I did not find it to be a fake out in anyway. Some of that may be because I did not have any real expectations of what we were going to get with Snoke in TLJ. It definitely was an oh s&!t moment as I did not see it coming. However I felt it did play a part in advancing Kylo’s arc and led to the drama of was he going to turn back to the light at that moment.

 

Yeah? Yet we have a fandom that is actually divided on this to an extreme.

Yet there was MORE of a build up with Vader - we saw him chasing his own daughter (which we didn't know when NH came out) in a murderous rage - we saw him slay his old master, and we saw him conceptualize that Luke and Leia were his children, but he still continued in his quest siding with the Emperor. While Snoke felt and saw the hesitation within Kylo, even after killing his father. Comparing Palpatine and Vader with Snoke and Kylo is apples to oranges in this scenario.

No one was trying to convince you my friend and no one was arguing that TLJ is in line with TFA - it's just a different avenue that - imo - is of poor quality and not fully thought out and forced.

 

Again, you're talking about your expectations. I can't speak to that. Objectively if you look at what's presented in TFA, Snoke's role is pretty small. Instead of a OT rehash we have Kylo as the big bad after TLJ. That's a great development as far as I'm concerned and that scene was amazing.

Snoke's hubris right before he's struck down is one of the best moments in the film. Andy Serkis was fantastic.

Nah, most fans like TLJ. Sure there's a very vocal minority online, but I reject the idea that the fan-base is divided.

 

Something like this....?


I like the BuzzFeed one, in particular, ("Loved it, Liked it, Undecided, Hated it" in red blocks) because of the shear volume of votes involved in it. It's nearly 180 thousand voters.

And that's something that I see repeated when I look at polls. Outside of RT, once the poll values seem to be substantially large into the thousands, the negative percent starts dropping. Where I see larger percents of negative bins tends to be in polls with small sample pools of maybe a few hundred or less (again, outside of RT).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Agreed. Hopefully E9 helps heal the fractured fan base because right now it is still heavily divided following E8. Interesting that Solo didn't really seem to move the needle one way or another.

 

Good stuff, there is certainly a passionate group that really hates TLJ, but as a percentage it's not very big. Star Wars is a huge IP though so even a tiny minority is millions of people.

 

Yeah, I did the math on that once.
The US consumer market population is about 106 million.
The Star Wars fan population is about 80 million (number of consumers who own memorabilia of some form or another).
Now, if you take the RT "44% liked it" value to be true of Star Wars fans, then, after filtering down the viewing audience population and applying the demographic percents, you're looking at 12 to 15 million fans who really didn't like the film out of around 63 million who saw it.

So, basically 20 million, at most, of that 80 million fan base. So at it's most, we're looking at about a quarter of the fan group in the US hated the film.
And I hazard to believe it's even really that high, because I'm using the worst case scenario of RT as if it is consistent across all polls (which, it's not, but hey, whatever).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Interesting

Side stepping for a moment that people's attitudes are dynamic and change over time (which is why we don't rely on polling in February to determine what's going to happen in November in American politics), I don't think the question is how big is the group that doesn't like TLJ, but how big is their contribution to box office revenues. Doesn't matter if they're 7% of the population if they represent a much larger swath of the revenue (which I suspect they do and why in part TLJ fell 300 million short of projections, and why in part SOLO fared so poorly compared to R1)

I think if you're a Disney or LFL Exec, if you have a choice between

• Doing a movie that casual fans say they like but don't see often
• Doing a movie that long term fans like and go to see often and buy merchandise for

You probably choose option B. No individual director's vision is worth leaving 300 million on the table. Meeting fans expectations isn't the problem, it's the goal.

 

Sales-wise...according to Disney; they've been happy with TLJ.
They weren't, conversely, tickled with Solo.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

If we go by Box Office numbers, you need to contribute to the fact Abrams pulled off a fantastic TFA and fans were expecting a repeat performance.

If we go by these poles you are showing - I’m curious if those numbers are fluffed with individuals who saw it to see it and are the fair weather fans. If you took the core base of fans - the ones who sit on forums and discuss (i.e. people like us) - would you still see the same numbers?

I feel like Solo didn’t do so well since TLJ wasn’t a cinematic hit and people were like, why do this again?

I liked Solo. I loved all the little nuances and the surprise at the end. The fact it bombed is something g I’ll never fully understand. I do know there are groups of people out there that are getting annoyed with the never ending stream of movies (Marvel Uni and now SW uni).

 

One of the polls was from Star Wars New Net, which had a result of 86% of over five and a half thousand SWNN voters offering a 5 - 10 score, and 5% offering a 0 - 2 score, and the Forum community vote of the same thing had a 54% rate the film as "Good"...so I'd say, yes.

As to the monetary angle; I'm not going down that road again (sorry, but there's an entire thread of my life spent on that topic and it got pretty silly).
It was simply an answer to the idea that polls may look neat, but all that matters is money, and so the money indicates satisfaction.
Well, to that note, it did well. Disney also thinks it did well in that regard. They wrote it down on their quarterly to their shareholders, and before anyone even thinks about claiming a cover up, yeah...we've been through that topic before. I literally pulled every quarterly report from Disney back to 99/00, and they expressly stated an asset performing poorly or unfavorably, or less than expected over 1,000 times, so aside from the legal problems of lying about the success value of an asset, they clearly state when they have an asset perform less well than they think it should have.

I think it's pretty easy to say that some folks didn't like this film; they friggen hated it. In spite of it being a very large success, and the majority of people enjoying the film.
Conversely, I also think it's pretty easy to say that some folks loved Solo (myself included; it's tied for first place in my list, and TLJ isn't tied for first), even though it performed terribly at the box office.

I don't think it had jack all to do with TLJ, however. Well...in a round about way it did. The problem was the over-spending was insane, so the marketing budget was radically cut, and the hope was that the wind and buzz from TLJ would just allow Solo to pick up based solely on name recognition, but that really didn't work out. Most of the average movie-goers didn't even know that Solo existed, let alone was in theaters. There was a huge gap of consumer awareness for that film. What Solo is a great study of is in regards to how important heavily saturated marketing is.

But really, the main point I was making was that if we say bunches of people didn't like it, and then we pull polls that don't align with that, so then we say that the real truth is in the money, and then we say that the money was good and the production studio and distributor were happy, then we say that the money doesn't accurately reflect reality because it was a windfall from a previous success, and then we say, well what about this subset of demographics or that one....basically, I've seen it all over a massive span of months...a constant moving of the success target until we get to a point that's simply unknowable and then that's where we're supposed to find evidence of the disfavor of the film by consequence of a lack of material evidence.

I've even seen it stated that the film is clearly not liked by fans because it should have made even more than it did, or several variations of this line of thinking about various sub-tangents of thought regarding the film. "It should have done _____ because _____, so from the fact that it only did ______ we can conclude that it wasn't liked."

It was liked. A portion of Star Wars fans really hated the film.
A portion of Star Wars fans is a hell of a lot of people in numbers.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

Jayson - wish I could give you a like or anything because that was very informative and I appreciate the post.

 

I enjoyed TLJ and Solo. The bottom line is films like the Transformers that made bucket loads of money which are for the most part unwatchable films will continue to be released. The studio will not give up on an IP that has made them allot of cash; therefore, we got Bubblebee which was pretty good, so yeah films are made to make money bad or good. I don't expect Dora the exploer to be any good, but it stands to make allot of money...

 

Again, my point wasn't about money.

I responded to someone who made that goalpost.

My point was originally about polls.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

After the 2016 Presidential Election, I wouldn't hang my hat on any poll.

I will say that I think both sides are accounting too much for the internet, as there are millions of fans who don't go on message boards and don't participate in any polls. I say this because I have many friends, family, co-workers who are big SW fans, and NONE of them post on the internet about the movies. They actually think that I'm kind of weird that I do post on message boards, but they don't understand that I love talking to real diehards and how they see the movies. Right now, I'm fascinated to hear people's take on TLJ Luke, especially fans who love it (since I didn't like it).

So, no poll matters to me if 99% of the people loved TLJ, or 99% of the people hated it, as nobody really knows. The only thing we can all do is speak about the real people we talk to in our lives who are fans of the movies. Among the people I know, it is split regarding TLJ, compared to most of them liking TFA. Do my friends represent the SW fanbase, I honestly don't know just like everyone else. That is why I get annoyed when certain people here make these proclamations that they know what % of the fanbase likes or hates the movies.

Another trend I noticed among my friends:

-People who liked TFA, don't like TLJ, and vice versa.

-People who liked R1, don't like Solo, and vice versa.

It's really interesting as there is a R1/TLJ crowd among my friends, and a TFA/Solo crowd among my friends. I honestly don't know what that means as maybe it is a product of different directors making these movies so there won't be the uniform love and hate of everything like the PT and OT had simply because Lucas was the brains behind them all.