Box Office

With lower word of mouth than The Last Jedi the people who love the film will have to go to the movie a lot to make up for the lower buzz. The film will still make Disney a lot of money, but reviews and general audience numbers do tell a story.

 

Makes me really sad. I was hoping the audience response would reward Disney/Lucasfilms/Abrams for trying to give the fans what we asked for. If they listen to us, and still aren't rewarded, why would they ever listen to us again? :-( And for the fans who complained for two years, got what they asked for, and are still complaining? Well, opinions are opinions but I don't think that's the right way to conduct one's self. :-\

 

There's been a lot of talk the past couple of years that this "backlash" would result in box office decline. We didn't see that opening night where the hardcore fans showed up in mass. We didn't see it in the Google trend data in the month before the film. People were super interested. Heck, this film is going to make $190 the opening weekend when it was savaged by critics.

Star Wars is fine, but Lucasfilm needs to outline the stories better than this one. If JJ was thinking that Palpatine was going to be a big part of this story it should have been revealed in The Last Jedi. Making it up as you go along can work, but not on this schedule. A film every two years? It's insane this thing turned out as well as it did.

The fans will show up for good films. Lucasfilm needs to work on consistency.

 

I agree.

The boxOffice is the only way LFL listens to fans, (Solo) that's the bottom line. So instead of complaining, just don't spend your hard earned money on the films.
I'm not a Transformers fan, the one with Wahlberg I just could not watch at home, I fell asleep it was awful and boring, but people kept going to see those crappy films in the theater. When they stopped going they rebooted the franchise with BubbleBee which wasn't that bad.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 22, 2019, Original Post Date: Dec 22, 2019 ---

TROS so far 149m worldwide. WOW

 

I think theatres are the major players on why people don't dress up anymore. many of them discourages people to do so (AMC has) and the prohibit on wearing masks/helmet, light sabers and blasters has taken the joy out of it. At my theater, I remember tons of people dressed up for TFA, there was little to none for TLJ and no one dressed up for TROS. I think the theatres are more to blame rather than lack of SW interests. My Thursday night showing was packed and the only seats available were the bottom rows where no one likes to sit.

 

Why do theaters not want people to dress up? I saw the film at an AMC and the only push back I got from the staff was the ticket-taker guy was like "you have to turn [your lightsaber] off before you go in." And I was totally fine with that.

 

Not sure, maybe every theater is different but I guess with the various theater shootings that has happened.

 

Honestly...

I've heard this idea of money, fans, and LFL/Disney listening, and...I don't see it anywhere.

What I do see is LFL/Disney et. al. taking Lucas' mantra of, 'doing it the way you think it needs to go because you cannot please all of the fans and trying to please fans just makes a bad story', to heart.

They've all discussed it multiple times...every time someone asks if they tried to play to or trip up fans, actually. And I think they're getting tired of being asked - based on tone and body language.

Further, if they were following this idea of listening to fans because of money, then every movie after TFA would be like it since it did over 7 times its budget, or at least R1 because it did 5.5 times its budget.
Instead, even though every film has gone down more than the one before in this respect (TLJ: 5 times, Solo: 1.5 times), they continue to hold to this idea of sticking to the story for its own sake and not trying to just make a fan fare film.

At some point, if it were true that LFL/Disney listened to fans through the free speech of money, you'd expect that at some point they would have reversed course and not dug in even deeper to their beliefs and principles.

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 22, 2019, Original Post Date: Dec 22, 2019 ---

Also...

I think it's worth keeping in mind that these films bring huge money even when they "bomb", and the media outlets crack me up.

Jumanji is getting press about how well it's holding up.
Its opening day was 13% of its budget.
TROS has somewhere around twice (30%) that in its opener and is being labeled a bomb by media outlets.

Some really crack me up because they talk about its stength, and then whip around and discuss it as a bomb. Retconing your forecast reviews much?

So while it isn't doing as well as those which came before, it's still a big hit film in money.
Definitely not like Solo, which ended up with the same budget and cracking open with 12% of its budget...which was spread everywhere as a dud landing.

And meanwhile Jumanji gets headlines like, "Duane Johnson thanks fans for making Jumanji a hit."

13% is a hit unless you're Star Wars I guess.
Then hitting 30% is a bomb.

*shrug*

Cheers,
Jayson

 

It made 175 millions in USA, well, not that great for last movie of the Skywalker saga...

 

How could it make 175 mil when Sunday is still not over yet

 

Projections off of early day sales patterns.
https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Star-Wars-The-Rise-of-Skywalker-(2019)#tab=summary

The numbers usually shift a bit later, but ballpark are usually right-ish.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Update of the forecast. The adjusted line takes the original estimate line and adjusts the values by the average amount that the estimate was off from the actual values of each day.


These are only domestics, so rule of thumb is double the domestic for the ballpark of the global.
We're looking at possibly 1.1 billion (or possibly even less) unless it picks up traffic next week (not typical).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

6 movies of plot stuffed into one movie is not what fans asked for. Star Wars is not hard, this stuff isn't hard to get right, but they just haven't been able to craft these movies properly. Someone needs to tell Lucasfilm to plan the trilogy the next time so there is one coherent story going forward. RJ made the movie he wanted. What JJ should have done was plot a film that makes sense with TLJ but no, He did what RJ did to him in TFA. It's a huge sloppy mess with no plan, why should fans "reward" Disney for this?

 

Firstly. Abrams didn't write a story to go through a fan check list. He's been clear on that. In fact, none of the films have been made that way.
I wrote about it a few posts back; that if they wanted to do that, you would see the behavior financially react to Rogue One, which has the best proportional performance aside from TFA of any of the new films, but LFL/Disney has repeatedly spoken about writing the story for the story; not writing the stories to appease the fans, or go through fandom checklists. In other words, if they were ever thinking that way, they would have seen R1 and changed course to copy that and TFA's methods, but they didn't do that at all.

Secondly, and more on tangent to this thread, opening weekend having low sales isn't an issue of fans seeing the film and not liking it.
Opening weekend dropping low is a marketing issue - always.

The second weekend and onward, the "legs", are the relationship to people liking what they saw and telling other people to go see it, or returning for multiple viewings.
Yes, fans will watch films more than once in the opening weekend, but the lion's share of sales in the opening weekend goes to the general audience's first time viewings.

That the sales are down speaks to one of three things (which are not mutually exclusive):

1. Poor marketing saturation (this isn't likely in TROS' case - this was what happened with Solo, but TROS, everyone knew about - the ads were everywhere).
2. General audiences weren't interested in going (either because of the last film, or the ads they saw didn't look interesting to them, or they are tired of Star Wars).
3. General audiences weren't going to theaters much at the time (due to economical issues, and/or logistics issues surrounding being days away from Christmas).

The last one is really actually quite possible as this year, again, the film industry is falling. It's down 4% over last year as a whole, with several films having lower values than you would normally expect to see.
This year, almost 40% of ticket sales revenue for theaters came from the top 10 highest earning films.
5 years ago? Around 25% or so of revenue was brought in by just the top 10 films.
We've all heard of the disappearing middle class, but theaters are going through a disappearing middle-film - which, honestly, are a theater's actual bread and butter. Huge films don't come along enough to make money, but audiences are really more and more only showing up for those huge block busters and not bothering to really go out for anything lesser than that. And why not? You hardly have to wait before you can just rent it for a fraction on your choice of streaming platform and it'll be there whenever you want it.

Films aren't that important anymore to the general audience, as a whole.

That said, again, I don't think people really keep in mind just how big these numbers really are.
Yes, we're talking about it being lower than TFA and TLJ, but in the scope of business, this thing is still a giant beast.

Take Frozen II, for example.
Opener? 42 million on day one.
The nice part about films like this, however, is they have tiny budgets. 30 million. So even though it makes a remarkably smaller amount of money, it pays for itself quickly. Nice little safe padding for the wallet.

TROS will likely pay for itself as well, with a 275 million budget.

Another example: Jumanji 2.
Opener? 19 million (with a 23 million saturday).

Star Wars brings in huge amounts of money, and for it to have a bad day, it's basically still out performing most films.
For example, TROS is still holding the 4th largest December opening weekend record, even though we're all looking at it as having done less than it's predecessors in proportion.

And as I wrote before, it's proportionately performing better than Jumanji, but Jumanji is being given a successful narrative in the press while TROS is being given a bomb narrative.

As far as viewer's opinions, on the whole, they are favorable. Critics are saying something entirely different, but general audiences think the film is decently good.
They certainly aren't walking out mad about the film.

And around here, fans are still in the majority share of favoring the film, and it's nothing like the heated polarization that we've been putting up with over TLJ for the past couple years.

I also spoke of this frequently before with everyone being all happy that Abrams was coming back. Sorry, but that never meant crap to me because I've never seen this fan base overwhelmingly be nice and well receiving of any film, except for maybe Solo and Rogue One (strangely).

Every major entry has had a pile of folks complaining and calling the directors names, and slandering the production in various manners - even after TFA, there were tons - I can go pull the records up...it's saved on this forum, and it's pretty easy to do.
So banking on Abrams saving the day if folks were upset about TLJ always seemed weird to me, because there will always be folks upset. It's Star Wars. It's part of the whole deal.

The box office returns we'll want to take a look at are the following weekends. That's when we'll see if folks are seeing it and telling others not to bother.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

If you look at the ST as a whole, you're right; fans definitely did not ask for a trio of films that had no overall direction and whose directors constantly threw each other's plans out the window. However, if you assess TROS in terms of what could possibly be done after the reality of TLJ, I think the fans did ask for something that would tie up the loose ends from two films (which largely ignored each other). And if you need to cram "six" movies worth of plot into one movie in order to do that? Then it's an incredible feat. The sheer fact that they tried to make us happy, instead of saying "eff you, we're Disney, it's gonna make money no matter what, shut up and we'll tell you what you'll like," is something that I think should be rewarded. Because I never in a million years thought Disney would swallow its pride and at least try like that.

You are, of course, entirely allowed to feel differently. I just hope that explains my perspective a bit better.

 

I think people got put off by TLJ and were hesitant to see Skywalker. Fan word of mouth will prevail though and Skywalker will deliver over time. Just saw it and loved it. Will see it again in cinema.

Moderator edit: Please address the post, not the person who made it.

 

I think Star Wars, at least the Skywalker saga, has gotten too nuanced for the general audiance, honestly.

As of TLJ the story became covered in Star Wars ins and outs that relied upon a familiarity with how the Star Wars universe works that I think general audiences were left in the dust.

People who aren't regular fans ask me for clarifications on things since TLJ.

Like...the meaning of Rey being a no-body is mostly underwhelming as a shocker to folks who don't follow the lore like fans do, and haven't watched a film other than TFA for 12 years, barely remember the nuances of PT over a decade ago, and mostly know the OT through rough memory - major big moments.

Why is it a big deal for Rey to not be of special lineage? Does the Force only pass in families, like Harry Potter? Is it genetic usually or something?

What's with the dice? Are they magic or Force dice or something?

Stuff like this, I've had to answer a lot to people I know who are just general audience folks.

TROS is even more nuanced, and the ads make that not only pretty clear, but talk about stuff only fans really in tangent understand the weight of.

Like Rey all darked out almost makes it look like that's what you're going to go see - Rey turn to the dark. Why would I want to see that?

Here's a good example, actually.
The ads are hyper focused on fan knowledge because only fans know that laugh and voice are Palpatine's.

The weight of that audio means nothing to general audiences because this isn't Harry Potter.
All 9 didn't come out in around one decade.
The last time people cared about Palp was over a decade ago and all that throne stuff is just...stuff.
It's not a powerful symbol of anything if you aren't a fan.

TFA is accessible to anyone. You don't need to follow and remember Star Wars.

Hell, one ad was half just a montage of all the old films - which mean nothing to general audiences as a meaning to this film.

And I really think Disney at this point is fine with that. I think they know this saga has gotten too nerd-level nuances and just went for it to do it.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I would really love to believe that you're right, but I think a more powerful voice than fan word of mouth is critic scores and clickbait headlines. My mother and my aunt heard that TROS was terrible before opening night even happened. That's how much raw power the critics have. My mother and father came over to baby sit our infant so we could see the movie, and my mom was like "the newspaper said to get a refund on your tickets and not go." As for the internet journalists, a lot of them (like the professional critics) really loved TLJ. So a lot of them are hurt by TROS and are trashing it and saying it celebrates abuse against women, etc. That's all really powerful too.

So, unfortunately, I don't think people like us going around saying "hey! don't listen all the critics and online journalists and half of twitter! it's a good Star Wars movie!" is going to be able to outweigh those other factors. I would love to be wrong.

 

Same here.
I went to a family party last night and since I'm the resident Star Wars fan, everyone came over and asked me my opinion because none of them went because they read articles from their Facebook feed that were critics saying the film was bad.

No one cited anything else. They cited critics.

The ads didn't help. They didn't clarify what the film was about. It was just a montage of stuff, and none of it tied to either TFA or TLJ's tangents directly and clearly.
Again, the problem as far as I see it here is that TROS treats the story like we're in the final throw down between Harry Potter and Voldemort, but that's not been the tangent that's been punched in your face film after film like Harry Potter, and the ads gave an air of this kind of concept, but the general audience doesn't know the first dang thing about what that air is implying...it's not like Palp has been hanging around for the past two films like good ol' Voldy.

It's a great story, don't get me wrong. It holds together well in my opinion and is a great show, and a great trilogy, but it's not general audience friendly.
It's not punching a two-note chorus on repeat film after film like Harry Potter did.

And a big part of why this is a problem is because the ST is answering themes and narratives that are decades old, rather than creating its own direct line of plot and payoff independent of that old narrative, which I love, but that's harder on the general audience.

When you walk around the general audience and ask who the villain is of Star Wars, they're going to say Vader. If you push them into the ST, they'll say Kylo.
If you push on the PT, most will think of Maul.

Palp just doesn't score high on the public image of Star Wars. He's not its Voldemort to the general audience, BUT he IS to the fans.

And THAT, to me, is one of the biggest problems is.

So wen you have all of these issues going on with a hard time making a crystal clear "on message" anthem, and then you make ads that are just montages that don't have an "on-message" punch in the face hard, but talk of things that are vague and not clear if you're not familiar with the long-form Star Wars, then of COURSE you're going to rely on critics reviews to see if you should bother seeing the film, or if it's more a Star Wars nerf-fan film....and?
It's a Star Wars nerd-fan film, say the critics, and one they don't think is very good.

Cheers,
Jayson