Did something go wrong?

To meet a date on the calendar. It sounds simplistic and cynical, but the studio pushing the release of a massive picture like this, when they have so many others slotted up, is a pretty difficult and costly task.

And as it turned out, if they had sizably delayed, they would have been right the heat of Covid and had to push it even further down the road. Argue the quality, but logistically, it wound up being the better choice in hindsight.

 

Huh? Yes, there most certainly is something called successful movie making. It's called making money.

What do you mean 'outside of that?' That's what successful movie making is! It IS a business and it IS about making money for the film's investors. The people inside the industry who do it best tend to get rewarded for it on their next film projects.

So.....yeah, "That's it."

In the case of TLJ, it made half of what TFA made and led to TROS making half of what it made. Given TFA's mega-blockbuster lead-in, that's a staggering drop. After TFA, the public's response to the next two was a resounding: "Ugh...NO"

Need more evidence? We've gone from a SW film a year to four years of...........crickets. So back to the OP, yes, something went wrong.

 

Because of the all mighty EBITDA.
It would be fantastic if movies were made in a vacuum where economics didn't exist, but reality is they don't.

Here's how people think movies are made, right?
Someone has an idea for a movie or project...

Before anything else, everyone just took a wrong turn. That's not what happens. No producer is sitting around thinking, "I want to find me a sci-fi fantasy movie and figure out how we can get that made".

Nor does any company operate that way. What they have is a giant calendar. It's filled with stuff. Everything filled on that calendar represents money in and money out at different periods. And what they look at is the gaps in that calendar. They say, "I need something there. What would be good to put there?" And then off they go.

Now, corporations have to declare an EBITDA statement at the beginning of the year. It's dumb how this works, but it's how this works. It's a statement that's the business equal to Babe Ruth pointing where he's going to hit the ball. Then, at the end of the year, the stock market looks at where Babe Ruth said he was going to hit the ball and if he didn't hit the ball where he said he was going to hit the ball - even if it was still a good hit, just not out of the park, then the stock market devalues Babe Ruth's salary. At the business level, the stocks drop considerably.

In fact, this is so integral to U.S. business legalities and economics that EBITDAs are targeted proportionately out for each quarter so that the overall trajectory of on-target or off-target can be known ahead of time by the board of directors and investors (the people dumping money into the company, or banks), and if a company fails an EBITDA for four consecutive quarters, the investors (in companies the size of Disney, that reads as "the banks") can remove the board of directors, fire the CEO, and take over the company.

What usually happens, however, is that the investors (in Disney's case, banks) issue what's called a "guiding document" which basically tells the company what they have to do and they don't have much a choice if they want to keep their jobs and control. If they continue to fail after that, then the investors (banks) step in and take over, fire everyone, get a new CEO, and sometimes sell the company off to another megacorp. Usually after hundreds to thousands of people have been fired during the "guiding document" where investors (banks) always start with the same move of cutting costs to raise the stock value (why anyone still thinks this dinasour move works is beyond me... it never does... it just sounds the alarm bell on Wall Street).

With movies, movies are very long running capital expenditure projects with massive capital debt that companies and banks have to hold for multiple quarters, even over an entire year, on their finance books... which no one likes in business. It makes all of the suits and bean counters get all itchy. So, given all of this, about the last thing anyone in the board of directors wants to hear is, "We've decided to move our tent pole revenue project that was a central call out on our EBITDA for the fiscal year to a different year". Iger may say he should have delayed it, but that greatly amuses me because I would love to have seen that Board of Director's table of faces when he said that. He'd likely get fired very shortly after and the schedule would be maintained anyway.

The reason you see so many CEOs getting fired all the time is because boards are very nervous about that corporate takeover stuff, so they'll up and fire CEOs right and left proactively if they smell trouble, or even think they do.

So, why wasn't TROS just moved back? We might as well ask why Voyager wasn't moved to a different launch window.

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 11, 2023, Original Post Date: Dec 11, 2023 ---

I'll be sure to tell my CEO when we meet with the producers later today all your thoughts about how everyone's doing their jobs wrong.

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 11, 2023 ---

Oh, also - Brandon specifically said she did not edit but very briefly a couple of times in an editing room, and the times she did weren't great because all of her stuff was on her mobile unit where she did everything, including the finalizing. She actually said she hoped to never go back to an edit room ever again (though, she didn't get that wish because the technological logistics are just not realistically there for most productions quite yet).

Cheers,
Jayson

 

LOL! For someone who complained about another poster, "twisting your words," show me where I talked about 'everybody doing their jobs wrong.'

I shared how the outcome of the game is determined. The winners make money, the losers either lose money or fall far short of projections.

What I have said -- and continue to say -- is that Lucasfilm made a radical decision regarding the plot of TLJ which has had a significant financial impact on the franchise and Disney's bottom line. Given everything that's taken place over the last four years, that should be obvious.

 

You make it sound as if the filmmakers are no different from fans. They're just the ones allowed to have the megaphone. But they're calling the shots purely on behalf of all our wishes. Well, the ones who are big enough fans to know what the necessary and correct plot developments are.

I never once even came close to prescribing how an audience should respond to something. That's a concept that you've suddenly dragged in by yourself. So if you're disturbed by it then you've only got yourself to blame.

 

There's no such thing as "successful movie making", the way you were talking.

Which I said as knowledge learned from working in the business. You asserted there is. Which would mean my CEO and the producers we're meeting with today are doing their jobs wrong since no one looks at the business the way you described.

My job is at a studio. Before that, I was at Crafty Apes VFX, a company that worked on tons of stuff including Marvel movies, John Wick stuff, a bunch of stuff. You can look us up if you want (though we left, they're still our tribe).

No one operates by the idea you described. If you walk into Hollywood and say the way to make it is to make successful movies, you'll fail because that means you fundamentally don't understand how the business works.

That's not how it works. It's not about fan approval and "successful movie making".

You don't need to go into business points you don't know to say a movie sucked. Just say it sucked or it was great, and argue the aesthetics. Business? No. That's a completely blind argument.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

You said the filmmakers are calling shots on behalf of all of our wishes -- then added the one's 'big enough fans' to know what 'the necessary' and 'correct plot development are. Either you are being facious or you are describing the pro-TLJ argument to a tee

You opined that most of the criticisms of TLJ were insincere. All of your opinions have implied that the audience SHOULD have liked TLJ. Sorry, a whole bunch of us didn't. Again, that doesn't mean you can't continue to enjoy it.

All industries require specialists who are focused on various parts of the business. For a project to succeed, everybody participates and provides value. I get that.

But for the project to succeed, the public has to acknowledge it with their hard-earned cash. We can argue to death various 'artistic' points of a film. But the film's "success" depended on how many people paid to see it---in some cases, again and again.

Cool. I understand a special effects guy isn't going to look at a film project the same way the Director and Executive Producers do. It's the final project -- when all the various parts come together -- that matters. As an example, I was absolutely blown away by the special effects in Amazon's The Rings of Power series. It was absolutely breaktaking. But was Season 1 a success? Nope. A shockingly high number of viewers never even finished watching the Season. So a film can feature amazing editing -- special effects -- acting, etc., etc., but if the project fails to capture an audience, it's rightly called "unsuccessful." It certainly doesn't mean it can't enjoy a cult following, but it ultimately failed to pay off.

It's not? Who knew 'fan approval' doesn't matter?

Oooooookay, I'll sit here with my popcorn and wait with anticipation for the much-ballyhooed SW film from GOT's Benioff and Weiss and the new SW trilogy that Rian Johnson is going to give us.

 

What are you talking about? Your whole argument is that if the filmmakers had tried to engage with the fans they would not have veered from the plot developments we were supposed to get. I've never once even heard anyone claim that TLJ gave us the plot developments we were supposed to get.

When did I imply that people's complaints were insincere? I've only stated that the arguments supposed to uphold those complaints are spurious and specious.


All I've heard for the past 6 years is that I'm wrong to accuse people of resenting that they didn't get the follow up they had predicted. But at the same time being told that if Johnson had been more careful to "engage" with the fans then he wouldn't have delivered something that defied the fans' expectations for the necessary plot developments that TFA tacitly promised.

 

You're not getting the point.
You are equating everything to one specific aspect of the business. That's not the whole picture and it's not how anyone working in it measures things.

Your idea is that you make movies that fit with fan approvals and therefore make money, which to you is successful movie making.

That is a very, very incomplete understanding. While that may be a tangent of thought by boards of directors and marketing to some extent, that's really the tip of a very large iceberg (and I'm not just a vfx guy... so, no, you can't dismiss me by that. I work in production management, development, and story, as well as manage studio business matters).

The number one reason anyone makes a movie is business placement. And no one looking at the title is interested in revenue returns in evaluating.

AIR did not do so great by your metric. Affleck and Damon? Smiling. Why? Because that wasn't the goal needed. What they needed was to show that they could deliver a project as a studio.

Losing money on a movie is the norm for this industry. As Lucas famously said, "Only suckers pay for movies to be made".

The overwhelming majority of movies made in a year lose in streaming and box offices, yet everyone involved, including the studios, repeatedly gets more business.

The money doesn't come from the movie. It comes from other businesses. You make a company separate from your studio that rents cameras, then your studio rents from that company. You made money. Because of equity. This is what Lucas did starting on Empire.

Transaction and equity are worth more than sales. Sales are fine, but that's not what makes a studio survive. If you are relying on sales of tickets to make your studio survive you are going to die. Period. You need to own studio space and rent it out. You need to create new tech and processes people want to pay to use (Think Mando was all about fan success? Hardly, it was one giant tech advertisement they make bank off of now).

Let's go back to AIR. How did it win for them while failing? Because they were both producers as well as actors, and Affleck was also the director, which means they were each paid multiple times.

Amazon and Skydance paid for it, and it still wasn't a loss for them either.

Skydance is on a campaign to expand sports show material presence, all the media buzz around it got them a ton of connections and doors opening that led to more dollar streams in.

Amazon got traffic attention, so it doesn't much matter to them either given how their model works.

Anyone would of course take more money, but "successful movie making" meaning movies making ticket sales is just simply a very, very short sighted and unversed point of view of how the business works.

And even what I've described here is a small fraction of how it all works. The best way I can describe it is that it's less like small business economy logic you're thinking in, and more like Wolf of Wall Street.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

We get it, you didn't like the The Last Jedi. Arguing with everyone who disagrees with you and pushing it back to Rian Johnson and TLJ is beyond tired. You've made your point, the same one. If that's all you've got, just move on otherwise it's just disruptive.

 

There's nothing more obnoxious on discussion boards than posters who feel compelled to "thought police" others.

This is the first genuine discussion we've seen here since Ahsoka wrapped up Season 1. For the record, 1) I didn't start the discussion thead; and 2) I've been responding to the comments made by others. If my comments bother you, I suggest you avoid this thread altogether and go check out the "What are you reading right now?" thread. FYI, I haven't posted in it and don't plan to.

 

You must be told to drop the stick a lot if you really think there's nothing more obnoxious than that.

 

Yup.

 

That said, though... you look smashing while miserable in the cold, sir! Yowsha!

 

They should call it the Coldth system........

See what I did there?

 

Roger Ebert has a quote I’ve always really liked, “It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.”

I’m of the mind that there’s nothing particularly inflammatory about the plot of TLJ that would leave most anyone apoplectic. It’s more so a response to the tonal choices of the piece. TLJ sets out to challenge the established conventions of the series in a way that TFA was deliberately avoiding. But I don’t believe that’s what certain fans were pushing back on. I believe it was the overall ‘attitude’ of the film - its narrative voice.

TLJ isn’t just intentionally interrogating the common precepts of Star Wars. It’s doing it in a way that can easily be misconstrued as flippant or borderline confrontational. I think that’s where the divisiveness really spawns from - that defiant pitch that the work is seemingly speaking and the instinctive impulse for some to reject it.

It’s like Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 rule. When you’re presenting to an audience, only 7% of what you’re saying accounts for what’s communicated. The rest is tone and body language. It’s ‘how’, not ‘what’. I feel that TLJ would have gone over much better if the overall tone of the piece had brokered a more convivial character: It’s challenging you, but not while antagonizing you. That’s easier said than done though.

 

Good timing:



I think this has been discussed before that the Lucasfilm/Disney brass wanted Kylo redeemed in the last film even though the first two films were going in a different direction. The shot of Rey looking at Kylo at the end of The Last Jedi is reminiscent of Kay looking back at Michael Corleone at the the end of the Godfather. There was no way back. Fisher passing away may have changed things, but Kylo being the big bad would have been more interesting.

 

Yeah, "interesting" maybe. But painting a wayward soul as irredeemable just isn't very consistent with the morality of the brand.

 

THIS!!! ^^^^^

Very well said, @eeprom.

If it was always preordained that TFA would lead into TLJ the way it did (as Johnson now claims), the filmmakers deliberately set up fans for a big 'attitude' gut-punch by moving from a highly dramatic ending to Film 1 to a slapstick har-har start to Film 2. Why would you do that? It didn't make any sense.