Did something go wrong?

The quotes aren't saying that opinions are manufactured.

That isn't what I said either.

 

I reckon if there is a culprit here, it’s more likely the massive underperformance of Solo. With the release of TROS, LFL concluded their VERY profitable saga films. All they had in the hopper after were more stand-alone fair like Solo. They were scared to go there again.

Couple that with the launch of D+ and a global pandemic and you got a natural pivot to streaming. Some of those solo scripts got reworked as teleplays then so they could feed their hungry little streamer before the bottom fell out. And . . . here we are.

 

It's pretty clear why the MCU kept pumping out films after Endgame. They were planned and they had been making films for years. After TROS Disney/Lucasfilm have to figure out what to do. At first they were going to try something new and let's face it, that's an enormous undertaking to start from scratch and get people in the seats. Disney told Lucasfilm to make something for Disney+ and what Lucasfilm has produced has been a huge win for Disney. The content hasn't been perfect (it never is), but the Mandoverse has been a huge hit and it's a big reason for the platform's success.

Disney has taken the pragmatic choice with films and they're going to start back up with Rey/Chewie/BB-8/Finn because they're popular characters despite what some would believe. Despite the wet blanket that was TROS the sequel trilogy succeeded establishing those heroes. I can't wait to see what Rey and company are doing. Personally I feel lot better about Star Wars than I did after the prequels were over. I simply lost interest after those films.

Iger hopefully learned a lesson after rushing TROS. Give the team time to make a fun film. Lucasfilm has proven they've got talented people but the next film needs to deliever to set up future films. Hopefully people relax and quit treating these films so seriously. They're really not supposed to be taken that seriously.

 

Iger doesn't have absolute control. The board and shareholders do. The CEO of a publically traded company like Disney is like being the world's highest paid maitre d.

So here's the real question. Do the shareholders care enough? No. Why? It doesn't mean more than the risk of corporate control loss.

I just got done with a conference with a producer the other day. They did things you would have seen. At one point, they lay it out on a particular tangent. Paraphrasing: 'Does the board care? No. So we got to find what we can cut from the story to fit the schedule.'

Again, that's a paraphrase because I'm not about to start dumping quotes from meetings into internet forums, nor telling who I'm talking about.

But this wasn't even shocking. They were saying this as an off-hand part of a given logic set up. This part of it was spelling out what we already know. I'm stating it here because there's this notion on the outside that there's this way where movies are public works of art projects or something, but they're not.

The king of it all is the schedule. Days are dollars. Literally how it's calculated.

If the days of dollars can afford to move, then it will. If it can't (and it so ften cannot), then it won't. And when it can't (which is usual) you have to start cutting.

The Director's not in charge. The Producer is. The Producer's not in charge, the CEO is. The CEO's not in charge, the Board is. The Board's not in charge, the Investor/Bank is.

This was why Lucas took the money and self-funded ESB. Because if you own the budget, he thought, then you can cut the board out. Problem was, the board wasn't the problem. It was the bank. And the bank became a problem on ESB because Kershner was going over schedule, which meant over budget (as Lucas had on the first one).

So, did Lucas do as Ladd had done for him and take it on the chin for Kershner so Kershner could maintain his vision?
No. He hopped over the Atlantic and shoved a boot up production's rear and pulled the plug because they were on their second loan extension and the bank wasn't going to allow a third - in fact, worse, no bank was.

And that's when Lucas stopped being a pure director. When he cut a director off from what they had wanted to do and forced them to do something else because of economic interest.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Interesting

 

It's a good example of why non-controlled measures of polling can be useless if there's a large number of people willing to game it. Rotten Tomatoes changed their system not long after The Last Jedi and they admitted the site had been brigaded.

Given how well the film did at the box office and the fantastic audience scores (it even got a rare 5 star audience rating) the RT score became the rallying cry for some who hated. The score help generated more content and motivated even more people to vote. Heck, people are still citing it 6 years later when it's been thoroughly debunked. Ah, the internet.

 

You don't even need that reason. They don't weight anything. There's no bell curve to their data. It's dominated by two groups of ratings. Bottom, Top.
People don't go to RT to say it was "okay". They mostly go to say it was great or sucked. When you see an RT score, you might as well just make it a 0 or 1 along the 50% line.

A better data controlled source is IMDB. It actually has a bell curve and medium grade ratings entry representation.

ESB: 8.7
ANH: 8.6
ROTJ: 8.3
TFA: 7.8
RO: 7.8
ROTS: 7.6
TLJ: 6.9
SOLO: 6.9
AOTC: 6.6
TPM: 6.5
TROS: 6.4

These values will undoubtedly change over time, as is usual as cinephiles and fans will change appreciations over time, and those are the dominant rating groups at IMDB. However, if we want to capture the random general audience's impressions as a snapshot in time and one that won't change, then we need Cinemascore (unavailable for OT).

TFA: A
TLJ: A
RO: A
TPM: A-
AOTC: A-
ROTS: A-
SOLO: A-
TROS: B+

Both tell different stories, as online polls are self selective while Cinemascore is a true demographic random survey. If you want more what fans and cinephiles think, IMDB. If you want theater goers, Cinemascore.

If you want only love or hate in online trend fashion, RT.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

And on that 'better data-controlled' site, TLJ is rated far below all of the OT films, the first ST film and Rogue One.

 

It's better, but it's still not great. 7% of the votes gave it 1 star. That's more than Attack of the Clones or The Rise of Skywalker. There's still no control to limit it to people who actually watched the film. There's no control for creating multiple accounts... which is a big problem when there's active brigading going on (which RT admitted). That's why CinemaScore/Comscore PostTrak numbers are so valuable. Those are companies who paid for reliable results. The box office legs matched the CinemaScore/Comscore PostTrak numbers.

 

Just going to get this out of the way.
I give two rats arses where any title lands in ratings these days unless I, or someone I know, is involved with it and the rating effects my, or their, positioning.

IMDB is more reliable than RT because unusual rating patterns are weighted against. And in their words they "have several safeguards in place to automatically detect and defeat this type of ballot stuffing", and, "apply several countermeasures against all attempts to skew the rating and the weighted rating you see displayed on the site already takes all of the above into consideration".

So, while I can't agree that they are all that heavily impacted by campaigns nearly as much, the real point about IMDB is we are looking at a niche view.

And I don't see a problem with their listing of the titles. 6.9 is roughly in the 50% of titles range. So, about an "average" movie to IMDB. It's statistically indifferent from 7.8 in this regard, as the next quartile of data doesn't shift until 8's start happening. Conversely, the bottom of the ratings kicks in at under 6.

So, if you wanted to, you could see 7s as upper average and 6s as lower average, which would see 7.5-7.9 as upper tier of upper average, and 6.5-6.9 as upper tier of lower average.

8+'s are essentially fan and cinephile nutlusters. The obvious answers to, "What's your favorite movie?".

6.9? Sure. In this group, that seems right. If I walk into a room of Cinephiles and Star Wars fans, that's probably the result of conversation. I also don't see that as bad.

Sometimes America is annoying with its "bestest best of bestest" culture, but 6.9 is in the Armageddon, Independence Day, and Die Hard 2 ballfield. Said another way, Billy Wilder would be perfectly happy with it. Hell, I'd be tickled to have anything hit to 6's on IMDB. That's not the junk drawer. It's just not the cinefan trophy room. It's more their poster room.

But again, this is a niche audience. It's cinephiles and fans of a movie series. You, know... Clerks. Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino type folk.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

If 6.9 on imdb is a disaster then playing Actorle has taught me that 90% of movie history’s acclaimed and successful actors best films are mainly in the disaster zone.

 

Definitely. It's very much worth realizing that 6.0-7.9 is 50% of movies in the dataset. Which means 25% are below it and 25% are above it. I think it's easy to see these as akin to school grades, but this isn't quite right because it's more like demography than that. We basically have 3 classes: less than the average population, average population, above the average population.

Average of what? Considering the cinephile/fan basis, "average" here is "good movie a cinephile/fan would watch".

Is it great? Standing ovation? No. But good? Sure. Bad? No. Bad to some, good to others, but not just bad to most.

Cheers,
Jayson