For the lovers, how much is too much?

Um, it is on a downward trend from a financial point of view. Movie revenue is down, merchandising is down (a lot).

That statement is an undeniable fact. Maybe it will turn around this summer. Maybe it won't. Regardless, it can not be denied that the trend is right now a downward one.

I agree the main episodic installments are a separate category from the spinoffs. That is why I compare E8 to E7, and will compare Solo to R1.

 

Yeah, I think that's reasonable enough. Which is why I feel that we have very little data right now.

I'll definitely be interested to see how IX does.

 

I agree there is not much data, but I disagree with your previous comment about having only 2 data points. As far as movie revenue is concerned that is true, but we also have merchandising sales which are based on cumulative, year-round numbers.

 

But none of these films are financial failure regardless of they're on a downward trend.

 

It might be more complex than that.

Remember, one of the biggest revenue points for Star Wars used to be toys. Those things flew off the shelves.

And yeah, they aren't selling well now, and as has consistently been pointed out here that's a microcosm of the problem that the entire toy industry has right now.

Where I think you and I would probably both agree is this- Star Wars needs to work way harder on their video games. That's what's widely popular now, and frankly while the few games they've published have sold fine, their presence in the video game industry if downright embarrassing. Two less-than-ambitious Battlefront games and some MTX-laden mobile titles.

So yeah, if we're discussing merchandise, I think the root of a lot of issues is that LFL really isn't taking advantage of what could be a huge strength for them.


That being said... again, I think with more films the new interpretation of this universe will take more shape and fans will garner more interest in things outside of what's on screen. The ST era is a little barren right now, and while that is currently a little frustrating I think that it could also be a strength for the LFL team- a blank canvasse in the Star Wars universe and an audience hungry for answers is a pretty good recipe for success.

 

Yeah, here's the thing.
The worst case scenario for Star Wars in the hands of Disney is that pile of Marvel material we currently see on Netflix, or the TV show SHIELD.

Meaning, at it's worst, it'll go where MOST science fiction goes - to the low budget and slightly cheesy production grounds.
You know...like, oh...Star Trek has done countless times, or Stargate did, and even that one hit wonder of a show Firefly.



Cheers,
Jayson

 

I can't claim any personal knowledge of this field, but I think the above is a fair statement given the recent debacle with Battlefront. My pet theory is someone behinds the scenes at LFL probably had a nice sit down with EA to tell them to get their crap straight, but it is an area I have to plead ignorance as I don't follow video games terribly well.

 

That's fair. Just to show how badly they're dropping the ball here, check this out:

In the eight years between 2003-2010 these are the major Star Wars games we got (not counting smaller handheld releases or expansion content):
Star Wars Galaxies- 2003
Knights of the Old Republic-2003
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy- 2003
Rogue Squadron III- 2003
Battlefront- 2004
Knights of the Old Republic II- 2004
Republic Commando- 2005
Lego Star Wars- 2005
Episode III game- 2005
Battlefront 2- 2005
Empire at War- 2006
Lego Star Wars II- 2006
The Force Unleashed- 2008
The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels- 2008
The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes- 2009
The Force Unleashed II- 2010

There are some really good games there, and I'm even leaving out Renegade Squadron and Elite Squadron (both really strong PSP games, in my opinion) because they're technically mobile. And at 16 entries, that rounds out to an average of 2 games a year, again not even counting the smaller titles, mobile titles, or expansions.

In the 7.5 years since, we've gotten:
Lego Star Wars III- 2011
The Old Republic MMO- 2011
Kinect Star Wars- 2012
Star Wars Battlefront- 2015
Star Wars Battlefront 2- 2017

This isn't me cherry picking. This is the exact same filter I used on the earlier games. And one of those is freakin Kinect Star Wars, and it's frankly generous of me to even call that a game. Granted, gaming has certainly changed over time, but with that it's also gotten significantly more popular. If anything, while it should be expected that small silly mobile games have gotten more popular, so too have quality video games.

So yeah, I know making games has gotten more expensive lately, but it's also gotten more profitable... if it's done right (look at God of War for a recent success story). And yeah, at 5 games in 7.5 years, that's almost one game every 2 years. Ugh. And maybe that means that LFL needs to focus on fewer, but better games. But that's not what we have, either, and I think the controversy around Battlefront 2 shows that. We've gotten fewer games, but they're also not really that great.



And yeah, seeing how Battlefront has been handled since it's utter fumble of a launch, I'd bet you're 100% right- someone got a real stern talking to from Mickey.

 

Star Wars has always been about people. Other franchises (I'm looking at you, Star Trek) is about technology but Star Wars has always been centered on the characters.

I'm happy Star Wars doesn't make a huge deal out of hyperspace or blaster pistols. I thought it was really cool that Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan just took those underwater breather devices out of their robes and used them without making a big deal about it. In the Star Trek world they can't even change the speed of their ship without announcing "Warp factor six!" I'm very glad Han Solo doesn't do that every other scene.

How much is too much? I guess there are two ways to answer that question.

First, when the movie draws attention to the shiny new gizmo at the expense of the characters, that's too much.

And second, when something new is introduced that imbalances or obsoletes the movies that have gone before, that's too much.

Was Holdo's flying into Snoke's ship at hyperspace too much? For me it was, because if doing it was that easy then the Death Star is just a target. But I can overlook that because my god, what a beautiful scene!

 

There's this tendency with some criticism to assume too much and so it ends up being a kind of, unknowable fact, or, built on false premises. This comes up in the Holdo scene, and some people claim there's a problem with the scene for reasons like "They could just do that all of the time" or somewhat as expressed in the statement "the Death Star is just a target" but the fact is that we don't have enough information to make any kind of conclusions. We don't know anything practical about, how hyperspace works, how mass and velocity, density, gravitational influences, how any of these practically work in relation to one another. We don't know what kind of resources are available or necessary. We don't know how any of this could be strategically employed given a host of unknown variables.

All we really know is, in the information we've seen in the movies, t's not been done before. A person saying "It could've been done before" or "It could be done again" is committing an error in reasoning based on unknowable fact. It's like a friend of mine who sometimes complains when we're watching a time-travel movie "That's not how time travel works" like he knows the facts about how time-travel works. Or when we were watching the movie Interstellar he kept saying things like "That's not possible" for instance the scene where the craft hits what appears to be a frozen cloud "That's impossible" and I asked "How do you possibly make conclusions about the properties of a completely unknown structure of object on a completely unknown planet?" and he goes "Because that's not how clouds work." And all I could do was rub my eyes.

The point being that there are just way too many unknown variables to even begin to draw any form of reasonable conclusions on these things. Also I'm not trying to be a downer or make you feel as though I'm having a negative view or anything. I'm just trying to, challenge typical reasoning to produce something more, true.

 

On the other hand, in this case, because it's Star Wars, we actually do have the technical information.
The novelization gives all of the geeky technical bits for anyone who wants more than what was shown on the screen superficially - as is the typical fashion.

(Transport ships are being destroyed) Holdo choked back a dismayed cry. She had to do something, but what? There was no way the Raddus could defend the transports. They had moved beyond the protection of it’s shields. She looked helplessly at her console, searching for some answer that eluded her. There was nothing. A light blinked on the interface with the nava computer. Holdo called up the interface to dismiss whatever the alert was. It would only distract her while she tried to think. Then paused. Someone had entered hyperspace coordinates into the system, calculating a jump that had never been made. The nava computer was asking if the coordinates should be purged. It was Dameron she realized. He had rushed to the bridge as part of the plan he had concocted. The one she had dismissed as too reckless and desperate to succeed. Holdo called the coordinates up on her console. The Mon Calamari cruiser had kept traveling along it’s heading for Crait since the coordinates had been entered into the nava computer. As a result, the entry point for the hyper space jump Poe had calculated was now behind the Raddus, on the other side of the FO fleet. Holdo stared at her screen, trying to figure out what she had missed and concluded that her wild hope might not be completely unfounded.

Aboard the Raddus, Holdo hastily rechecked that the heavy cruiser’s nava computer hadn’t kicked back the overrides that she’d had to program into it. Proximity alerts flashed on the console but she ignored them. The FO flagship began to slide across space ahead of the Raddus, outside the temporary bridge’s viewports. (FO blows up some transports) Holdo reminded herself that there was only one way to help the evacuees. If she attracted the FO’s attention too early, her desperate gambit would come to nothing. The only thing she could do was wait.

Connix looked from a sensor screen to the Raddus, “our cruiser’s priming it’s hyperspace engines” she said. “She’s running away.” “ No she isn’t,” Poe said. There was nowhere to run and Holdo knew it. Besides, Poe had been on the bridge. There had been no courses loaded into the nava computer until he’d programed one himself. He knew what Holdo planned to do.

(Raddus turns toward Supremacy) Under ordinary operations, the presence of a sizeable object along the route between the Raddus’ real-space position and it’s entry point into hyperspace would have caused the heavy cruiser’s fail safes to cut in and shut down the hyper drive. But with the fail safes offline and the overrides activated, the proximity alerts were ignored. The heavy cruiser plowed into the Supremacy’s broad flying wing, the force of the impact was at least 3 orders of magnitude greater than anything the Raddus’ inertial dampeners were rated to handle. The protective field they generated failed immediately but the heavy cruisers’ augmented experimental shields remained intact for a moment longer before the unimaginable force of the impact converted the Raddus into a column of plasma that consumed itself. However the Raddus had also accelerated to nearly the speed of light at that point of catastrophic impact and the column of plasma that it became was hotter than a sun and intensely magnetized. This plasma was then hurled into hyperspace along a tunnel opened by the null quantum field generator. A tunnel that collapsed as quickly as it had been opened. Both the column of plasma and the hyperspace tunnel were gone, in far less than an eye blink. But that was long enough to rip through the Supremacy’s hull from bow to stern. Tear a ragged hole in a string of Star Destroyers flying in formation with it. And finally wink out of existence in empty space, thousands of kilometers beyond the FO taskforce.

Poe saw the Raddus elongate into a streak of light that chopped through the FO flagship, shearing it in two and leaving a fiery trail to mark it’s ruinis passage through the fleet. Though ripped in two, the mega destroyer continued to hurl through space along it’s last heading. The Raddus had passed through it with such astonishing speed that what was left in tact barely slowed.​

And that says everything anyone needs technically about it; including the questions about why people aren't doing it all over the place.
The reason is that it normally doesn't work.

Everything has to be perfectly right, and you have to intuit the right moment to take advantage or the opportunity will be missed and you'll have just entered hyperspace rather than rammed anyone. It outlines right there that Holdo had to wait for just the right moment and implies that the right moment is not only a technical alignment, but also a psychological moment. If you move at the wrong moment, then you would show your cards and the opponent would be able to move or do something to avoid the ram and...you would just be in hyperspace, or blown up by being shot.

It also outlines that the main reason this worked technically is because of the distance involved and that the Raddus wasn't actually yet in hyperspace when the collision took place, but was instead ramping up to speed for hyperspace, as it was nearly to the speed of light. The hyperspace was achieved after the Raddus was already plasma, and so it was the plasma that jumped to hyperspace.

Wherever Poe was going just abruptly had ultra hot plasma in massive volume shoot out like a cannon for a brief moment before consuming itself.

There's really no reason for this argument, or for anyone to ask why Lucasfilm hasn't answered questions...the only thing they should answer is, "Buy the book", like a good salesman.

So...according to the book if the coordinates of the hyperspace jump point entry had been different, if the coordinates hadn't been pre-entered by Poe so that no time was required for the nava computer to calculate the jump, if the distances between the ships had been different, if the size of the ships had been different, if the moment of initiating the jump had been different, if the fail-safes and dampening technologies on the ships had been different, if Holdo's intuitive psychological read regarding the timing had been different, and if the Raddus hadn't had an experimental shield that could withstand the force just long enough before the Raddus was vaporized into plasma, then....

It wouldn't have happened. All that would have happened would have been that
A) The Raddus would have either jumped into hyperspace or slammed into the Supremacy and done not nearly as much damage.
B) It would have taken Holdo far too long to get usable coordinates for a moving target such that the sweet spot was just at the right distance for the jump to reach nearly light speed at the moment of impact and she would have just been blown up by shots.
C) It would have done nothing but vaporized the ramming ship if it were a smaller ship.
D) The possibility of the trajectory alignment given the need to have the pre-programmed nava computer established as in point (B) would mean that any chance of doing this twice, hell even once, is just incredibly unlikely, so unless you're Holdo and you just can't believe that everything aligned just right and you happen to be thinking the option at that moment, you're actually not going to hit anything in all likeliness and end up back at point (A).
E) The fail-safes would normally get in your way, or take a while to get around unless you had already shut them off previously so that alignment time would be a problem, because if you had to spend time doing (E), then it would be akin to problem (B) and you'd be blown up by shots fired.
F) Your ship would normally be ripped to shreds before being able to make considerable damage due to not having the Raddus' experimental shields which held it together just long enough for the impact to play a role.


The only thing this scene, in the film, actually needed was 3PO rattling off the odds of that happening after it happened.
I love crunching numbers, and it's beyond me what the probability is of all of that happening just right as the book points out as the requirements.
All I can suggest metaphorically is that this is akin to the Voyager launch window of once every 175 years for just the right alignments of the planets, and not only that, but also the politics with congress going just right, the financing, the technology, testing, and juggling a failure along the way...all in time to complete the sequence of planetary dosey does that need to happen exactly so along the way.

It's like that, but now imagine instead of a near decade of heads up, you have 5 minutes, at best, heads up to your parameters and logistics considering that you won't know what the parameters and logistics are until the target ship or station is within shooting distance of where you're at - since it is a moving target itself.

So, basically Voyager planned and launched (we'll assume it's already built and ready to go) in 5 minutes with no prior knowledge of the possible trajectories involved and this time around you have to hit an object three times the size of Voyager that's capable of moving.

It's something like that and asking why we don't get all probes up to 38,000 mph by slinging them sequentially around the planets if that had happened to be the event that was the Voyager launch.

Simple answer, really. It's next to impossible logistically to accomplish.
The book basically points out that Holdo didn't really plan to do this. It just happened to line up and she happened to think of it while scrambling through all of the possibilities.

She, in effect, pulled a Poe. A very long shot odds maneuver that got her killed.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

That's a good explanation Jayson, but it's not in the movie. Based on what we see in the movie the trick didn't require a special shield or a rare combination of the planets aligning just right. What we see in the movie is Holdo pointing the ship at the target and activating the hyperdrive, and a big, beautiful outcome.

There is nothing in that scene that says "We've only got one chance to do this" or "Good thing we got this special new shield installed on Tuesday" or anything like that. It's perfectly logical to assume if it works for Holdo and Snoke's ship that it would have worked for any big asteroid and the Death Star.

@metadude, I have to completely disagree with you when you claim "A person saying "It could've been done before" or "It could be done again" is committing an error in reasoning based on unknowable fact." When you pull the trigger on a blaster, what happens? Does it shoot a blaster bolt or does it shoot a cloud of soap bubbles depending on what day of the week it is? I'm saying - based on watching what happens when a trigger gets pulled in the movies - that the outcome is knowable, and if you're watching Han pull the trigger on Greedo it's NOT an error in reasoning to assume Greedo's gonna die. We could argue semantics here but it's not hard to see my point - repeated actions have repeated consequences.

Why would jumping into hyperspace be any different? Because the novelization said so? If that's the argument, then it's an argument that doesn't exist in the movies. Based on what was seen in the movies, and based on the lack of any qualifications or disclaimers that what we saw could only work if relative distances, ship masses, payloads, or barometric pressure were first satisfied, it should work every time, the same way a blaster bolt comes out every time the trigger gets pulled.

 

If SW went back to "the light side is holy" and "the dark side is evil", THAT would be too much. If cool force abilities would become more important than character development, that would be too much also. It would mean that they ran out of ideas and SW is pretty much dead. But I don't think that's going to happen any time soon.

 

Han's 12 parsec explanation wasn't in the movie either.

That's the explanation. On screen or not. Most of Star Wars has explained itself regarding technical details off screen.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

If you're going to pull a stunt like a hyperspace jump into an enemy command ship, fine. I loved the scene.

But if you're going to call out movie audiences for not reading the novelization and therefore not knowing it was something that could only happen on very rare occasions, then you're just being dense. THERE IS NOTHING IN THE MOVIE THAT INDICATED THIS COULDN'T BE DONE AGAINST THE DEATH STAR. You pretty much admitted that yourself in your last post. The average movie-goer doesn't get his technical details off screen so quit acting like I'm stoopid for taking what the movie showed at face value and not knowing the details of the novel that contradicts what's shown in the movie.

 

After careful consideration, space whales are still too much for me

 

Firstly, I want to clarify that I wasn't calling anyone stupid, nor suggesting that anyone is stupid in the previous post.

Secondly, there's nothing contradictory about the maneuver. Never before had anyone in a Star Wars film done the maneuver. Now someone has.
That's not a contradiction. It's only a contradiction if we assume everyone could have been doing it, but given the same information we can also assume there's reasons why people weren't doing it.
Either we assume everyone in Star Wars is stupid for not doing this maneuver, or we assume that the reason we don't see it all over the place is that there are reasons and Holdo had some kind of exception.

This is akin, once again, to Han's 12 parsec line.
Either we assume (A) Lucas is ignorant, (B) Han is ignorant, (C) Obi Wan is ignorant, or (D) it actually makes sense in Star Wars, for whatever reason not superficially shown on the screen.

For a long time people either assumed (A) or (D). The real reason turned out to be that Lucas originally wrote it so that (B) was the case, but ended up deciding to go with (D) because it was more interesting, and it was after Lucas decided the reason was (D) that extra material in books was released which explained the situation in terms of (D).

This is no different.
We can either assume (A) everyone's an idiot, or (B) people don't do it for whatever reasons.

Just like before, as it turns out, the case is (B), which we can assume while watching the film, and extra material took up position (B) and supplied the details just like books once supplied the details regarding (D) for Han's line years ago.

No one needed the information if they didn't want it.
But, like all things technical in Star Wars, and unlike Star Trek, if you wanted the technical information, then you don't look for the explanation in the film. You look to books.

No one ever once explained why Lightsabers didn't just melt your face off, or really anything about them, on screen.
That was done on the side in books.


No one explained why Kamikaze piloting wasn't the go-to maneuver after seeing an A-Wing in Return of the Jedi and take out the bridge.
I mean, think about that for a moment. All you have to do to destroy a Super Star Destroyer is hit it enough that the bridge deflector shields, which are separate apparently than the rest of the ship, go down, and then just throw a ship into the bridge and boom...it's done.

So...since deflector shields are limited in their ability to defend, you just basically need a big enough ship - say a cruiser, and then just drive them straight into every star destroyer bridge because the shields won't stop it. Tada!

However, everyone's not doing this all over the place, so we can safely assume there's reasons for that.

But it's pretty much exactly where TLJ gets the idea from.
It's just that TLJ's is a steroid version of that moment, but it's not like we haven't seen ramming before in these films.

We saw it there in ROTJ, we saw it when the Super Star Destroyer slammed into the Death Star II and even a ship that size, though not at near lightspeed, didn't cause much more than a surface scratch on the Death Star, we saw a Star Destroyer rammed and subsequently pushed and used like a battering ram to hit another Star Destroyer, and we saw it in Rogue One, as @LadyMusashi mentioned, where it was almost the same kind of situation where ships were ramping up to lightspeed and just ended up slamming into a Star Destroyer's bottom side and exploding (too bad they didn't slam into the bridge - those appear rather easy to break ).

Star Wars has always been non-technical on-screen. It's always shown things that, if you think about them beyond the superficial firework show, don't seem to make any damn sense at all.

I mean...why the hell do all Star Destroyers list downward when damaged as if they are boats in water instead of just stalling out with the physical momentum of the moment they lost power?


So I don't require the general audience member to go read books. The general audience member also didn't care about the Holdo maneuver. It didn't even hit the general audience member's brain that there was anything to think about regarding that moment.

Star Wars geeks, like you and me, on the other hand, yeah. We're the type of people that are likely to stop and think, "Hang on..."?
Because we're the same population, Star Wars geeks, that stopped and thought, "Hang on..." every time something like this happens in Star Wars.

And if you're going to ask about why something can be and you're a Star Wars geek (i.e. you're here on this forum), and you're not going to take the superficial affirmative where you assume there are reasons (for everything not explicitly stated in Star Wars), then yeah...in that case, I do think the onus is on the Star Wars geek to recognize the extra-film material because that's what Star Wars geeks have always done.

Otherwise, almost nothing in Star Wars makes sense, honestly.
It's not actually easy to geek out on from a technical perspective. Star Trek is far easier to do that with.
Star Wars, on the other hand, rarely makes a lick of technical sense, and often doesn't even make sense when you do go looking in the books.

But even if you, for whatever reason, want to choose to ignore the non-film material in the novel that explains what happened, there's still nothing contradictory.
There's simply a scene where someone shoots a ship through another ship...yet again. This time at higher speeds.

The only difference here is the speed of the impact. We've seen much bigger ships hit each other, and we've seen ships hit each other several times.
The speed was the only new factor, and there's probably no real reason that it actually required hyperspace to cause sufficient damage in the first place. The hyperspace just made the attack fast enough that no one would be able to react, because it closed the distance almost instantly.

If the ships had already been closer, say like the two Star Destroyers in Rogue One, then the Raddus would likely have just gone through the Supremacy anyway; just at a much lower speed.

And all these ramming moments in the past, even when directly intentional, like the primary one in Rogue One...weren't done with droids or autopilots.
For whatever reason, in Star Wars, when you want to ram something, you seem to need to have humans in control. Don't know why...but that's just how it's happened.

*shrug*
I guess have a problem if you want to, but it's not really that big of a problem - especially at this point.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Jayson, I let my frustration get the better of me.

The OP asked how much is too much? I answered. Metadude called my answer an error in reasoning and you kinda piled on. So I wrote back with reasoning and got slapped with an "unoriginal" feedback. And I got a little angry. I apologize for that.