Question about the size of the backlash

You "Nerfectly" capture my #1 problem with many arguments on here. I have NO problem with someone hating a movie! However, statements like a "huge backlash" or a "majority hate it" just rub me the wrong way.

 

Yep.
I just Don't get it neither.
Time to stop.
Been almost Two Months.

$1Point Three Plus BILLION Dollars ... says folk Liked the Film.

This, That, The Other .. I, We, They, You, Me ...

STOP.
Time to Stop.

... now, Rilly, Kinda, Pretty Much ... Pointless.
Is What IT IS.

If ya can't See !?!

That is On You.

... as Rafiki once Said ... "Look Harder ..."

 

Here's what I think (Answer seriously).
1. There are also some Why I like the ST threads. Quick Example : Thread for people who love the film.
2. Where do people get these numbers? 10 percent people are haters. loud minority. 100 percent of haters are sexists. etc. Where do they get the numbers?
3. It's like if you bought a computer for Battlefront gaming. It broke after a week. You will complain. everywhere, it is normal. IF your computer do not break, and you love it. You will be too busy playing Battlefront to sing how awesome your computer is.
4. I am complaining because I want Star Wars to improve (my POV). If I keep complaining about the state of the SW book department, I have hope they will restart the Legend line. If enough people make enough noise, maybe someone will take notice.
Edit 5. I could turn the argument around: It's been 2 months. Why won't these guys stop defending TLJ? The defense must stop!

 

OK time to roll out the numbers. Tired of explaining, again, what my point is.

First, I DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH SOMEONE HATING THE MOVIE.

Next, I DO have a problem with "a huge backlash against the movie"....."majority of people hated it"....."Older fans hated it"......which have ALL been used on this site repeatedly.

TLJ made $1.3B worldwide. Average movie ticket price worldwide for 2017 was $8.97.

So approx 147.9 million people saw TLJ (I know what about people seeing it more than once, but can't measure that).

Until someone comes up with a statistically reliable way to poll those 147.9 million people, all discussions about rotten tomatoes, IMDB, "what I heard the other day", etc etc etc, are ridiculous.

Yes, some people hated it, and some people liked it. That is it. That is the entirety of factual data we have.

 

Lock S Foils
Ironically that was my point.
Except for 1.3 B from box office, which is hard fact. There is no numbers to suggest that "majority/minority of people hated/loved it"
Basically it sounds like we (SW fans, not me and Lock S Foils specifically) are using the same cold hard fact to reach different conclusions.

 

Pobody's Nerfect.
3. People want to belong. They seek like minded people. It gives me good feeling that my thoughts are shared among others. It's just human nature, I guess.
4. Thank you.
5. 2 and 5, and a bit of 1. Kind of my point. No one seems to have cold hard numbers except 1.3B. Some says it could have been 2 B (haters), some says 1.3B means great (go Disney Star Wars!). The haters keep saying size of backlash is big, yes. The same time differnet people are saying it's just a loud minority. I fear SW fans are stuck in a cyclic cyle loop trying to justify our own position without enough data.

 

I'm not "stuck in a cyclic loop"

Some people hated it, and some people loved it.

Period. That is all we know.

 

I agree, some people hated it, some loved it. editA: that is indeed only what we know.

Yes, but SW fans are defending/attacking the TLJ in different ways every day.
I mean, we are here in this thread. You are asking me to stop attacking TLJ, while I ask you to stop defending. Someone will be asking me to stop attacking TLJ, while someone else (maybe you, maybe me) wioll be asking for won't someone defend the TLJ.... That's a loop, right?

 

Agree with the general flow so far - exactly what the size of the 'backlash' isn't known and probably won't be known. It could be that, when you take away the most vitriolic or extreme opinions and rankings (either way) the results are quite possibly somewhere in the middle.
For me, of my friends and colleagues who went to see TLJ (mix of ages and gender):

• One thought it was fantastic
• Two liked most of it, apart from an odd bit (the humour was called out, specifically)
  
• One thought it was somewhere in the middle (which was me)
• Three had significant issues with it, or large chunks of it

Perhaps more interesting for the bottom line, no one in my group went to see it more than once. Two or three of us will be picking up the Blu-ray though.

As Darth Mu said, we are stuck in a loop without data; we may never have that data and to be honest for some of the most passionate on either side of the debate the actual percentages may be meaningless where emotions are involved.

 

I could ask the same question. Why do people who like TLJ understate the backlash. To me TLJ is a mediocre rating, I neither identify as a hater nor a fanboy. In order to estimate the extend of the backlash I usually compare TLJ to other SW movies, espeically the SW era ones. TLJ is an oddball when comparing it to previous entries in the franchise and thus I think that it's pretty save to say that the backlash is actually pretty substantial. Here are a couple of observations I made that allow me to put teh backlash into perspective.

- The ratings in multiple online polls:
No matter if you look at RT, IMDb or european websites like allocine.fr or filmstarts.de. The ratings are all relatively mediocre compared to previous SW movies. There are claims that these ratings are manipulated but I do have a problem with these claims. They are unproven (RT outright denied them), downvoting trolls are mainly a phenomenon on "American" websites but do not explain the bad ratings in Europe and there is no exdplaination why the alledged trolls targeted TLJ but not R1 or TFA.

- None of the analysts got it right:
Forbes estimated 1,6Bn in a "worst case scenario" prior to the release of TLJ. They were pretty much in line what most analysts estimated in terms of BO. The fact that to this day I couldn't find a single analyst who correctly estimated TLJ's actual BO of 1,3Bn. You're always going to have experts who miscalculated the potential BO of movies, that should definitely be expected. However, the fact that none of them got even close to estimate the final BO is quite telling.

- The movie has been pulled from the second largest market (China) after not even three weeks:
The Last Jedi has already been completely pulled from cinemas here," chairman of nationwide Chinese cinema chain Lumiere Pavilions Jimmy Wu told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's performed much worse than we could have expected.”
In China the Star Wars IP does not have the same cult status as it has in the US which means that the label "Star Wars" does not shield the quality of TLJ from criticism the way it does in the West.

- Potential Star Wars fatigue is a myth:
TLJ started with a 90% BO on opening day compared to TFA. Keep in mind that a) sequels usually perform worse than the original movies and b) TFA started during the holidays which TLJ didn't. So TLJ had a fantastic start but then saw the most rapid (!) BO decline in the history of SW. It ended up earning "only" 60% of TFA's total BO while starting at 90% BO on day one. The rapid decline is a strong indicator that people where almost as interested in TLJ as they were in TFA but after a couple of days the interest plummeted. Again, this did not happen to R1 and TFA.

- The internet Buzz about TLJ:
There will always be people who dislike a movie, no matter how well it is received but even a vocal minority can only make so much Buzz on the internet. However, the negative response to TLJ was all ove rthe internet, including this forum, for months! I can only repeat myself when I say: Why didn't something similar happen to R1 and TFA? Are people suddenly more mysogynistic? Are they suddenly more racist? Or did TLJ just not hold up to the quality of R1 and TFA...

TL;DR. Is TLJ the end of SW? Absolutely not? Did I meet expectaions? Hell no.
=> A mediocre movie gets mediocre audience ratings which result in mediocre BO. Mystery solved.

 

i could care less about the box office, but you kinda blew your whole argument with that conclusion.

1.3 billion is not mediocre, period.
it doesn't meet some initial estimates, no.
and you could argue that some people are even disappointed (the Chinese market, etc.)
but calling the returns on the highest grossing film of the year (and in the top ten of all time) "mediocre" is kinda flummoxing, really. : o p

 

Why didnt happened the same with TFA and Rogue One? well TFA was the first movie in 10 years Bob Ross full novelty there. Rogue One was a Fan Service Movie ( at least for me) so the fans were pleased, the critics? not much The last Jedi has no novelty and was like some said an anti fan service movie.. bang!! the critics enjoyed it the fans....not much ... there you go.

China also thought that the Original Trilogy was just chessy movies, with chessy dialogues and chessy visual effects, they were not impressed with those movies , so it seems that they dont have the same love for star wars than the rest of the world?

and your analisis on the BO, i tihnk the word is underperformance, mediocre sound worst than really is

at the end of the day i think fans will kill star wars if they keep this behaviour of X killed star wars ( they did it once when they harrassed until the end to George Lucas, and made him to sell his franchise to Disney):

Accoring to their timeline:

1978 - Holiday Special raped my childhood.

1983 - Ewoks raped my childhood.

1999 Jar Jar Binks raped my childhood.

2002 - Sand raped my childhood.

2005: Darth Vader NOOOOOOO raped my childhood

2015 - Mary Sue and J.J raped my childhood.

2017 - Rian Johnson raped my childhood.

2018- Ron Howard Raped my childhood?

2019: J.J. is back and raped my childhood once more?

 

Expectations were not met, so the BO is mediocre. Maybe I'm using the wrong word because English is not my first language but it was a dissapointment compared to what investors had expected. The IP of SW is incredibly powerful and lowest estimates were 1,6Bn. I usually add (mediocre for SW that is) but it's kinda self explanatory at this point and I have made this argument multiple times on this forum. I'll give you an example of one of the gaming companies I worked at. They said they estimated a 30Mio in revenue for a product they released but they only made ~25Mio. Therefore it was considered only a mediocre success. It's really not that hard to understand!

 

mediocre means "ordinary" and "unremarkable".
so no, i don't think its the word you want to use as neither applies.

i get what you're trying to say; but regardless of what was "expected" or hoped for by pundits or investors or the production company, etc., TLJ was still successful at the box office. could it have been even bigger? sure! but its performance was definitely not mediocre; it was actually very successful compared to every other film over the last two years.

 

Bob Ross mediocre and underperformance is a whole different range in the B.O. For example underperformance is what happened to TLJ , a mediocre BO is what happened to Blade Runner 2049

 

I think I won't live to see the day when a SW movie doesn't generate profit. That's out of the question due to the strength of the IP. But again, I'd like to point out that not even the experts correctly estimated the actual BO. There is a -300Mio difference between the WORST CASE SCENARIO proposed by forbes and the actual BO of TLJ. A ticketsale that started at 90% of TFA's BO crashed to 60% putting it closer to R1 than TFA (a scenario anaylsts obviously thought to be impossible). For a company like Lucasfilm this is huge. Sure you don't voice your concerns publicly if you work for a big company but Kathleen Kennedy has been awfully quiet about TLJ's financial "success". There are a lot of indicators that point to a rather widespread divide among fans. It's on social media, on this forum, on metacritic websites, and BO expectations that weren't met. Downplaying all of these indicators as the work of internet trolls (who somehow didn't do the same to R1 and TFA) is farfetched.

Btw thanks for the clarification concernign the term mediocre. What I meant is that TLJ underperformed significantly compared to what analysts had expected.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 25, 2018, Original Post Date: Feb 25, 2018 ---

I thought Bladerunner 2049 was a pretty big failure (which is sad because I liked the movie). It didn't even make it's production budget back (including marketing) which I don't think can be considered "unremarkable".

 

agreed. probably a better measure of mediocrity in terms of box office would be something like Justice League.
it was neither a massive flop nor a financial success. it just sort of laid there in the middle, gasping.

 

The thing about English is the insane amount of words you guys have (around 170,000 afak). A person who looks aesthetically pleasing is "handsome", if he is a man, "gorgeous" or "pretty" if she is a girl and "beautiful" if she's an adult woman. The German language only has about 75.000 words which you can combine to form other words. Hand = hand, Schuh = shoe, Handschuh = glove... As a result the meaning of individual words is less nuanced than in English.