There is a genuine backlash building against The Last Jedi

I don't think we'll truly see the financial effects from TLJ until a couple years from now. There are plenty of people like me who disliked it the first time I watched it, but still bought a ticket a second time to see if my initial gripes held water (I believe they did). Don't forget that we have the Solo film in 5 months, and there's a lot to suggest that it could be a disaster. If Solo flops on the heals of the backlash from TLJ, we could see the financial effects hit when episode 9 is released.

 

The box office numbers tell a very different story. People who like the movie don't post it on the internet. They go to the theatre.

 

Box office numbers are currently saying that TLJ is heading towards a billion this coming weekend projection is that it will fall short of TFA and Rogue one.. the negative backlash and divide of the film has had an effect on the box office numbers plus the holiday's and the fact that it was a different economic climate during the release of the TFA along with it being the first star wars film since the prequals.

 

Like has been stated many times, whether the movie was complete garbage or not it was always going to make this much because it is Star Wars. All I am stating is there is a large amount of people who do not like the movie. Because lots of people are saying only small groups of hardcore fans don’t like it which isn’t true.

 

People go to theater to discover whether they like the movie or not - especially those who don't go in the opening weekend. Opening weekend people are predisposed to liking something because they had enough interest already to show up the earliest. There's also later people curious as to the controversy over the movie is and want to see for themselves, like rubber necking past a car accident.

 

Not actually true, historically.
AOTC at the box office was to go down in SW history as the lowest gross delivery of earnings ever at a mere 650 million globally in non-adjusted 2000 dollars, which in adjusted USD 2017 dollars (~1.42:1) is around 316 million in net earnings.
The only saving grace for this show's earnings was that it's budget was so low at ~160 million 2017 USD, so the net return against that was worth the same as Rogue One's 200 million USD budget against a net earning of around 380 million USD.

So far, SW has never had an outright flop, but they have entries that just barely cover their cost (so far; those two - RO and AOTC - they both failed to reach much beyond 2x their budget, which means after a net consideration - they balanced the books to nearly 0 and that was about it).

So there's no guarantee that TLJ will slam it out of the park just because it's SW.
The last SW to truly slam it out of the park in net earnings was TPM at over 3 times the budget. Everything since then has been between 2 to 2.5, with an average of around ~2 times the budget and a standard deviation of 0.2.
What this means is that you will make your money back, but that's about it. You aren't going to rake in groves of money over your investment like TPM and ANH (27 times the budget) because of a multitude of factors that separate then from now (some of the reasons are the way financial decisions are made).

We commonly just look up and see more money than any of us are likely to ever own and so it's just racked up as "Of course they made bank", but that's actually a misunderstanding of the large values in their appropriate context.

SW is huge, but Disney isn't making huge returns on SW. They're betting on the investment of the movies to balance the books, make a little extra if possible, and rely on the films to fuel a zeitgeist over merchandise and theme parks (and cruises). They're basically using SW, correctly, to bump their EBITDA portfolio by using the SW movies as a form of advertising - as if the films were the marketing campaign. This is clever because, like I said. SW doesn't actually rake in net earning explosions that just make the bank swell like it did back in the early days with Fox and super tiny budgets.


In regards to large bodies of people hating the movie...just on basic principle of the nature of percentages and scaled demographics, if a film has a large attendance, then it will have a large volume, in numbers, of people who did not like it.
If in one hand we say that SW will always make large sums of money because everyone sees SW, and in the other hand note that there are sizable volumes of people who do not like the film; it's not exactly curious where that large volume of people comes from.

SW has always had large volumes of people upset with it, since at the very least, ROTJ (personally, I would argue since ESB, but at the least ROTJ), and that only makes sense because if your audience is virtually the entire world, then upsetting 25% of that population is somewhere in the millions of people potentially. If you have 90 million patrons, for example, then you would have roughly 20 million upset people.
I can't recall a SW which doesn't have a "fallout" of some kind by a reasonably sizable portion of the audience.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

I know it seems silly to say that several hundred million over budget isn't enough, but for Disney's flagship franchises, it isn't. All companies, no matter how big, have budgets. They have projected how much TLJ should make, and if doesn't, it hurts other projects all down the line. The money from SW doesn't necessarily go back into SW, but it goes into whatever projects (and jobs) Disney wants to invest in.

Fan backlash may not have immediate consequences, but the ill-will and lackluster numbers are starting to surface in national media. It's particularly troubling to see it in publications such as Forbes or Bloomberg. It affects how investors see the entire Disney project, and with the troubles they have been having with ESPN tanking, it's not good.

Disney stock has been essentially flat for two years, while the overall market is up 25%. How can they have missed this rally?!! All my funds have dumped them when DIS used to be in my top holdings. They needed to knock it out of the park with TLJ, and did not. Whether that's fan backlash, or too many Star Wars movies, or due to bad weather, it's a problem- and we're whistling past the graveyard if we think it is not.

 

"So far, SW has never had an outright flop, but they have entries that just barely cover their cost (so far; those two - RO and AOTC - they both failed to reach much beyond 2x their budget, which means after a net consideration - they balanced the books to nearly 0 and that was about it)"

I understand that Hollywood does some weird accounting, but this just doesn't add up for me. Rogue One made $1,056,000,000 on a budget of $200 million. If we go by the common understanding that a huge film's marketing budget is roughly as much as its production budget, that makes it cost $400 million total. Now, it's been said a movie has to make twice its budget before it starts being profitable (whether that's twice it's production budget or twice its total budget I'm not sure)...but just for the sake of argument, let's say it has to double $400 million to start making a profit. That's $800 million. Rogue One made, again, 1.056 billion. By my math, it came out -- at the very least -- $256 million ahead in profits. Which begs the question: how is that balancing the books at zero?

Basically, at this rate it seems downright impossible for a film to make money unless it's a micro-budgeted film like Blair Witch Project that makes $140+ million off of like $60k.

 

The production cost of Rogue One was 200 million USD.
Domestic Box Office was a bit over 532 million.
International Box Office was just over 518 million.
Domestic typical share is 55% of that 532 million.
International averages to around 15% once all trade variations are accounted for (this isn't the case per country; this is a short-cut to the average return out of each unique national agreement and fees).
So that's 292 million and 78 million against 200 million (budget)
(292 + 78 = 370)/200 = 1.9 (1.85 specifically, but I tend to round off to the tenth)

So it did fine.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

And ALL of the casual fans I know who saw it consider it one of their favorites. It's anecdotal, we all have circles of friends casual or hardcore with a variety of opinion on the film. This is NOT unique to TLJ.

I know the feeling of disliking a Star Wars film and watching aghast as many of the fans in person and online crow about how amazing it is. Rogue One, for me, is a DISASTER of a film. It has some cool fan service moments, but the script is jagged, the opening act a complete mess and the characters have all been forged with multiple writers and vision, often leaving the tone and the theme of the film all over the place. It has great sense of scale and action, but the writing and development in the film is a lazy, mess.

That opinion is dissonant to the film's overall success and general acceptance into the franchise. That opinion alone got me a significant amount of down votes on this very forum, despite the fact that even though it may disagree with your own view, it's a perfectly valid take.

This has been with the Star Wars community since its inception. I remember them as far back as Splinter of the Mind's Eye (a very divisive novel).

It's not such a terrible thing, that the community is so large, so diverse that no film can apparently appease all of us.

Fans are entitled to hate TLJ, they are entitled to the pedantic reaction of "I guess I like it, but I hated these small details about it", entitled to say, "I think Mark Hamill is so good in this film, it's become one of my favorite installments based on his performance alone," which happens to be my personal take on the film.

It's all good, it's all part of the community and each should be embraced and welcomed here.

But the key fact that nobody's opinion can take away is the film is a rousing success, America loves The Last Jedi and are eating it up at the box office and near-record pace. It's a win for the franchise, a win for Star Wars and overall America loves it.

 

It's rather natural anyway.
The higher the emotional investment the higher the specificity of focus.
In a way its an emotional bandwidth problem with high stakes consequences.

 

Will the Han Solo movie heal the fandom rift?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...solo-movie-can-heal-left-by-last-jedi-1070752

 

Some excellent truth to this.

But I'll say this, there's obvious evidence the film is a success and that generally America loved the film. It seems like those who dislike TLJ can't square that with their own opinion and therefore keep insisting that obvious truth is a lie.

Even the notion that "TLJ has divided the Star Wars community" (a frequent title on some of the shittier nerd YouTube channels) is a distortion. There are fans who dislike the film, but so what, I've met fans who dislike A New Hope, an opinion which mortifies me because I rank that film with All About Eve, Casablanca, Citizen Kane and Wizard of Oz as some of the finest American cinema one can consume.

But the community isn't "divided" really, it's opinions and reactions are varied and diverse but uniformity of opinion isn't a reality for ANY NERD CULTURE. Just review the wide reaction to Star Trek properties, or the massively wide reaction to any World of Warcraft expansion.

But the verdict is in and it's clear: overall America loved The Last Jedi. Loved it and continue to make it the #1 film in the country and the highest grossing film of the year, despite only 3-weeks to make that mark.

We nerds are guilty of proclaiming our opinion as universal truth. Some of the YouTube channels are HATEFUL at this. They declare "facts" with no research or data to support it, just their own gut instinct.

Online media (including this very forum) DISTORT facts more than they produce them. It's easy to review a thread like this and think, "wow Star Wars fans are really divided over the film." Well of course if you read a thread that's DEDICATED to debate and discussion that's what you'll take away. But this is like taking a ten second incident in a locker room to decide the overall morale of a team, or a 30-second argument with your spouse to judge the quality of your marriage.

And the opposite of love isn't hate anyway, it's indifference. To even the most angry and dismissive of reactions, you have to laugh, because if they really disliked Star Wars they wouldn't give a rat's butt. But they do care and are still invested clearly, or they wouldn't be here debating in the first place.

There's a scene in Gone with the Wind where Rhett Butler is ranting about how much he dislikes Scarlett. And Belle Watling just laughs and says, "It's no use Rhett, you're poisoned with her."

In other words, if he really hated her, he wouldn't be fuming and ranting, the fact he does, means he still actually cares.

Star Wars thrives folks, even if your Snoke opinions were exposed as being dead wrong and utterly irrelevant. The "I hated this Star Wars so much I only saw it 5-times" crowd is a very common phenomenon in Star Wars and it is nothing new. The Last Jedi is a winner, it's a massive success and overall people liked it, a lot.

Truth is brighter and stronger than any opinion expressed here, including my own.