To my surprise, Solo was sold out!

First off...I'm not making a case for some empirical proof for why Solo is a good movie, and I'm also really not interested in arguments about whether it was or not.
If you hated the film and the thought of it just crawls in your skin and makes you want to tear into a rant, cool. Just...really, this isn't the place for it and I won't respond because I just really don't care.


So, after the box office results, I was pretty much resigned for Solo to be a film that I would always love that not many people did (outside of the Star Wars community here in our little hub).

So it was that I was a bit surprised when I walked into the store today (not to buy Solo, I had already done that the day it came out), and turned around to look at the electronics section and saw the kiosk empty of any Blu-Ray's or 4K's.

I was a bit shocked. I never saw that with TLJ here locally (that's not meant to suggest that TLJ performed worse...it's meant to say that it was a bit of a shock).

I walked into the department and the shelf for it was empty.
There were still DVD copies, but no Blu-Ray and 4K's. They were all gone.


That was pretty cool; honestly.
Maybe Solo will have a film life like Fight Club, where it picks up in the after-theater cultural life far more than it did in the theater.


Anyway, just a cool moment that I thought I'd share.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I'm a bit doubtful on the stocking since it is a major chain, but I think locally this was probably helped by it being the week everyone in our State recieves between 1 and 2 thousand dollars from the oil returns so folks tend to spend now and shops get slammed.

Even still; I didn't expect that to be the thing folks rushed on.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

That's what I'm kind of hoping for, and honestly, some of my favorite films had that happen.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Yeah, Jeff Bridges even read his speech as The Dude for John Goodmans' Hollywood Star.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I doubt it.
The issue at play with Solo was all down to shooting the film virtually twice and being too careless with directors.

That single bad choice caused most every fall out.
Because they reshot so much, they went far over budget and time. Because they went far over budget and time, they lost some cast and, more importantly, they could not afford more marketing but had to do actually less marketing to try to balance the books.
That didn't work.

Disney hasn't shown a history of whiplash rash decisions in the past, but instead tweeks going forward. Most likely one-offs will be more carefully chosen and checked, and marketing won't be kneecapped as a go-to move going forward.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Oh, I'm fairly certain that they wrote off the film long before it was in the can.
Everything in their actions indicates they knew full well that it wasn't going to score great dividends and pulled back on marketing to attempt to not blow even more money.

I do think, however, that they didn't expect as much of a drop as happened, and I think they over-assumed their product awareness in the general audience.
Yes, TLJ just happened only months before, but when I surveyed people around where I live (I tend to ask checkers at stores, gas stations, nurses at hospitals, and people around the work-place these kinds of things when I'm curious), the most common response of whether they were going to go see Solo back when it was coming out was that they didn't even know there was another Star Wars film. Some didn't even grasp that "Solo" was a Star Wars film when I said the name.
A common follow up response was something along the lines of, "Isn't the other one still out?"

Probably around a quarter to a third hadn't even made it to seeing TLJ yet, so the idea of making it to see Solo was no where on their itinerary and most said they'd probably just see it on video streaming when it came out. Some took a moment to complain about how many movies are out - a sort of "I give up; I can't keep track anymore" feeling about films in general because people tell them so frequently of some film that they just have to see.

But I think the biggest blow was Disney really thinking the general audience was more aware of Solo than it probably actually was.
I continued to find people who didn't even know of its existence after it was already in theaters.

I'm quite certain every Star Wars fan knew of it, but I don't think the awareness in the general population was nearly as high.


Cheers,
Jayson