'Star Wars' discussions

**Gaidin** · January 02, 2019, 11:51 AM

The fans are a bit crazy. Disney are still selling both the tv shows and the movies to the viewers at large rather well so who cares.

**Condottiere 40K** · January 02, 2019, 12:34 PM

That's probably the point.

If you don't care, you don't watch.

And if you don't watch, you don't buy the merchandise or visit their billion dollar experience park.

**Gaidin** · January 02, 2019, 01:55 PM

My favorite part of that video is me hoping they never bothered to sit down and watch Battlestar: Galactica if that type of story really bothers them.

**Love Mountain** · January 02, 2019, 06:14 PM

Honestly found BattleStar Galactica boring as hell. Star Wars and the EU was incredibly good and engaging. Had issues with power creep imo, but was very good regardless. The new Star Wars trilogy is too artsy for me to understand and feels like a retelling of the original trilogy. In a world of sequels, reboots, and cinematic universes... originality is a risk one cannot always justify.

**Gaidin** · January 02, 2019, 10:10 PM

Originally Posted by Sukiyama

Honestly found BattleStar Galactica boring as hell.

Yea well...

There's room for everything in these stories. All a matter of what you wanted to watch.

**Common Soldier** · January 03, 2019, 09:34 PM

Originally Posted by Gaidin

The fans are a bit crazy. Disney are still selling both the tv shows and the movies to the viewers at large rather well so who cares.

The Hans Solo.movie was a largely a failure. And The Last Jedi failed in China. It remains to be seen how well the Star Wars franchise will.continue to do.well. I can't help but think the failure of the Hans Solo.movie was a sort of backlash against Disney. It won't matter if the other Disney films do.well, but it it will be interesting to see how the upcoming Star Wars films do. The main thing is that Disney has seemed to alienated some (but not all) of Star Wars loyal.fan base, so.the upcoming movies will have to rely more on their own merit as a movies and cAnt depend on just fans making them successful.

It remains to be seen if Hans Solo was just the case of another so so Star Wars movie released too soon after some.other Star Wars film was released, or whether it is the start of a trend.

**Lord Oda Nobunaga** · January 04, 2019, 02:04 AM

The Han Solo movie failed due to a combination of apathy with regards to the franchise and also a boycott by ardent fans of the old material.
Still one could argue that a Han Solo origin story was a miscalculation on the part of Kathleen Kennedy. Most of the people I've seen and spoken with thought the idea was dumb.

**Condottiere 40K** · January 04, 2019, 02:58 AM

Who cared about his origin story? His introduction was almost as good as that of Captain Jack Sparrow.

His past can come back to haunt him, like Lando, or apparently, his wife, but you didn't need flashbacks.

It might have worked if the story was about Han's time with either the Imperium or Corellian Navy, where it had been implied that he broke with authority in regard to Chewbacca and was cashiered.

**Gaidin** · January 04, 2019, 09:07 AM

Originally Posted by Common Soldier

The Hans Solo.movie was a largely a failure. And The Last Jedi failed in China. It remains to be seen how well the Star Wars franchise will.continue to do.well. I can't help but think the failure of the Hans Solo.movie was a sort of backlash against Disney. It won't matter if the other Disney films do.well, but it it will be interesting to see how the upcoming Star Wars films do. The main thing is that Disney has seemed to alienated some (but not all) of Star Wars loyal.fan base, so.the upcoming movies will have to rely more on their own merit as a movies and cAnt depend on just fans making them successful.

It remains to be seen if Hans Solo was just the case of another so so Star Wars movie released too soon after some.other Star Wars film was released, or whether it is the start of a trend.

Who cares about China? TLJ was never going to make as much as TFA and everybody but the fanatics knows it. Making four times your budget is a success and is good. They have literally no reason to change their model for the main story.

**HannibalExMachina** · January 04, 2019, 02:53 PM

Originally Posted by Common Soldier

The Hans Solo.movie was a largely a failure. And The Last Jedi failed in China. It remains to be seen how well the Star Wars franchise will.continue to do.well. I can't help but think the failure of the Hans Solo.movie was a sort of backlash against Disney. It won't matter if the other Disney films do.well, but it it will be interesting to see how the upcoming Star Wars films do. The main thing is that Disney has seemed to alienated some (but not all) of Star Wars loyal.fan base, so.the upcoming movies will have to rely more on their own merit as a movies and cAnt depend on just fans making them successful.

It remains to be seen if Hans Solo was just the case of another so so Star Wars movie released too soon after some.other Star Wars film was released, or whether it is the start of a trend.

Originally Posted by Lord Oda Nobunaga

The Han Solo movie failed due to a combination of apathy with regards to the franchise and also a boycott by ardent fans of the old material.
Still one could argue that a Han Solo origin story was a miscalculation on the part of Kathleen Kennedy. Most of the people I've seen and spoken with thought the idea was dumb.

nobody was interested in solo, the few tribalists getting pissy about the sequels arent enough to make a dent. but keep blaming the makers, how dare they make a buisness out of star wars. whoops, lucas already did that.

loyal fanbase, my butt.

**Gaidin** · January 04, 2019, 03:01 PM

Personally I loved Solo and the cool stuff that came with it. But yea, the writing's on the wall. They pretty much slammed the breaks on side stories and are being a lot more thoughtful and careful after that one barely made its official budget back.

**PikeStance** · January 05, 2019, 11:37 PM

Originally Posted by Common Soldier

The Hans Solo.movie was a largely a failure. And The Last Jedi failed in China. It remains to be seen how well the Star Wars franchise will.continue to do.well. I can't help but think the failure of the Hans Solo.movie was a sort of backlash against Disney. It won't matter if the other Disney films do.well, but it it will be interesting to see how the upcoming Star Wars films do. The main thing is that Disney has seemed to alienated some (but not all) of Star Wars loyal.fan base, so.the upcoming movies will have to rely more on their own merit as a movies and cAnt depend on just fans making them successful.

It remains to be seen if Hans Solo was just the case of another so so Star Wars movie released too soon after some.other Star Wars film was released, or whether it is the start of a trend.

China is not a good metric for scifi films.
Solo definitely fell victim to the backlash of the Last Jedi. Solo was a strange movie from Lando and the robot relationship to the resurrections of believed to be dead villains. Plus the movie did one of those, cross, double-cross plots, so it was a bit cliche. The basic concept of the movie wasn't bad, but it had an odd execution. I wish they had followed a similar concept to the original movie. Two characters force together having to complete a task (Han and Chewey) without an un-needed plot twist.

Solo was just ok and it needed to be near great to bring back those that just chose not to view it.

**Condottiere 40K** · January 06, 2019, 05:23 AM

Chances are that the original treatment of Solo would have done better, or at least, filmed better than the slow motion disaster movie it turned out to be.

It certainly should be funnier, which is why I suspect Kennedy pulled the emergency brake. It cost more to produce than The Last Jedi; the sets and the special effects certainly didn't look it.

Kenobi probably would have been the only post/prequel that could have worked, since you had the original actor who could have given a transitional Alec Guinness performance. He could have also spread some DNA around.

**Cookiegod** · January 06, 2019, 05:28 AM

Originally Posted by PikeStance

China is not a good metric for scifi films.
Solo definitely fell victim to the backlash of the Last Jedi. Solo was a strange movie from Lando and the robot relationship to the resurrections of believed to be dead villains. Plus the movie did one of those, cross, double-cross plots, so it was a bit cliche. The basic concept of the movie wasn't bad, but it had an odd execution. I wish they had followed a similar concept to the original movie. Two characters force together having to complete a task (Han and Chewey) without an un-needed plot twist.

Solo was just ok and it needed to be near great to bring back those that just chose not to view it.

I never watched TLJ. I only know about it through the hate-videos (and a few love videos like this one), so take what I'm saying about it with some salt: TLJ isn't the worst part of the trilogy, TFA is. Solo suffers for overcompensating TLJ.

The Force Awakens sets most of those bad plotlines up, which is why I never went to watch the last jedi. Rian Johnson's movie is probably bad, and does a lot wrong, but it at least has some creative bone to it. Which "the remake of the originals awakens" does not.

The boredom awakens tells you 1) that the originals don't matter, because hey, the emperor and darth vader might be dead, but here we are again; 2) J.J.A. doesn't have a single creative bone in his body, nor does he know how to make a truly strong female character; 3) all those fan feminists have apparently never watched "Alien" or "the silence of the lamps", since if they had, they'd know what a truly strong female character is (they tend to have far greater potential than male characters), and that we had them since the 70s; 4) that Lucasfilms+Disney also don't have a single creative bone, nor care about anything other than the franchise being a cash cow; and 5) that nothing that happens in the Star Wars ~~universe~~ galaxy is ever going to matter. You can't ever kill those baddies, as then the story would be over. You can't kill the good guys, as Star Wars is mostly marketed towards children.
So I didn't watch TLJ because of TFA.

For all the s_ that TLJ get's deservedly I have to credit Rian Johnson for at least trying to be surprising, for at least trying to make some points. He did it very very badly, but at least he tried.

And it's not like Lucasfilm is filled with people who say: "Hey, how can we push this agenda, how can we push that one?"
Nah, what likely happened was that some executives told them: "You have this giant fanbase, and they're not going to leave you no matter what. So how about you expand your audience? We need a girl, a black guy, a hispanic guy, a gay guy, but don't make that last one too obvious because then the Christians won't come.
Also, score as many nostalgia points as possible."

What I love about the TLJ debacle is that the fans are pushing back. Not because I'm one of them, but because this bland corporate BS is going on my nerves. You can't serve one audience without sacrificing the other. It's not like the fans decided to hate it for no reason. Lucasfilms treated them poorly, and I can only applaud the little men standing up for themselves.

What I hate about the backlash is that the result has been even more of that corporate blandness in the movie Solo.

I watched Solo in the cinema with a friend.
All I needed was ONE LOOK at the core cast and I knew exactly what their purpose for that movie was, who the traitor was, and in which order they were going to die.
That's how crude this movie was. The first few moments in that first poker game also tell you the protagonist would lose due to cheating (can't lose for real, now, can he?! But he has to lose, so...) and that there'd be a second game at the end that he'd win (can't end the movie without him winning everything now, can we?).
The only things I didn't saw coming was the mentor figure being killed by the protagonist, and the bandits being the good guys. I knew the mentor was going to die last, but I thought he'd die doing that arc of redemption through self-sacrifice thing, and the bandits being good was entirely predictable except that I didn't give a damn.

The entire movie felt like the screenwriters had copy pasted their script from a template for dummies, and merely inserted some names and locations.
That minitwist at the end Pikestance talked about had the odor of them realising 3/4 through: Oh

, it's too obvious we copy-pasted the entire thing. We need to hide it so it's less obvious.

I spoilered the entire movie to my friend before the exposition was even over. When that minitwist at the end came which Pikestance is talking about my friend happily leaned over to tell me "Hahah! You were wrong!" And I merely replied: "Nah... just give it a minute."

And not to get too political here, but the virtue signalling thing in all of these new movies is downright offensive for me.
Greed aside (we already got a white male fanbase, we need a hispanic for the hispanics, a girl for the girls, a black for the blacks,...), these executives must think really low of women and minorities.
The reason why all those "progressive" movies (like new Star Wars, Ghostbusters, etc.) suck isn't because of the "progressive" cast. It's because they are lazy and care more about the package than about the substance, since the package is the main factor deciding whether or not we buy that product or not.

There are plenty of political art that is done well. Probably because their creators actually believe in it and also have talent.
There have been strong compelling female characters in art that are done well. If anything they have greater potential because of greater adversity.
Clarice in Silence of the lambs is constantly facing off against men. And she wins every time. But we never know that from the start. And she still has weaknesses and undergoes some change. Which Rey never will because her character was solely created for marketing. Not because any of those writers actually genuinely cared for her. That's why she's so obnoxiously shallow.

TL;DR: I think Disney & Lucasfilm in particular are a prime example of people rising to their level of incompetence.
They know how to make special effects, but the only difficulty there from a managerial perspective is how much money you can sink in them. J.J. Abrams knows how to copy people. He does not know how to resolve plots. Or maybe he doesn't care, since the people have already paid by that point and it's not worth the effort? Resolving plots is harder than to set them up. I'd argue that no matter how bad TLJ is, it still tells us that if Rian Johnson had been allowed to make the trilogy from the start, the result would probably been far more interesting than what J.J. Abrams could ever do.

But the gravest mistakes are made by the executives. It's painfully obvious the virtue signalling doesn't stem from genuine beliefs, but from greed. They expanded their target audience so much that they ended up having no target audience at all, and cared about the short term profits only.

This aspect isn't even speculative. It's endemic across industries, and mostly due to a) the executives having risen to their level of incompetence and b) them knowing they usually don't keep their posts for much more than a few years. Their boni depend on short term profits alone. Hurting long-term profit prospects by burning through brand equity matters not. It's really a cause of celebration that the backlash came so quickly it hurt those responsible for this mess, instead of their successors, which is what happens usually.

**Magister Militum Flavius Aetius** · January 08, 2019, 09:42 AM

Solo wasn't killed by a fan boycott it was killed because:

1. Terrible timing. It was released on the worst weekend ever to release movies, in the shadow of two recent giant films (Infinity War and Deadpool 2).
2. Terrible press. The movie news was all about how it was plagued by reshoots and rewrites after Ron Howard took over.
3. Virtually no advertising campaign. Which relates to point 2.

And yet, it still broke 100 million for that weekend, which means it was extremely successful for those circumstances. Only IIRC 6 other films have broken 100 million for the weekend-before-memorial day release in the past 20 years.

As for TLJ in China, every Star Wars movie has failed in Japan and China. They just don't like Star Wars. Japan has Space Battleship Yamato and in China it just doesn't fit into their cultural mindset.

**Condottiere 40K** · January 08, 2019, 10:34 AM

It's recognizable.

**Cookiegod** · January 08, 2019, 02:34 PM

Originally Posted by Magister Militum Flavius Aetius

Solo wasn't killed by a fan boycott it was killed because:

1. Terrible timing. It was released on the worst weekend ever to release movies, in the shadow of two recent giant films (Infinity War and Deadpool 2).
2. Terrible press. The movie news was all about how it was plagued by reshoots and rewrites after Ron Howard took over.
3. Virtually no advertising campaign. Which relates to point 2.

And yet, it still broke 100 million for that weekend, which means it was extremely successful for those circumstances. Only IIRC 6 other films have broken 100 million for the weekend-before-memorial day release in the past 20 years.

As for TLJ in China, every Star Wars movie has failed in Japan and China. They just don't like Star Wars. Japan has Space Battleship Yamato and in China it just doesn't fit into their cultural mindset.

Your reasoning makes sense until you remember that Lucasfilm is a branch that is meant - and given the slapstick humour in TLJ obviously trying to compete with Marvel, and no one, including at Lucasfilm, is disputing that 100 millions weren't enough and that it flopped.

Star Wars used to have a huge loyal fanbase especially in the US. Normally, these fans would've gone under any circumstances, and they were obviously expected to. But obviously many of them did not.

Like I said earlier, the decision to have a target audience of basically everyone means this franchise now has a target audience of pretty much no one. That's when the factors you mention come into play. But only then. Casuals =/= Fans.

**PikeStance** · January 08, 2019, 11:15 PM

I personally think the Star War Stories should be movies based on stories outside the known arcs. Ideally, people we already know could make surprise cameos or introduced as a plot twist. I think this would be better received than storylines that "plug the gaps."

**Gaidin** · January 27, 2019, 08:36 PM

https://io9.gizmodo.com/adam-driver-...ues-1832101405

People, we must find the Taun Taun Report!

**HannibalExMachina** · January 28, 2019, 09:59 AM

and now for something completely different:

oc yall now theres a lot of matte painting in the originals, but i didnt how just how fricking much. my mind is now blown.

more:

https://twitter.com/MrEwanMorrison/s...23613107474433