Solo: A Star Wars Story

Oh, you've seen Episode 9?
Shit, can I borrow your time machine to castrate Trump's father?

I didn't mention that I almost watched "Solo", solo.

I was the one and only person in that particular theatre until a family of five showed up just a couple of minutes before hit started.

It sure takes something away from a movie not to have a significant audience around you.

Eh, I prefer it that way, it makes it more intimate that way. It's like they are playing the movie just for you. Big event movies like Infinity War, yeah it's nice to have a full theater and gauge responses.

I find on "event" movies as in summer blockbusters that a great deal of the excitement is that from the crowd that feeds on itself. Sometimes in unexpected ways. I remember Amy and I watching Independence Day in a packed theatre and when they came to the point (before the aliens actually attacked) and a "news report" flashed on as part of the movie urging the residents of Los Angeles not to fire their guns at the spacecraft.

When that line played, most of the African Americans in the audience nearly fell out laughing

That's been the standard I've always heard. If a movie's budget is $100 million, they're going to spend an additional $100 million advertising it. Thus, to "break even" the movie has to make $200 million. I think Solo will break even, but no way it makes $750+ million.

It has to make 600 million to break even, and I'm skeptical of it getting to that.

A lot of people want to compare this to Justice League.

Solo isn't Justice League, Solo is Hulk.

They didn't cancel Marvel over Hulk being "meh".

Now, Episode 9 is Star Wars's Infinity War.
Episode 9 performs like Solo, then you've gotta worry.

I'm not going to bother to find the thread which goes into details about it, but suffice it to say that "accounting" and Hollywood are about as well acquainted with one another as I am with Marilyn Monroe. (Meaning, not at all.) For example, despite having made at the box office several times its production costs, Return of the Jedi failed to turn a profit. Nor is it alone in this. In short, what Hollywood considers to be a bomb is any movie which makes less than what it was projected to make. If the studio thought that a $10 million movie would make $2 billion at the box office, but instead made a "mere" $1.9 billion, they'd decry it as a "flop," even while they sought other ways to capitalize on the movie.

I stand corrected. I saw Deadpool 2 this past weekend. I'll be seeing Solo this weekend. So, only time will tell on my personal opinion.

Better hurry. It’ll be out of theaters soon.

Han getting his name from the Imperial recruitment officer, are we all agreed this is how Porkins got his name?

I saw it on a Wednesday night in a packed theater and everyone applauded at the end. Well, most everyone. I liked it as it was entertaining enough. I think people just have expectations set too high.
It was definitely better than Last Jedi.

It takes a lot to kill a franchise. Even the best efforts of Rick Berman couldn't do it.

Hmmm....



...what say you fellow Media-forgers?

Mangle won't make it to the end of Boba Fett. He's a competent director willing to take risks. Kennedy will drop his ass about 65% through production and bring someone else in. Thats how Kathleen Kennedy do.

Its damning that people from the entire spectrum are calling for the mouse to fire her. I don't agree with the personal views of the guy in Dicanu's video, but his points are salient. Kennedy is at the helm of the ship and its like she's trying to hit every iceberg.

He makes some good points, but #3 is totally unfair. Just look at the Star Trek fan base.

But I do agree with him that Solo was a bad idea to begin with, and shouldn't have been released so close to the last SW film.

Fan Fatigue!!!1!

My POV has always been that Han Solo was such a classic character played perfectly by Harrison Ford why bother telling an origin story. I don't think many people wanted this movie. Just leave it as is.

The Obi Wan movie would work because Ewan McGregor was one of the only good things about the prequels, and is the right age now to tell a pre-A New Hope story. The continuity and potential here is just impossible to ignore.

Well the fact remains that the studio DOES NOT get 100% (or even 50%) of the box office revenue a movie makes. It typically only gets about one third.

Not to mention that while most major motion picture releases make a substantial portion of their box office overseas, Studio execs still tend to get extremely nervous is the domestic U.S. box office appears to be disappointing.

This means that directors that can make a movie "cheaply" (relatively) that then produces really strong box office are highly prized because studio out of pocket costs are quickly recouped and the suits can start totaling up the profit pretty quickly. IIRC Nick Meyer has had that reputation.

To me what would make an Obi Wan Kenobi movie potentially good is that I consider him an extremely interesting character. Basically a very good and noble man with a rather narrow character flaw (over confidence) that makes him the author of not only his own destruction but the destruction of damn near everything!

I would go so far as to say that Ewan McGregor is Obi Wan, at least in my head. He owned it, it's his. Sir Alec was merely playing an older Ewan McGregor and he didn't know it.

The Obi Wan movie could be nothing but Ewan McGregor reading the phone book or ad-libbing what he thinks the character would be doing in the middle of the Tatooine wilderness, but so long as he's in the robes, I'd still watch it.

From what I've read Sir Alec Guiness spent most of Star Wars collecting a paycheck and looking sideways at George Lucas and mumbling "What the hell?"

There's the famous incident where some young kid told him he'd seen the original Star Wars 400 times, and it disturbed him, and he told the kid to promise him to never watch it again, and the kid ran way crying.

That little boy grew up to be Ted Cruz. And now you know the rest of the story.

Looks like another bad weekend for not only Solo, but theaters as a whole. https://www.thewrap.com/solo-continues-nosedive-box-office/amp/

Yes, but what does that have to do with the posts you quoted?

Nothing aside from having Sir Alec Guiness in it.

I think it really looks bad on Kennedy that she and her team didn't map out the movies. Lucas knew where he was going in the OT and the PT. He had things planned out. It doesn't mean there weren't changes just that he had the overall story arc plotted.

The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi have too many inconsistencies between the two. This started the problems with the fans.

Disney should have commanded her to get a team together and figure out where the story was going. She should also not have allowed what happened to Luke to happen. I think that Mark Hamil wasn't happy but he's just not in a position to say it. If Luke had to die it should have been in the third movie.

We also don't need origin stories. I say there are plenty of stories that can be told during the PT, OT, and new trilogy. Rogue One is actually a good example of a movie that could be done. Not everything has to be a trilogy.

It could be one shot movies much like one shot comics. The Empire is huge. Trillions of people. Tens of thousands, maybe millions, of planets. There is plenty of story in there. If you think about it the Empire is so large there is bound to have been people who didn't even know there was a rebellion going on. Empire polls show that only 15% of the people in the Empire can even name who the Emperor is. Sort of like modern day America.

So I went to realclearpolitics, as I do every day. Never mind, I saw a link to why the movie has failed at the box office (too early to think about why this would be on rcpolitics)

Link went to Breitbart, which I hadn't realized. I don't read Breitbart. Not because of bubbles but because the conclusion to everything is always the same. Like with why the SOLO movie failed:

It's because it's leftist.

Of course.

That's a fairy tale peddled by Lucasfilm.

"Splinter Of The Mind's Eye", very easily could have replaced "Empire Strikes Back".
"Return Of The Jedi", was the original third trilogy squished into one movie.
Luke's parentage, and the Skywalker siblings were pulled out of thin air, hence the infamous incest kisses.
"Attack Of The Clones", was supposed to be all love story, then it was pumped full of action in the third act, and right in the documentary, Lucas says "I lied".
Anakin's saber was supposed to have an elaborate origin in "Revenge Of The Sith", then Lucas just plain forgot, and put Kenobi picking the saber up at Mustafar as a quickie pickup shot.

The book "How Star Wars Conquered The Universe", goes into way more detail on this, but suffice to say, Lucas did indeed make it up as he went along.

Oh, he's said as much, and then backpedaled on it when shown the fine print in his contract.

I agree. That's my beef with a lot of the comic book movies. Characters like Batman and Superman have been part of the cultural milieu for so long that even people who've never read the books or seen the movies know the backstory, no need to waste screen time on it. And not knowing a character's backstory can often enhance the experience. Take Rick in Casablanca. We don't know how he came to be in Casablanca or Paris, other than the war, and that's really all we need to know.

One interpretation of Han and Greedo's conversation in Star Wars is that Han was so good at smuggling that 99% of the time, his trips would seem as routine as a UPS package delivery.

Yeah, imagine a film where someone's a bit of a petty thief in the Empire who decides that they're going to join the "big leagues" of the criminal underworld when they figure out how to get a large amount of some valuable stuff that can be sold on the black market. The film follows their efforts to steal the stuff, evade the Empire, and get it to a crime lord, so he can sell it on the black market. Only in the final moments of the film do you learn that it's spice, and just as this is revealed, we see a shot of the ship carrying it taking off. That ship, of course, is the Falcon. At which point, the credits roll.

I have a friend who is roughly 10 years younger than me and had no interest in Star Wars growing up, but went and saw Rogue One because their kid wanted to see it. She raved to me as to how much she absolutely loved Rogue One and thought that it was a fantastic film. Movies like that will appeal to both the dedicated fan base, as well as non-fans, and that's how you make the big bucks.