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Pollyanna posted:Making movies costs a lot of money. Isn't there a graph out there detailing how Disney is still in the hole on Star Wars? Supposedly they've been in the black since at least last year. Even if merch sales are down, they've still sold billions of it. Then there's all the home media stuff, and tv shows, and licensing, etc. Don't cry for Disney.
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Dec 26, 2019 04:06
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If the prequels didn't kill Star Wars, this isn't going to either. Yeah a lot of people feel like Star Wars isn't special anymore, but most of us are probably still going to watch the next movie anyway, just as tons of people with Marvel movie fatigue still watch Marvel movies. That said, I don't feel any particular emotional attachment to any of the new characters, and I doubt I'm alone in that, so losing the ability to throw OT characters into the trailers to make people wonder what they're up to presumably won't help (unless they get truly desperate and actually reboot the series). I just think there will always be tons and tons of people looking for any kind of 'this one's good, I swear' word of mouth to drag them back onboard, no matter how many bad movies come out before then.
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Dec 26, 2019 13:48
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Pyrus Malus posted:Star Wars was pulled from the mind of a man in the 70s, so inherently it's flawed as a merchandising tool. Ityool 2019 and beyond, in these days of marketing directors understanding perfectly how to squeeze out every last cent via recursive pavlovian conditioning inserted into every single form of media, a machine learning algorithm sometime in the future will create the perfect intellectual property that will doom humanity to a disney-dominated dystopian culture based entirely around maximizing profit for the mouse and his goons. I think you're way off here. Nothing sells merchandise like growing up giving a poo poo about something, because not only will adults spend shitloads of money on the stuff, but they'll do their best to introduce their kids to it. If people could capture lightning in a bottle like that at will, Marvel movies wouldn't be crushing everything else in Hollywood.
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Dec 26, 2019 14:21
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ONE YEAR LATER posted:I kinda wonder how many of those kids will grow up and completely reject whatever nerd stuff their parents try and force on them. I know a number of people who have based their entire identity around their love of nerd IPs and they've had kids and they just swaddle them in Star Wars blankets and video game things and it's makes me feel really uneasy. I am by no means saying that they're bad parents (I don't know and don't care) but when your kid is a 10 day old infant and their crib is covered in porgs and R2D2 plushies I wonder what that child is going to grow up and be like. I know I had Batman pajamas when I was a kid (though my parents weren't comic book nerds at all), and I still like Batman, so as long as Disney keeps putting out kid focused cartoons and poo poo to help the kids get and stay hooked, I think it'll work out. Obviously not everyone's going to turn into a life long fan, but if the parents are into it, that's just another point of entry. Yeah, teens find their parents super embarrassing, but that's still a lot of years for the kids to decide they like Star Wars after being exposed to a ton of it for years before then. Obviously it helps if they make some good movies that aren't 40 years old at some point though too.
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Dec 26, 2019 15:12
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dex_sda posted:It doesn't even look like ROS will do more than barely break even. It already made more than 500 million in less than a week, this sounds crazy.
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Dec 26, 2019 15:23
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Isn't Hollywood accounting the opposite of that, where they pretend the budgets are higher than they really are so they never have to say they made money?
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Dec 26, 2019 15:42
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sassassin posted:If a big company invests 4 billion in something and only roughly breaks even heads tend to roll. To spend that much cash and not see a significant return and/or growth is poor. Recouping your long term investment you can milk forever in six years is actually extremely good. If they're doing long term damage to the thing they own now, that's bad, but the initial investment was incredible. If Disney was in panic mode, Kathleen Kennedy would have been moved to other projects a while ago. I still think it would be smart to do that, but they just gave her a three year extension last year. The Mandalorian is basically the one big tentpole of new content propping up Disney+ too, so Star Wars continues to be a valuable part of their holdings. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 16:57
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At least the final fight scene being extremely anime is true to the original trilogy also ripping off Japanese cinema.
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Dec 26, 2019 18:54
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It's hard to blame JJ for blowing past Johnson leaving the rebellion with all but nothing, but choosing to ignore that because it stacked the deck too hard is kind of funny in light of him giving the emperor such a massive fleet that it trivialized everything the First Order had. They both wanted to make the rebels such extreme underdogs that it was laughable, they just couldn't agree on how to get there.
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Dec 26, 2019 19:51
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Intel&Sebastian posted:Making the series answerable in any way to adults who post about Star Wars online is the biggest mistake Star Wars ever made. I'm genuinely curious to know what kids think of these movies. Are they fun because of the pew pew and laser swords, or are they incomprehensible?
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Dec 26, 2019 20:51
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McCloud posted:TLJ deserves to be overtly dumped on, repeatedly Without getting into the merits of TLJ as a viewing experience, I don't get why anyone would think JJ being disrespectful to Johnson is unfair given that Johnson went out of his way to break JJ's toys. The ultimate responsibility is with the execs who let him do it, but coming into a collaborative effort and saying "nah that's all bullshit" seems pretty toxic to me. Maybe JJ coming back and trying to steer things back in the other direction only compounded the error, but he inherited a poo poo sandwich. I know some people say Johnson inherited a poo poo sandwich too, since he had to follow up a soft reboot and take it in a new direction, but I don't really think that's the same level of problem. To the extent that it is true though, again that's the fault of the execs who didn't sit everyone down to at least vaguely outline the whole thing from the start.
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Dec 26, 2019 22:40
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dex_sda posted:A bigger problem Johnson had was he allegedly had to start working before TFA was actually finished, with a script draft. That's dumb as hell. Everyone managing this thing was a loving idiot.
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Dec 26, 2019 22:43
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2house2fly posted:He didn't "break toys" he followed up on plot points. The way you people talk about the directors of these movies is deranged. I'm not saying he's a bad person or a bad director--I like a lot of his work, and look forward to seeing more. I just think his vision clearly didn't fit in with the trilogy it was part of, and whether it's because he wasn't provided enough context by others or because he didn't give a poo poo if he was playing well with others, he contributed to the disjointed mess we ended up with. I mean he even said he would have killed the Knights of Ren if he'd put them in the movie, which to me says he was aware that he was cutting threads rather than just following them. Literally everyone knew that Rey's origin and wtf Snoke's deal was were mysteries set up in the first movie to be expanded upon later, but he said they didn't loving matter and just dropped them. It's a valid perspective, but again, as part of a collaborative effort he was taking a poo poo on the intent of the creator before him. To be clear, I'm not saying nobody can go against George Lucas's wishes or anything like that because it's all part of one broader series he started. Creator intent isn't absolute, but this was structured as a trilogy from the get go, and the movies are too busy fighting each other to create a cohesive whole. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 23:07
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ONE YEAR LATER posted:Snokes guards in TLJ should have been the Knights of Ren because they were pointless in RoS. They're interesting in concept, force sensitive devotees of Kylo Ren, but in practice they were a big wet fart. In retrospect, yeah. Turns out JJ didn't have a clue what to do with them either, and I 100% agree that they would have been better used there than where they ended up. That's where the whole thing being the suits' fault comes in--nobody knew wtf the trilogy was supposed to be, very much including JJ when he created a lot of these threads.
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Dec 26, 2019 23:18
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Boxman posted:Now if you want to talk about weird rejection of Johnson's contributions - lol @ Kylo randomly having the helmet soldered back together but this time it has red lines so you can buy another toy. Tbf, I think that had some meaning because behind the mask he was Kylo Ren, but without it he was Ben. I get why Rian Johnson thought using a talented actor's face was better than just showing a mask for the whole movie though, so it's hard to fault him for discarding it, though doing so by having Snoke mock it and make Kylo embarrased to wear it does seem a bit insulting.
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Dec 26, 2019 23:23
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Eimi posted:Like TLJ has it's flaws, with the muddle message about sacrifice and what feels like last minute meddling to make sure poo poo ends up in a convenient Disney approved rebels v empire, jedi vs sith box, but it at least has vision. Also good directing and amazing scenes. It's funny to me that they went to all the trouble of bringing back the Empire and the Sith and then just threw it away again ASAP. If they felt like they needed the status quo so bad that they dragged it out of the 80's, why did they immediately put themselves back in the situation pre-TFA where they'll have to come up with a bunch of EU-level poo poo going forward? I guess one possibility is they genuinely don't plan to move the plot forward in a big way with sequels for quite some time, and want to tell side stories and/or stories set in different periods of the universe, so it's a problem the current suits felt comfortable kicking into the distant future. The other I guess is just that they were afraid to end the thing with anything less than total victory, since they didn't want to end things on a downer note like the prequels. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 23:31
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Btw I don't know if this has been covered, but I feel like the 'every Sith who ever lived is inside me' bullshit really undermines Palpatine telling the story of Plagueis as a tragedy if Plagueis is hanging out inside him the whole time as part of some hive mind or whatever. I guess Palpatine could just be insane in the new movie and granting himself an importance he doesn't really have by presenting a metaphor as literal truth. He clearly did intend to live on in Rey though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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Dec 26, 2019 23:45
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Unoriginal Name posted:Yeah the apprentice/master murder dynamic doesnt work very well with the concept of all the Sith ghosts working together through Sheev or whatever I think the irony of the apprentices thinking they're getting one over on their masters each time is kind of funny, and helps to explain why masters keep taking new apprentices if betrayal is inevitable, so I like it as a concept but think it makes for a better fan theory than something spelled out in a big anime fight at the end of the series. It jdoesn't make much sense for a former apprentice to tell the story of his dead master in quite the way we saw it if that's the case either, though since he was in the process of duping a new apprentice into the long con, I guess you can view it as another part of the lie.
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Dec 27, 2019 00:02
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Imagine rewatching this poo poo.
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Dec 27, 2019 03:40
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The prequels are still bad with wooden acting and lovely dialogue, but I don't think they're as soulless as the sequels, which are more competent aside from the total lack of overall plotting. Maybe it's just that I'm older now, or that I know the backstory about Lucas selling the series to a megacorp that openly talked about churning out movies until after we're all dead, idk, but even though I dislike both trilogies, I think the hate Lucas got for the prequels was overblown, while I think Disney deserves theirs.
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Dec 27, 2019 03:49
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Kin posted:I've been thinking about the thing that's been bugging me about episodes 7 to 9 vs 1 to 3 and its that the prequels, while not amazing, focused heavily around a lot of the main characters that were in the original trilogy. Sometimes I wonder if they should have just recast the original characters and told their continuing stories from an earlier point. If these movies had come out 15 years later, I think there's a decent chance they would have, but with the original actors still alive and able to work at the start of the trilogy, I guess they decided that would be too weird and offputting. I still kind of think they should have recast Leia for this most recent one, but again I understand why they didn't.
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Dec 27, 2019 03:53
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MonsterEnvy posted:Man I really don't get how people are saying TLJ poo poo on the TFA. Johnson pretty clearly set out to demystify JJ's mystery boxes instead of answering them, and then when JJ went back and said actually there's something here after all, people got mad at him for retconning Johnson. If people like TLJ's approach better (ie you don't think it matters where Snoke or Rey came from), that's totally fine, but both of those movies undermine the one before them.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:06
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MonsterEnvy posted:How Snoke other than being scary was never set up as being a mystery. And there was nothing that suggested Rey had some Legacy. Honestly her parents just being some trash made perfect sense. Stuff could have been posthumously answered about Snoke. Literally everyone who watched the movie was speculating about her legacy the second they left the theater, and almost as many were wondering wtf was the deal with the new dark side guy who only appeared via hologram. Killing off Snoke the way Johnson did is just bad storytelling imo, even aside from whether or not it was disrespectful. Pollyanna posted:TFA says literally nothing about Snoke or Rey, and they're blanks in a sentence. Like I said, I think it's totally fair to prefer Johnson's approach, but I don't think it's reasonable to pretend he didn't junk whatever he felt like junking from the previous movie, just like JJ felt free to retcon that to bring back the poo poo he wanted to bring back. Having a trilogy where the creators played tug of war with each other on the screen instead of behind the scenes is the dumbest poo poo ever, but it's what we got. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 04:14
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Pollyanna posted:Rian Johnson never said something didn't happen, he just elaborated on the details and explained what might be the case. I can't think of a single thing TLJ retconned. Right, he just told us none of the poo poo we thought mattered actually mattered. In a bubble maybe that's fine, but in a trilogy bookended by the guy whose poo poo he decided didn't matter, I think he bears some responsibility for not finding a way to be on the same page. The people above his head deserve the most blame of anyone, of course.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:22
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General Dog posted:I think TLJ has some very high highs, but come on, the Canto Bight sequence is like watching a prequels cover band. It's too bad, because the idea that there were bad guys outside of the Sith and the Empire was the most interesting idea in the trilogy. Even the OT had Jabba as a bad guy outside of the Imperial hierarchy, but Canto Blight was the only hint that a universe existed beyond Rebels vs Empire, and then it was awful.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:33
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SUNKOS posted:I've come to realize that the prequels actually had some good stuff in them now the sequel trilogy has concluded. People were talking about merch earlier and I realized that aside from Kylo and his new lightsaber, there wasn't anything really new or fun/interesting. The prequels had the pod racing which was enjoyable and cool, we got some really interesting villains like Maul and Grievous who had great designs and the lightsaber battles were great, they went really acrobatic and provided a spectacle. We even got to see Yoda have a great fight with Palpatine and the effects were bad like a lot of stuff in the prequels but it was still entertaining to watch. The Yoda fight with Dooku got a huge audience reaction when I saw it, and as corny as it may look in retrospect, that's a lot more than I can say about literally anything from the sequel trilogy. I don't recall anyone really making any kind of audible reaction at all for this movie.
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Dec 27, 2019 04:55
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Everyone posted:Perhaps, but at the same time, almost all answers to the burning "Who is Rey"/"Who is Snoke" are guaranteed to be loving lame. In TFA Snoke came off as a second-tier take on Palpatine. Even if he turns out to be Darth Plagueis/Darth Bane reborn, he's still basically having Palpatine's sloppy seconds in terms of being the Emperor. In TFA the First Order mostly comes off as a really well-funded terrorist group. That's a far cry from ruler of the galaxy. Again, I'm not saying JJ's approach is better than Johnson's. Maybe they were stupid mysteries from the start, or maybe if the trilogy had a coherent focus they might have turned out better--we'll never know for sure. My point remains that having each director decide the direction the trilogy would go in by himself was insane, and maybe each director bears some responsibility for trying to steer things wildly in the other direction instead of finding a way to accept what the other guy did. I genuinely believe that a trilogy fully created by either one of them would be better than the tug of war trilogy we got. Beyond just finding someone to oversee overall plotting in future movies, Disney really needs to get some people together to decide wtf they want Star Wars to be about.
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Dec 27, 2019 05:03
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Baronash posted:You’d have to change TFA and TLJ quite a bit if you wanted to seriously pursue the idea of stormtroopers being brainwashed slaves worth saving, what with the heroes spending the whole sequel trilogy gleefully murdering them. Including Finn pretty much immediately. He was such a massive waste of a character.
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Dec 27, 2019 05:17
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The Dave posted:Also wondering if people are honestly expecting Disney to come out with a press release and be like “we just want to formally apologize to a fraction of people on the internet for anecdotally Luke warm reactions to our latest blockbuster.” The big sign would be Kathleen Kennedy moving on from the franchise since they just extended her contract for three years last year, but it would still be pretty easy to save face with it by saying it was just the right time with the conclusion of the trilogy. She's an insanely successful producer, so it's not like she'd be fired altogether, just moved to other poo poo. The other thing that may be telling is seeing how hard they course correct when the start announcing new movies, but we'll probably have to wait a bit for that.
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Dec 27, 2019 14:57
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euphronius posted:It was the effect Lucas was intending as a genre hallmark. He’s said this. Many people have said it. It’s clear 100x. It’s obvious he can get “non flat” performance from actors when he wants to. He intended her to be flat. People growing up with Tarantino don’t expect it or think it’s “right” to have non “naturalistic” readings but cinematic history is vast and “naturalistic” acting is one branch. It’s not right or wrong "Actually I meant for the acting in my movie to be lovely, which means I did a great job."
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Dec 28, 2019 02:23
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Schwarzwald posted:I got bad news about the OT series. I'm way more open to the idea that the OT was never as good as we think it was than I am to the idea that the prequels are secretly great.
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Dec 28, 2019 03:00
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Bongo Bill posted:Everything people dislike about the prequels is present in the originals. It's one thing to have an opinion about which ones do certain things better or worse, but the degree of hate the prequels get is way out of proportion to what's actually different about them. Something about this fandom just makes people unhinged about it. I believe it was on these very boards that I really into someone saying they're not movies. SuperMechagodzilla posted:I’m beginning to think that Star Wars fans don’t actually like Star Wars. I'm not a kid anymore, and can admit that having nostalgia or an attachment to something doesn't mean it was flawless. To the extent that some of the flaws of the prequel trilogy are present in the OT, I don't think it automatically absolves the prequels, particularly since they don't share some of the more positive attributes of the OT. That said, to the extent that some people enjoyed (or even continue to enjoy) the prequels, great! The 'George Lucas destroyed my childhood' people are insane.
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Dec 28, 2019 03:26
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Boxman posted:Anyway, I'm surprised to see AotC get so much love. Rewatching 2 and 3, I was struck by how the climax of 3 pretty much hit the mark and 2 just...sorta flopped around with potentially big impact moments. Like, Obi-Wan finding the army is presented in this very matter-of-fact way that belies the fact that there is some profoundly bad poo poo going on. He finds out someone is using a dead Jedi name to amass an unauthorized army and the reaction of 3 Jedi masters is "hm, that's not good, we'll keep an eye on that." Even when the clone army joins the fight, it's all played for spectacle until Yoda takes a moment to say "war were declared." AotC got one of the biggest pops I've experienced in theaters when Yoda pulled out his lightsaber, so I think one big difference in how people view that movie is if they saw it in the theater and value that experience or if they decided Yoda flipping around is actually stupid. Personally, I really enjoyed that part on my first viewing, and didn't really feel all that negatively about the movie as a whole (though as far as I can recall the romance always felt super awkward), but I rewatched it at home when it came out on DVD and thought the whole thing was tedious as hell.
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Dec 28, 2019 04:22
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I feel like it would be smart for them to use the Star Wars comics Marvel puts out as a content farm like they use comics for the Marvel movies. If a particular story or concept resonates with people in comic book form, throw it on the screen. You lose the big shocking twist element to some extent, but people already having read multiple Infinity Gauntlet stories clearly didn't stop people from watching the Avengers movies. It doesn't help that the main Star Wars title has been focused on the time between OT movies, since Disney probably isn't ready to recast those versions of the characters yet (though I think it will happen eventually), but they could always do a Vader movie, and having people's reactions to the story in the comic version helps to avoid the 'they loving ruined Vader' risk if they already know people thought it was good.
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Dec 28, 2019 16:43
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tadashi posted:My response to every critic has just been surprise that they were expecting a sequel trilogy to the first two Godfathers or some poo poo. I don't think people who really hate these movies like Star Wars at all. Which I understand a lot more than hating the most Star Wars movie I can imagine. I think part of the issue is that while nostalgia can put the hooks in and make people feel a connection to a franchise for life, it also creates unrealistic expectations, because nothing (at least nothing you'll get from a popcorn movie) will ever be as good as your perception of something you loved as a child. I think another thing is that even if people disliked the prequels, they cemented the idea in people's heads that the Skywalkers, and Anakin in particular, were extremely important, so for their/his biggest accomplishment to be retconned away so a new character unrelated to him could do a better job of it while his descendants all died as supporting characters was bound to make people unhappy. The existence of retconned EU stories that made Luke a galaxy striding hero for decades probably also contributed to superfan bitterness when that was far from what they got. I really think a lot of the fan anger that people thought was because Rey was a woman was really because she wasn't Luke's daughter (which isn't to say the first doesn't exist too). Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Dec 29, 2019 |
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Dec 29, 2019 03:27
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Jerkface posted:it was always strange that JJ basically only had Leia react to hans death and nothing else really force related in tfa given the time gap from when we learn Leia has the force. She never really did much with the Force in the EU either, so it seems like that's a cue he took from what came before, even if it wasn't canon anymore. I think his Luke pretty clearly would have been closer to the EU version than the one we got was too.
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Dec 29, 2019 04:41
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Nobody being willing to resist after they destroyed the Starkiller Base was the dumbest part of TLJ anyway. Even the Empire wasn't able to scare everyone into submission, or they wouldn't have needed the Death Stars, but within days the First Order seemed to have put down all dissent. I don't think we saw anything in between then and TROS to justify an abrupt change to what we got at the end of that movie, but the initial reluctance to fight was never explained in the first place.
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Dec 29, 2019 04:54
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2house2fly posted:If you jump out of a moving car the air resistance pushes you back and gravity pulls you down, the same things arent going to be factors in space There wouldn't be anything to stop the momentum from the explosive decompression either, so she would have been continually moving away from the ship either way.
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Dec 29, 2019 15:46
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Just Chamber posted:Yea the sequels continuing the trend of the prequels by upping the power level of the force is a big mistake imo. For films that were supposed to be leaning more towards the OT it was weird they decided to treat the force users like they were marvel super heroes. I agree, but it's a total lost cause. If Nu Trek couldn't be made without turning it into a generic action movie, there was no way Star Wars was going to avoid the bigger and louder treatment.
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Dec 30, 2019 02:57
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feedmyleg posted:From a narrative standpoint it'll be incredibly easy to just ignore the entire sequel trilogy. The status quo post-ROTJ is restored without any meaningful changes, and I doubt anyone involved in the ST is really champing at the bit to get back in front of the screen. They were able to get Harrison Ford back twice, so I'm not buying anybody promising they won't be back if Disney decides they really want them. It's arguably even a good negotiating tactic to let everyone know how much you don't want to come back (though obviously if you really do want to come back and/or work with Disney again on other projects it's also dangerous to take it too far). Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 21:44
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