Only if you subscribe to the theory of franchise fatigue, which maybe Bob Iger does, but maybe not. Another way to view the Star Wars slowdown is simple stop loss. It’s hard to tell them apart.

Apologies for condescending



Just domestic box office as well? Obviously there are more international moviegoers now, so a raw comparison is unfair. + I wonder if there are more American moviegoers now too.

I buy into it some extent. People would easily buy back into the franchise if they made movies people cared about. Though yeah, you could also explain it through stop loss..

Haha it's all good, I am pretty involved w/storytelling stuff in my day job so I may have taken it worse than was intended :v

What I was going to say was that I think general audiences do like the characters quite a bit (messy arcs or no), but like I was saying to JonC I may be way off on that. Post-TRoS should be an interesting inflection point for Disney Star Wars

They're definitely likeable. I believe it takes a bit more than that to get viewers involved in their story

omg

Also I have to share the best meme to come out of this movie announcement

That's funny.

I always think it's important to remember that Solo's performance was spoiled because of how bad TLJ was. It would be interesting to see how those movies would have done had their releases been swapped.

Here’s my hot take

Solo didn’t do poorly because TLJ, it did poorly because they chose a boring subject and then led with it. Colonel Starwar Story is the worst marketing misstep of our generation.

Edit: I mean, we’ll never know, but I was pretty cool on solo until they announced who was playing lando, and that turned out to be not enough to get me into a movie theater. Or was that the weekend Deadpool 2 came out? I saw that.

on the subject of solo and marketing social justice, though. Does Disney get to have it both ways? They caricatured feminism AND the civil rights movement in Solo, quite prominently. If that’s the thing I hated most about Solo, does that mean Disney can still call me racist and sexist for hating TLJ?

Sure, but clearly they have no clue how to make Star Wars movies that will build a consistent audience, and if I were Disney’s CEO I’ve got to ask whether the property will even be worth anything by the time we figured out how to do that. I’d be ordering an Episode 9 packed to the gills with fan service, mostly out of contractual obligations (merch deals cut both ways). Then depending on how that went, spin it off or try to sell it back to Lucas. Whatever. Get it off the books. Bury it if I can’t.

It might have done poorly regardless but I think it's obvious that TLJ had a detrimental effect on Star Wars film appeal. I think I would have seen it at the cinema had I not ended up despising Ep VIII as much as I did. I thought TFA was mediocre but I still saw the next two theatrical films. TLJ was a fool me twice shame on me moment, TFA being the first. Still, what an absolute disaster. Far worse than the dumb stuff in the prequels. Even if they managed to pull it together for this last film it's permanently tarnished in a way that even the prequels couldn't have done. There are parts of the prequels I absolutely despise but I am not overly offended by the general story. Anyway, it's fun to go on about this stuff but we have beaten this horse for so many years now. I think we can all agree that we hope this next film is decent.

How about a Terminator-esqe situation where Lucas gets it back and ignores everything that was made after him? The funny thing is, I'm not sure James Cameron hasn't lost his mind so I won't know how valid an idea this is until after I see this next Terminator film.

Personally, I find that the problems with the prequels are almost entirely concentrated around the execution itself, while the ideas are (for the most part) excellent. Of course one could argue that there's too much distraction around politics and the such in a way that's very different from the originals, but I never found that to be a problem (probably due to the fact I grew up with the prequels). The sequels on the other hand go the other way around. I can actually enjoy these movies as I watched them because they're somewhat fun to watch, but the ideas here are what I think are offensively bad, so the execution is far better than the ideas this time around. IMO that's a lot worse as even if you don't like watching the prequels you can still like the story, so it doesn't actually "ruin the saga" so to speak, while for the sequels it is painfully obvious the trilogy has no direction whatsoever. I feel like if you made the nine movies into a single movie it would end up feeling a lot like Hancock.

I loved Solo and Rogue One, however.

Here's my hot take on this. My guess is someone at Lucasfilm decided at some point that Han Solo referring to his ship as a "she" was sexist, so they stipulated to the writers that part of his backstory would be the Falcon receiving a distinctly female AI so that Han Solo would no longer be sexist*. The writers, being fans of David Rubin, decided they would caricature the request.

I have zero ****ing evidence whatsoever for this but it sounds too good to be false.

Also who the **** cares what movie makers call us in this day and age.

* I can't think of any other reason such a dumb bit was added to the plot.

I guess Bob Iger isn't up for restructuring all of LucasFilm, sounds like too much of a task nobody wants to do.

I find it surprising Disney of all people would simply not be up to the challenge of making a decent ****ing movie, but who knows. This is an unusual century.

What are you talking about? Nobody hated TLJ, it was all Russian bots putting those reviews up. Or internet trolls. For some reason a whole bunch of people decided to make it known how much they didn't like that film, and clearly it had nothing to do with the film.

Question: if Darth Maul and Darth Sidious both survived being thrown into bottomless pits, does this mean we get Han Solo back??

HAND SOLO ISNT A SITh so NO

Eh, is anyone making good movies now?

I genuinely can't tell whether or not this is sarcasm. I mean, all things being equal, it has to be but this is Massassi.

Yes, but they’re all Disney subsidiaries

Ah ****! The Sith are made out of invincible!



100% sarcasm

Not just involved in the story.

Like, this is why merch imploded, right? Even if the new designs were cool enough to sell toys, the filmmakers clearly don't give a **** about any of them. Back in the old days, almost every ship got beauty shots. Star Destroyers got lingering establishing shots where they weren't doing anything, just flying around showing off the design. Hell, the entire franchise STARTED with a Star Destroyer beauty shot, considered one of the most iconic sequences in cinematic history. It was imposing. Enormous and threatening. And the characters interacted with the prop versions in ways that showed how important they are to them, like all of the work Han and Chewie do on the Falcon, or Luke affectionately running his hand down his X-Wing with a glint in his eye literally every single time he sees it. That stuff is missing in the new movies. The audience is never given a reason to care about any of the space ships in TLJ, so why would anybody buy the lego set?

This isn't just Star Wars. The Star Trek reboot had the same problem. Playmates took major losses on their Star Trek 2009 / Abramsverse toy series and quickly discontinued it. Other Star Trek licensees announced early on that they had no intention of producing toys for the new series because (and they were very frank about it) they knew they wouldn't sell. And for what possible reason would they sell? They wrecked the Enterprise in every movie and nobody on screen gave a ****. You think kids are really gonna get excited to roleplay as Captain Kirk, commander of history's biggest chunk of single use plastic waste? **** no.

TL;DR: luxuries are emotional purchases, so if you want people to buy your luxury goods, you need to make people feel emotions.

Edit: and no, contempt and boredom don't count.


Edit 2: and in case anybody is wondering why every time Star Wars / Star Trek movies come up I keep harping about the business side of things, it's because I find it way more entertaining and emotionally engaging than the actual movies. Kinda my point, too.

I still remember pouring over the TIE Fighter manual, as well as spending hours just perusing the Tech Room to look at ships and listen to cool music. I even wrote a letter to Lucasfilm with a crude drawing of my own idea for a ship design (which some secretary kindly thanked me for).

Probably nobody at Disney who liked Star Wars as a kid was allowed to actually make a film centered around the parts they remember being cool. It's almost like they are too cynical to succeed in making money, I guess?

I think that by throwing out the expanded universe of games / cards / comics / novels, they threw out an unprecedented amount of "emotional capital" that an entire generation of kids had been nurturing for decades. I mean, if they made a story around Thrawn and threw in some assault gunboats and made them pick up where RotJ left off, maybe involving the Hutts and Nar Shaddaa, I'd have been ecstatic.

Shadows of the Empire is probably a much better script than anything that Disney has done.

I mean, it would have been perfect: one additional trilogy (the prequels) to fulfill Lucas' original vision (which the OT -> EU had clearly diverged from, but which he probably kept going on autopilot just to milk his empire), and another trilogy to capitalize on the now adult EU fanbase... and their children!

Instead they tried to cater to a generation of people who didn't grow up with SW. But... that totally ignores the fact that most of us probably got into Star Wars because our parents had fond memories of what THEY considered to be Star Wars, and exposed it to us at an early age, in its original glory.

My son got some die cast Hot Wheels TIE fighters last christmas. Two from the new series, one classic. I did a blind test and asked him which one was his favorite. He picked the OT one.

Not a scientific study or anything. I'm not even sure what it means.

I think it means that TIE Fighter was "The chosen one."

Mmmm... they’re taking a break from making Star Wars movies, but they’re still going ahead with Star Wars new TV shows for their streaming service.

Does that say anything about where the industry is headed more generally? (Is it easier to monetize a property like Star Wars through a subscription service than through periodly releasing a new movie?) Or is it just that they already ordered the series before they decided to put SW on hiatus, and so they’re not going to cancel it now?

Live action Star Wars TV is a pretty safe bet. There was an earlier thread where I did some back of the napkin analysis showing Star Wars' problem is more about budget than revenue, but Google is a bad search engine so I can't find it.

Looks like a new Star Wars game is coming out. Respawn said they are using Unreal Engine 4 (no longer Source), but I wonder if EA would feel the need to cripple their own studios again and do the Frostbite switch-a-roo.

edit: looks like it suppose to come out this year. So maybe EA just has a hate-boner for Bioware.

Or maybe since then they realized it costs billions of dollars ongoing to develop a modern engine with tooling you can successfully use to make different kinds of games

For reference, UE4 is 5% gross revenue (open to negotiation/flat fee for large publishers). It is inconceivable that internal support and ongoing development for frostbite would be cheaper than paying even the maximum UE4 royalties. Not to mention the costs of dealing with bad tooling, training every new hire, and the opportunity cost of just putting it in stock.

That said, it makes sense for Dice. I’m not a UE expert, so I’m not sure how well UE deals with nonhuman scales. But EA generally doesn’t make games different enough.

It’s almost like engine selection is an engineering decision, and if you want to get a profit maximizing choice you should empower engineers to make that choice with financial data that’s usually hidden from them. But then people might start asking what managers are any good for.

This seems like a really hard lesson for them to learn.

Do consumers even react to what game engines games use, apart from concomitant technical issues of that engine? Would it play into your decision to buy a game? I remember id tried this with Rage and that version of id Tech, and now they don't that anymore (for general, non-technical players).

Well, Lenin had an answer there:



Not a good one. But one that's always kind of bubbling down there.

Id stopped because they got bought out by Zenimax. Previously they licensed their engines out. They don’t do that anymore. Zenimax is trying to make it their Frostbite.

People do care though. I’ve seen lots of weird opinions about UE3 being a hog, UE4 being too resource intensive (it CAN be, but doesn’t need to be, devs need to do their job), Creation Engine being buggy (it’s not really, the games BGS makes with it are buggy), Unity games being crap asset flips. I generally think it’s anti-marketing today. It’s probably in your interest as a game studio to avoid talking about engines at all. Curious people will figure it out but otherwise you’re inheriting a lot of baggage for no reason.

Edit: another example of a marketing misstep, Unity charging money to *remove* the logo. Meant only the worst of the worst games would advertise themselves as being built on unity. Dumb!