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Lucasfilm "Licking Their Wounds" But Not Halting 'Star Wars' Development
Mild spoilers in TFA about certain characters that appear in the film.
Disney and Lucasfilm are reassessing their plans for future Star Wars movies in the wake of the disappointing performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is having to fight to make much more than $350 million worldwide, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter. "They haven't slowed down development," says a source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking, "but they are licking their wounds."
Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and her team are regrouping and figuring out the direction of the movies beyond the final installment of the main series of films, Star Wars: Episode IX, which is scheduled for release Dec. 20, 2019. "It doesn't mean those spinoffs don't happen," says another insider of Solo's underperformance globally. "It just means they're trying to figure out how to make, and market, them differently."
[...] "They were developing anything and everything," says another exec. "It was a case of them stuffing so much sausage and not try to break the casing."
Meanwhile, Han Solo's blaster was sold for over 0.1% of the film's gross.
Also at Collider, Space.com, and Forbes (archive).
Related: Star Wars Franchise Loses Fourth Director in Two Years
Meet the New Star Wars IX Director: J. J. Abrams
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday June 25 2018, @02:45PM (6 children)
To quote another epic sci-fi franchise that also jumped the shark: "He's dead, Jim."
Star Wars is dead. Kathleen Kennedy nuked it into oblivion with a hydrogen bomb. The even more depressing thing is, so many have become so indoctrinated by the "message" they're interlarding everything with now that they cannot even see it.
I went to a wedding for a friend of the wife, who is an artist who specializes in installations. She and her new husband, who is a year older than I am, wound up seated next to me at the reception. The best man's toast and many comments from his other childhood friends made much of his geekiness, referenced their past playing D&D, etc. So, making conversation, I asked him what he thought of The Last Jedi. I expected him to loathe it, too, because like me he had cut his teeth on Episode 4. Instead, he held forth on how important the female archetypes and the puncturing of the patriarchy were, how the story line was original, etc, etc.
Decorum forbade it, but every nerve was screaming to spit out the chicken, "Pfah!" and leave.
Honestly, nobody could say anything like that about TLJ who was not drinking the BS kool-aid deeply, and I mean, Thor trying to empty the drinking horn that held the world's oceans deep. The physics of the movie were so ridiculous. "Dropping" bombs in space? Where there's no gravity? A slow-mo chase in space where the rebels are slowly running out of fuel, but the fighter pilot and plucky woman mechanic have enough time to galavant off to another world light years away and return with a fix? It was so retarded that it was clearly meant to be an FU to every sci-fi fan out there.
The recycled plot elements that were lifted wholesale from the original trilogy. Imperial walkers advancing on a terrestrial rebel base? Hoth, anyone? Space ships flying through subterranean tubes filled with red crystals? The flight to the heart of the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi, anyone? The stupid casino with weird aliens? Mos Eisley, anyone?
Then there were all the social narratives of how all men are stupid and all women are wise.
Then there was the absolute trashing of Luke and Yoda, the two most iconic characters from the originals, and the entire Jedi mythos.
They just nuked Star Wars. They lined up every ICBM on Earth and plunked them down one after the other on the franchise.
It's so bad that I have levied a blanket ban on all things Disney in my household. No superheroes, no Disneyland, no cartoons, no Star Wars, nothing. I'm sure there are plenty of sheeple who will keep them in business, but my conscience will be clear.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday June 25 2018, @08:22PM
Wait: are you telling me they "dropped" ICBMs in space as well?
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday June 25 2018, @09:40PM
The household Disney ban is actually quite a good idea.
(Score: 1) by Sabriel on Tuesday June 26 2018, @07:23AM
This. This is TLJ's problem, and why Solo suffered. The fandom went to see Star Wars. They came for an escapist adventure in a galaxy far, far away, where your sex didn't matter so long as you were ready to fight evil with a lightsaber/blaster/bowcaster.
Instead we got "let's continue showing how the old heroes suck while we re-hash all the plot elements of the original trilogy without even trying to be subtle" and compounded it with "look at how strong A is when we staple the idiot ball to B" - and they couldn't even get that right. The original trilogy had Princess Leia and Mon Mothma; they had pluck and gravitas and they showed it. They dominated their scenes. Heck even Aunt Beru was no wuss. By comparison, while Paige and Rose Tico showed grit, Admiral Holdo was hyped up as this amazing leader but when actually on screen couldn't dominate her way out of a wet paper bag. The day - what was left of it - ended up being saved by deus ex machina.
So a large chunk of the fandom, already disappointed by TFA's clumsy rehash of the plot of ANH, saw TLJ and decided Disney's Star Wars was dead to them.
If Disney and Lucasfilm are blaming Solo - which speaking as an old fan of both SW and the EU lore written for WEG's SW RPG is actually a damn fine Star Wars movie - rather than TLJ, then they're even more brain-dead than Nute Gunray.
Actually:
(1) there's still gravity in space so long as you're near enough to a planet, and the battle did indeed take place near a planet
(2) the bombers had their own internal gravity, to which the bombs were subject until they left the bays (and an object in motion remains in motion unless blah blah)
(3) the bombs were on rails and were magnetically accelerated (this is the canon explanation the movie failed to adequately show).
Yeah, TLJ didn't just have issues, it had subscriptions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 26 2018, @10:47AM (2 children)
Starting from the first 30 minutes of EpIV:
An escape pod that crash-lands without destroying itself and its occupants.
Droids that are semi-controlled by a glue-on restraining bolt device.
Moisture "vaporators" in the desert?
A hovering speeder.
Lightsaber.
Vertical liftoff from a pit with a big-ass thruster on the back and nothing visible underneath.
We're going to make the jump to hyperspace.
Don't watch Disney's Treasure Planet cartoon, you'll have a seizure.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 26 2018, @02:07PM (1 child)
Retro-rockets? We are using those to land things on Mars now, you know.
It was more of a geo-fencing device, which we have now. Think ankle-bracelets that people under house arrest wear now. Is it too far-fetched to imagine a device that disables a machine with an electric shock?
You mean, something like this [climatetechwiki.org]? Or like this [wikipedia.org]?
Indeed. Pure science fiction [youtube.com].
OK, you got me there. But anybody who doesn't think lightsabers are fucking cool has no heart.
See: 'a hovering speeder'
I dunno. I remember Carl Sagan talking about concepts like this. If mathematicians and physicists talk about other dimensions, then maybe hyperspace isn't pure fantasy? Just spitballing here.
Yes, bluewater sailing ships in space, right? Except sailing in space is a thing [wikipedia.org] that has been successfully demonstrated.
Admit it, you just have a grandma fetish for old Leia.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 26 2018, @07:10PM
Apologist.
Absolutely no sign of a controlled retro-rocket landing in the film footage, the pod was laying on its side with sand drifting up on it like some movie prop that had been left in the desert for days or maybe weeks.
It appeared to be interfering with R2D2 when he was playing back the message, Luke bought the story, and R2 either was affected or played it up with the message stopping when the stick-on device was pried off.
Geo-fencing with a zap-o-field I would buy, but that shouldn't be interfering when inside the permitted zone.
With open decks?
That would be a zombie thing now, right? (Too soon?)
If I remember, I'll check out the speeder link later - the EM drive initially proposed to be capable of this kind of thing, but the most recent testing seems to be saying that the EM effect is just the power cables interacting with Earth's magnetic field. I gave everybody a pass on artificial gravity, but c'mon, even if that was a thing it's not like it would be installed on every craft in the galaxy.
As for Hyperspace: I want to believe, but I think Fermi would be a paradox if it were possible. I'm used to being and dealing with the 1/100 unusual/rare, I have encountered and interacted with 1/100,000,000 rare people, but for Earth to be the first to approach development of FTL would seem to put us about 50 orders of magnitude rarer than that - and I just don't think we're that special. Even without FTL we're still at pretty low odds for not encountering interstellar travelers, but with it.... pfffft.
🌻🌻 [google.com]