SoylentNews

Solo's Disappointing Box Office Performance Puts Future Star Wars Story Films in Doubt

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:27PM   
from the solo-failure dept.

takyon writes:

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

---

Original Submission

• Re:No Doubt (Score: 1) by Sabriel on Tuesday June 26 2018, @07:23AM

  by Sabriel (6522) on Tuesday June 26 2018, @07:23AM (#698632)

  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.

  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.

  "Dropping" bombs in space? Where there's no gravity?

  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).

  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.

  Yeah, TLJ didn't just have issues, it had subscriptions.

  Parent