Elfdart wrote: ↑2019-12-29 09:57am
ray245 wrote: ↑2019-12-22 02:32pmThe box office isn't doing too well. It might actually make less than a billion worldwide at the box office.
OH NO!
Unless they spent $500 million to shoot and distribute the movie, this is beyond silly, like when the Red Letter Moron claimed TPM was a failure when it earned a billion at the box office.
While there is something faintly ridiculous about claiming a billion dollar movie which turned a profit is a failure, and in any case popularity is not an indication of quality (ie, appeal to popularity fallacy), it is significant for a couple of reasons:
First, while box office numbers are not a measure of quality, they are the measure a lot of Disney execs and shareholders are likely to care most about. There can be little doubt that the lower box office numbers of TLJ and especially
Solo were a factor in driving this about-face by Disney (albeit a poorly-considered one, given that
Solo, a film seemingly designed to pander to OT fans flopped hard, while TLJ's lower numbers were roughly in-line with the pattern of the prior two trilogies, in which the second film always grossed significantly less than the first). So if
Rise of Skywalker underperforms, that might make Disney reevaluate their approach (although given their track record so far, they'll probably just blame its failure on a continuing backlash to TLJ, and double-down on OT fanboy pandering).
Its particularly significant if
Rise of Skywalker performs below TLJ, as the pattern in the prior trilogies was "First film is a massive box office hit, second is much less profitable, the third does better than the second but not as well as the first". The panic over TLJ's numbers, and claims that they proved the film was a failure, were therefore highly questionable, because TLJ was simply fitting the same pattern as
Empire Strikes Back, and it was ludicrous of Disney to expect every film to have numbers on par with TFA's. But
Rise of Skywalker performing lower than TLJ (which it grossing under a billion worldwide definitely would be) would be bucking the pattern, and a possible sign of an overall decline/loss of audience enthusiasm, rather than just the usual fluctuations within a given trilogy.
The other reason is that TLJ's lower box office numbers were (falsely) used as "proof" of the film's failure, and I'm not above a little retaliatory gloating at ROS's expense.
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.