I think expectation plays a lot into it. I think that after the controversy of TLJ and the failure of Solo, no one was expecting an Oscar quality film. I think the direction they took was not unlike TFA and the critics wanted something else. I think most people who didn’t like it were expecting something else (or expecting what we got but no liking that). I read a lot of the RT critic reviews and it seems unreasonable that the final installment of a trilogy, much less a 9 movie saga, is not going to have some story call back to the past. To some that is critically called fan service where I see a lot of that as just being inherent to a movie being part of a series. I don’t think Abrams played it as safe as he did with TFA. I think he took risks because this is the best work I have seen from him.

I find it odd with as good as I think the film is for the critics to blast it too harshly for being just what it is - the end of a trilogy and the end of a trilogy of trilogies. But I think that the critic response plus the lower audience reaction fits in with that. While the PT ended with a better movie, a lot of people find ROTJ to be the weakest film of the OT. I see several trends that indicate that this film was never going to make as much as TFA. That film was the start, something new. It had Star Wars starved fans and more casual viewers interested and entering it with an open mind. TLJ and Solo both disrupted part of that interest. So I don’t think the results are at all surprising. It was hard to know if it would do better or worse than TLJ, but my guess was (and where I got my number guesses from) it would do something close to TLJ and it seems to be on course to do that. Not as good, but still the numbers indicate a profitable film.