Vladius said:
There aren’t that many people that like the sequels.
You seem confident about this, but this actually isn’t obvious to me. I know I hate the Sequels. But it’s really hard to quantify public sentiment about something like this. It’s easy to find thousands of people online who hate the Sequels. But perceptions about this topic are heavily influenced by selection bias, and online communities are pretty much designed around selection bias. Also, it’s much easier to inaccurately conclude a majority hates something than it is to inaccurately conclude a majority likes something, because people that hate something tend to be more vocal about it.
This is another reason why aggregate movie review scores (like Rottentomatoes) aren’t a reliable indicator of general public sentiment. I don’t believe negative reviews are bot-generated (at least not a significant percentage of them). But the The Last Jedi’s 44% audience score doesn’t mean 56% of humans are likely to dislike this movie. It means 56% of humans inclined to write movie reviews online and/or with strong pre-existing feelings about Star Wars, are likely to dislike this movie. And of course, these review scores cause a feedback loop because the scores themselves influence public opinion. (And the same goes for the professional critic scores obviously.)
Box office return is another signal, but again box office performance is not a reliable proxy for a random sample of public sentiment. There’s just way too many unpredictable variables that influence box office returns. Everyone always points out how the Sequel Trilogy generated diminishing returns with each subsequent movie. But the Original Trilogy experienced the same pattern with the worldwide box office (with ANH making the most and ROTJ making the least). The drop in worldwide box office from TLJ to TROS (19.4% decrease) is steeper than the drop from ESB to ROTJ (13.2% decrease), but not significantly. In general, every Star Wars trilogy follows a broadly similar pattern: the first movie makes a ton of money, then the following two make much less. The Prequels were a bit unique because the 3rd movie (ROTS) made more than the second (AOTC). We can come up with lots of seemingly obvious reasons to explain these patterns. (Obviously ROTS made more $$ cause Vader). But looking at the big picture, it certainly isn’t obvious to me that diminishing box office returns for the Sequels is a clear signal of widespread dislike of these movies.
That said, I’m not saying you’re wrong necessarily. I want you to be right, because I don’t like the Sequels either. I’m just not sure. My own intuition about this kind of thing is not reliable - I NEVER would have predicted the Prequels would ever be so adored as they seem to be today. But when people claim “most people don’t like the Sequels” I have to ask: how do you know? Unless you’ve polled a uniformly distributed random sample of people that saw all 3 movies, how can you be confident about this?
I mean, there are people that really like the Sequels. They do exist, somehow. I have no clue how numerous they are. I can even understand why people like TLJ. I get it. It’s different. It’s beautiful. It at least seems to be trying to convey something meaningful. I get why people like it. The problem is that it’s also a blasphemous abomination from hell designed to shred the semantic fabric of our collective folklore. Also it’s stupid because Porgs are dumb and I didn’t see any B-wings.