Any people with distaste for the current state of the SW "brand" or LFL in general feel any vindication by the floppage of TPM 3D? Between the flopping of TCW in 2008, and now this re-release, it's clear that Star Wars has lost a great deal of esteem amongst non-hardcore fans.
I'll paste parts of a post I made at TFN (that started me getting banned, again) to sum up my thoughts:
[TPM 3D] will make about 60% of its net overseas. Absolutely standard for action/adventure movies. Everybody appreciates that money is money no matter where it's earned. The reason for the focus on US BO is because it's easier to generate comps that way and, in many cases (such as most re-releases) you can't generate good overseas comps, or even get the figures until many months after their release.
So let's quit this charade of saying it was some sort of epic triumph overseas. It wasn't. It did the same business overseas as it did in the U.S.....crap business.
So we can look at its BO in several terms:
1) On its own terms: It was advertised in the Super Bowl and was heavily, heavily marketed (as most of us will attest, and as detailed in the Hollywood Reporter article linked to above). Movies advertised in the Super Bowl are supposed to make more than 40m.
VERDICT: Flop.
2) Relative to other re-releases: Here, we can look to (a) the recent Disney re-releases - even though they had probably less than half the ad budget of TPM, and were only released for a limited time, (b) the SE releases, and soon (c) Titanic. It did less business than any of these where it can be comped to them. The SE also blew this away. Any international comps are rendered irrelevant by the fact that international BO has grown tremendously since 1997. Only include true nearest neighbor comps, not cherry-picked random countries to bolster a pre-determined argument.
VERDICT: Flop.
3) Relative to SW: SW is obviously (or at least it WAS) a major franchise/brand. The movies are considered more than just hits, but also cultural hallmarks. They are NOT supposed to open at #4 (in fricking FEBRUARY) and then absolutely TANK each successive weekend, with worse legs than Joe Swanson.
VERDICT: Flop.
Starting with the embarrassing TCW in 2008 and continuing with this re-release, SW has clearly lost a great deal of esteem in the eyes of the common man. It has become cheap and the value of the words "Star Wars movie" don't have the same value (culturally or monetarily) as they used to. Yes, parents still reflexively scoop up armfuls of SW merchandise for their third-graders, but that's a fundamentally different value than being able to get tens of millions of people to pay money to sit in silence for 2+ hours and give you their time as they watch and listen to what you have to say. Lots of companies can get hording Americans to buy tons of junk, but not many people can get them to truly give their time and attention. Now, sadly, SW cannot get that from people.
LFL has largely just become another cheap plastic crap company, and the utter floppage of the TPM re-release demonstrates this starkly. (Maybe that's expected when the brand is entrusted to weirdos like Dave Filoni. But whatever.)