zombie84 said:

[....] no, the hype did not kill TPM, did not cause the criticism or the unfair expectations. Hype, in fact, was the one thing the film had going for it. Episode I minus the hype gets you a flop, with the same bad reviews but this time barely any money and barely any audience.

That is the crux of the issue, and sums up, I believe, the truth of the debate, "If people didn't like them, they wouldn't have been hits!" Now we see what the movies do sans hype, and it's like a control experiment: they do nothing.

I read in an article (I think linked to here, a few pages back), that at the time of TPM's re-release, AOTC was already half done, and so that adds still more certainty to its re-release. But I will be shocked if AOTC hits even 30m dom.

DominicCobb said:

[....]

Of course, what they should do, is re-edit the film to make it better.

Funnily, I think that if LFL would hire Adywan and have him work some magic on TPM and AOTC - he does better CG work and cooler improvements than all of ILM put together at this point - they could have probably amped up the business $10m or so, just because of the curiosity draw. Instead, they just used the butt-ugly, DNR'd to hell, Blu-Ray master, which had no significant changes (aside from the removal of the Don Rickles Yoda puppet, which I thought was a good change.)