Broom Kid

Not sure how to make you understand, I guess. None of those other things are happening in a vaccuum with regards to the story. Starting with Carrie’s footage needing to be repurposed, and further deciding to make her self-sacrifice the reason he turns as the justification for keeping Carrie’s footage is just that: The start. That’s the foundation the rest of the story (and most of the decisions afterward) follow from. Those are the first two cards pinned to the board, and they never came off.

“They’d just have found a different way to redeem him” is part of my point - they should have, especially if choosing a different way would have meant doing the right thing and not repurposing deleted scenes “to honor” Carrie, especially since the result achieved nothing close to legitimately honoring her. I’m not arguing they shouldn’t have redeemed him. But by tying his redemption to reusing Carrie’s deleted scenes, they removed a ton of options, many of which would have likely been better than what they wound up with as a result.

I also don’t understand why you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to “not doing a CG Leia” when they actually did it, and word is the sequence was even longer initially. I guess if you want to simplify my biggest disappointment, it’s that I’m disappointed they even tried to sidestep her actual death by making her final performance in Star Wars a bunch of strung-together deleted scenes that never worked in the finished film. The movie (and the filmmakers themselves) would have been better served by not looking backwards so hard and by looking forward instead.

Leia being around was a key part of Kylo’s redemption, and they specifically tied her dying to his redemption. It seems pretty apparent to me they only wrote Kylo’s arc (which essentially superseded Rey’s arc in terms of importance) the way they did because they worked backwards from what would redeem him, and they decided his mother’s choice to kill herself by reaching out to him during that fight would be the catalyst.

So they kept her active in the plot by recycling footage and writing dialog to mad-lib their way to the end of the 2nd act, specifically because they needed that presence to register just enough for Kylo’s redemption to pay off as intended.

If anything, Terrio’s answer when he was trying to explain why Rose Tico got so minimized seemed to hint that their initial “We’re not going to CG her” was an out and out lie, (it kind of was already, considering that training scene) and I wouldn’t be surprised if Han’s appearance was similar to how Superman’s mother is who showed up in Superman II once Marlon Brando was cut out. “Well, we can’t CG Carrie for this scene, let’s see if Harrison will do it instead.”

So even setting aside the fact her scenes aren’t particularly good (and it’s fairly obvious she’s not really acting with anyone in the scene, and nobody in the scene is really acting with her) the initial decision to make her self-sacrifice key to Kylo’s redemption, to justify repurposing a bunch of deleted scenes, is what hemmed them in.

It’s why the movie is so plot-focused at the expense of any real feeling or thematic coherence. They approached it like a puzzle first and foremost instead of really exploring what they had to work with at the end of The Last Jedi and building from there. If your primary story question (and they kept saying keeping Carrie is where they actually started) isn’t “Where do I want my characters to go from here” but “How do I repurpose deleted scenes so they’re so vital to our endgame that you can’t remove them,” you’re starting from a pretty mercenary spot, even if you’re doing so with the best, most honorable intentions.

I’d imagine probably around late January/early February? Just a guess, though.

I don’t think JJ’s statement was anything other than JJ trying to be interesting but unsubstantial during a press tour. Which JJ is very good at being.

He’s not a Lucasfilm spokesman or anything. He’s not even an employee, really. Keep in mind that he had a chance to sign his production company up under Disney while he was making Rise of Skywalker and chose instead to sign with WB. Looking at that one interview as confirmation of what’s coming on this set seems, to be all Treebeard about it, a little hasty.

It’s really, really LIKELY that the original versions won’t be on the set. But it’s just as possible Abrams doesn’t know what’s on this set (or at the time of the interview, that there even WAS a set coming) one way or the other. So we’re basically back to just waiting to see what these 27 (or 18) discs contain.

ray_afraid said:

^ Didn’t JJ just confirm that there’s no OUT coming out?

JJ’s not really in a position to confirm what the home video department is or isn’t doing. He said he asked about it once (he never said when, could have been when he first got hired back in 2013/2014, and he doesn’t seem to have ever asked again) and he didn’t understand why the answer was “no.”

That doesn’t confirm anything other than he doesn’t get why Disney hasn’t released the OT, which is essentially no different than anyone else who wants these versions made available. Just because he worked there doesn’t mean he speaks for what’s happening currently.

Again: It’s pretty likely the original versions aren’t going to be on this set, but Abrams didn’t confirm anything other than that he asked about it at some point between 2013 and now and didn’t understand why the answer was no.

I think a lot of the film’s primary problems are due to making space for her deleted scenes as opposed to using that time to create new scenes. And Terrio’s “excuse” being valid or not, it still points to the idea that there are things this film couldn’t do because they were pre-occupied with keeping those deleted scenes. They boxed themselves in unnecessarily, and that box was extra small because they only had a few minutes of deleted scenes from which to build an entire plot around. Leia not being alive for this movie was never an option for Abrams and Terrio, and that rigidity was damaging to the film overall.

It was their first really big choice when it came to the storytelling, and they chose not to accept the truth of what had happened in 2016 and instead decided to look backwards as hard as they could and build everything else from that decision. It made for a dramatically unsatisfying character, and movie.

Fang Zei said:

What I find kind of funny is that this Skywalker Saga set is going to contain an additional disc per movie and yet that additional disc will not contain the unaltered versions.

We don’t actually know what the breakdown on the extra discs are, or what’s going to be on them. Granted, you’re PROBABLY correct, but we don’t know what those extra discs even are yet. It’s all hypothetical at this point.

there’s some good stuff in there, though!

My most disappointing aspect of the Sequel Trilogy:

The decision to start the construction of the final chapter’s story around mad-libbing deleted scenes of Carrie Fisher into the film proper. That single decision was one of the biggest handcuffs on the story’s total potential, led to the almost complete erasure of Rose Tico from the story, and worst of all - never worked as intended. It was intended to be an honoring of Fisher’s work, and an homage to her and her character, and it came off as one of the biggest acts of storytelling childishness in The Rise of Skywalker: an almost petulant refusal to accept things had changed, and to move on in a healthy, meaningful way. A better tribute would have likely involved finding a way for the characters to acknowledge and figure out their own ways to fill that Leia-sized hole in their hearts, preferably in a way that actually pays tribute to the character in spirit and in meaning, as opposed to literally turning the character’s dead body into a prop for about a half hour of screentime.

My most satisfying aspect of the Sequel Trilogy:

Honestly, it really has to be Rey plucking the saber out of the snow. I rarely get full-on goosebump moments during movies. I acknowledge how special they are, but I usually don’t physically react unless the movie has really nailed a moment, above and beyond. Not only did that saber flying into Rey’s hand as “Burning Homestead” played induce chills and goosebumps on first view, it happened on the second and third view, too. It’s just such a perfect reveal, and the potential of the sequel trilogy is made blindingly apparent when she switches it on. Even knowing how her story ends, that moment is still satisfying.

People are guessing (details haven’t been released as to what the contents are)

9 4k UHD discs (one per film)
9 Blu-ray discs (one per film)
9 bonus discs (one per film)

And that seems to be the best bet considering the blu-ray only set is exactly 9 discs less than the 4k set.

It could be possible that the 9 bonus discs are not a per-film thing (this is where whatever original versions hope one might have still lives) at which point you could have the bonuses broken out in a bunch of different ways, with three discs (or even more, considering the theatrical cuts of the Prequels aren’t available anymore either) dedicated to presenting the originals at 1080p, and all the rest of the bonus features occupying whatever discs are left.

I guess the sense of contention I’m feeling is basically that I said “I would probably buy these if it had X thing that I want and I think has a lot of value” and the direct responses TO that contain a lot of things that essentially suggest “the thing you want is basically worthless, let me count the ways.”

Like this whole scenario:

And if this set is the only way to get them, then that’s 27 really expensive coasters heading my way, 24 of which I suppose I can immediately throw away, and three of which I can handle like my existing official Blu-rays: glue them all together, put a string through the middle, and suspend them inside one of the cavities in the walls of my house, so nobody accidentally watches them or stumbles across them and thinks that I like those films enough to buy them, but good enough to fish out if someone ever questions my legitimate ownership requirement for the fan reconstruction.

I guess it’s just coming across as sort of a passive-aggressive means to minimize the possibility I might get something out of this official release, which seems like a weird response to my direct statements (and direct conversations) explaining why I want a thing, and would get said thing if it was provided. You say it isn’t an implication that I’m making some sort of mistake in finding something potentially worthwhile in this set (should it even be there), but it feels that way to me, and apologies on my part if that’s a misunderstanding, but I’m not really convinced it actually is, considering your direct response denying any implication really exists is essentially “oh, well, that’s all well and good but the thing you want is so worthless to me I wouldn’t just destroy it, I’d turn it into something so unusable I’d put it INSIDE the walls of my home so I wouldn’t have to pretend I even own it unless the Fan Edit police come and investigate me.”

It’s hard to believe there’s no implication there of subtly suggesting or demonstrating that accepting any conditions by which this set might have value is being frowned upon.

I’ll stop bringing it up. Apologies to all, again.

I liked both Jedi Starfighter designs. The “sorta-kinda mini-Stardestroyer” ones AND the “Sorta-kinda TIE-fighter/Stardestroyer hybrid” ones.

Sebulba’s pod is a pretty fun design as well. That and Mars Guo’s pod are probably the best looking machines in The Phantom Menace, I’d say. I really like how they look. Mars Guo was my main character in Episode I Racer mostly because I liked the way his pod looked.

I doubt even PT fans could name any of Padme’s ships.

There’s the one that looks like a silver bar of soap

And the other one that looks like a silver bar of soap.

I think the Clone/Republic Gunship is a great design. For my part, if I think “prequel ship” I think that one. What it has going for it is essentially the same thing the Falcon had going for it - there was a core recognizability in its shape that allowed you to essentially “play” with it whether or not you had a toy.

If you ever had a paper binder around the house or on a nearby desk, you had a gunship.

I also agree that the prequel saber designs were mostly great.

The PT is even more “reverse engineered” than the ST is. The amount of “reverse engineering” is the whole reason people honestly believe “The Ring Theory” has merit.

The PT films are ALL bad stories, but they’re bad not because they’re reverse engineered, but because the ideas behind each entry aren’t elaborated upon, or executed competently. They’re THERE. But their mere presence isn’t enough to justify the larger story they’re trying to prop up.

The ST has one decent-ish story (TFA) that led into one great story (TLJ) that ended with a giant mess (TROS). Execution means more than intent at all times. If you execute well the intent doesn’t even really get questioned. If you don’t execute well… well, you wind up here, haha.

A movie making a billion is still a very big deal, no doubt, and Rise of Skywalker is likely going to start making a profit (I should put quotes around it considering how Hollywood accounting tends to work) very soon, but it’s all about those certain points of view.

Making Rogue One money domestically (between 510-540) and settling around the 1bil mark (970-1.05) worldwide is a huge haul for 2019’s box office. That domestic would put Rise of Skywalker at #3 for the year, behind Avengers: Endgame (The #1 film of all time) and The Lion King remake. That’s a success by most metrics.

It’s only when you acknowledge that the final episode of the sequel trilogy will fall about $100 mil short of its predecessor (never before happened in Star Wars history), and might end up making just barely more worldwide than the first episode did DOMESTICALLY (and that worldwide number might only be good for #9 on the 2019 ww list, under JOKER) that you start to get a sense of how much goodwill got eroded by this movie. No matter what happens from this point forward, this film is going to be the worst reviewed film in the ST, and the lowest-earning as well.

Slavicuss said:

Steal what? You mean like all the people that have downloaded the fan restorations/preservations? perhaps yourself included?

I’ve spent enough money on STAR WARS over the decades, I’m not wasting more money on constantly revised rubbish that barely resembles the classic original films.

I promised myself I would only be interested in this if the originals are included.
I would like to own the official product and not a fan edit. I don’t have a problem paying for it.

What you just described isn’t the same as what you’d initially said. You don’t already own a version of blu-ray extras that haven’t ever been made, so you “waiting til they’re online” isn’t the same thing. That’s just pirating. The amount of money you’ve spent and the personal promises you’ve made (and the entitlement you think it provides you) is your business, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the point I’m making, which you just unintentionally highlighted with the bolded:

I would like to own the official product. An official version (possibly taken from new elements, even) of the full scores to ALL the Star Wars movies in that set, synced to picture. That doesn’t exist yet. It’s never existed, in fact. if this set has it, I’m going to buy it. I don’t know why this has become such a point of contention. There’s a lot of unreleased music I’d love to listen to and this hypothetical extra would give it to me.

If we’re going to start arguing that “well what you’d like to see in an official release already exists in a fan-edit so why bother” that kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

(Besides - for most of these movies what I’d like to see - or hear, rather - doesn’t exist in a fan-edit).

I believe it’s also an option on 4K83 - and there’s a version where the music from Ben Kenobi’s sit-down with Luke is restored to picture as well.

I do believe there’s more than that, but even if there isn’t, there’s still a ton from The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Awakens, and The Rise of Skywalker that hasn’t been released yet.

Besides which, being able to watch the movies with that music synced to picture hasn’t been an officially released option ever.

Again - if you choose to describe HOURS of new music never before released as “meaningless” because three of the 9 films will have that music synced to the 4K cuts, that’s your choice, but I don’t understand describing John Williams’ Star Wars music as “meaningless” in any context, really. It obviously has some value otherwise you wouldn’t be implying that you’ll just steal it once it’s pirated online anyway.

My hypothetically choosing to buy a hypothetical set with Isolated Scores of John Williams’ compositions isn’t encouraging Disney to bury the originals. And as has been stated before - the idea they’re going to be encouraged or discouraged by anything we do at this point is pretty silly.

As an aside: I’m getting the sense people here might honestly believe all the music in the OT was presented exactly as Williams composed it and it wasn’t changed until 1997? That’s very much not true. And further - a LOT of the music we have gotten from the OT we only got thanks to the SE being released in theaters. Before that, some of it saw official release in 1993, but up until that release, all we had were the original album releases.

There is still a LOT of Star Wars music we haven’t heard outside of their placement in the films, and if there’s an extra that allows us to hear it, that’s a worthwhile extra, to me.

Update: That 75-77 estimate might be way low. Looks like Saturday is looking to drop to the 21-22 range. If Sunday follows the standard 10% drop from Saturdays, That’d put it around 68mil for the weekend. Saturday dropping from Friday is the first real piece of un-spinnably BAD news this movie’s had. Movies (especially super-popular ones) aren’t supposed to decline day-to-day over the weekend.

It’s very likely Rise of Skywalker will permanently fall behind The Last Jedi’s pace either Wednesday or Thursday, and if the drops maintain this pace, not only will $1bil worldwide be in jeopardy, but breaking $500mil will also. In good news - it’s looking like of all the contestants, Rocknroll41 has the best shot at hitting the trifecta.

If I can get literal hours of unreleased John Williams music via isolated scores on this set, I’ll absolutely pay for that. That’s a pretty valuable “extra” should it be included, and it’s probably the last “big” extra that’s never appeared in any set. Even Lucas admitted that a huge reason any of this ever worked was due to that music, and I think a set for “The Skywalker Saga” could stand to dedicate something more than just a puff-piece 10min EPK to celebrating Williams’ contributions. Isolated scores containing hours of music we’ve never had a chance to hear or own before is a great way to do that.

DrDre said:

Both JJ and RJ reverse engineered the OT to figure out where to go with their part(s) of the story either in an attempt to replicate the Star Wars formula, or to deliberately starkly deviate from it at key moments, but neither feels like a good, and natural way of developing a story to me. It feels very artificial, like the writer is constantly aware someone (the audience) is watching over their shoulders, and so the entire trilogy is shaped by what the writers’ believe are the audience’s expectations, and they either chose to cater to, or subvert those expectations.

There are only 2 films I can think of in the entire saga that didn’t do the above (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back).

Writers are always aware the audience is watching/reading. Knowing that isn’t a bad thing. Catering to it CAN be a bad thing, depending on how indulgent the writers get. Pandering is absolutely a bad thing. But many good, natural ways of developing stories involve keeping the audience in mind. “Write for yourself first” is great advice for any storyteller, but that “First” implies that there ARE other concerns to keep in mind as well.

But creation (especially on a scale this big) isn’t all inspiration and desire. Sometimes you have to plink and plunk at it, and that can feel (or appear to be from the backseat) artificial in the moment. That’s where the craft comes in. Passion can’t get a project across the line alone. Often you have to “artificially” introduce things that didn’t just appear in a flash, hand-delivered from the muse.

But that’s also a huge part of why I feel like judging finished work mostly on suppositions of behind-the-scenes machinations and making-of anecdotes isn’t very useful. Most of the audience will never know HOW a thing got made, or what went into its making, or even think to wonder about that aspect, and it honestly shouldn’t really matter. What matters is if it works or if it doesn’t - and if it doesn’t, WHY it doesn’t should be pretty clearly explained without having to go “I bet the guy who wrote it just didn’t feel it like this other guy did.”

Granted, The Rise of Skywalker was very obviously fumbled in its execution and I imagine there are plenty of behind-the-scenes stories we’ll hear eventually as to why it’s such a mess. But acting like the very business of creating fiction is somehow “artificial” because they had knowledge of “the formula” and chose to tinker with the recipe for their own purposes seems like a weird read considering how often that exact bit of business is NECESSARY as a creator to come up with solid work.

Just because we notice the artifice involved in creating and maintaining good fiction doesn’t mean that by the mere fact of our noticing it that it’s now BAD. That’s unfair not only to the writer, but to us as well, because it assumes that we shouldn’t be smart enough to spot seams if we’re looking for them. Of course we are. Most audience members are, honestly. The magic of a good story is that it distracts us from looking, or it engenders enough goodwill that even if we do spot the seams - we don’t care. In some cases, even the seams look good to us.

Basically, what I’m saying is: The Rise of Skywalker doesn’t work because the elements IN the story aren’t well-thought-out, and aren’t executed very well on top of that. If I’m not willing to indulge an imaginative exercise as to how a fabulous movie I watched this weekend was written and executed - like, for example, I didn’t finish watching Little Women the other day and conjure up a possible story as to how Greta Gerwig adapted the book to explain why it worked the way it did - I don’t know that it makes sense for me to do that when JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio drop the ball.

I do think it’s safe to assume they didn’t MEAN to drop the ball.

theMaestro said:

Weren’t the finalized scores for some of the prequels hastily chopped up in editing? If I recall, John Williams wrote a letter to Lucas expressing his displeasure at how his music had been chopped up in episode 1. The scores for the original trilogy probably don’t have this problem because the final cut was locked down before Williams started scoring, though some weird edits may still have been introduced from all the special edition tinkering. So given that this is an issue, I can’t imagine that they’d just use the current “film version” of those scores as the isolated score tracks. And going in to smooth out some of the choppiness seems like work…and we all know they won’t bother doing extra work for something like this.

So given the two possibilities that they’d either include the final film versions of the scores for all the movies or not include any at all, I predict it’ll be the latter. Letting us hear the isolated scores will just expose how they were edited from their original compositions. I personally wouldn’t mind it, but I can’t see them releasing something like that.

There was some chopping going on in basically every movie but the very first. Return of the Jedi is probably the most cut-up of the scores in the OT (although Empire had its own fair amount of flat-out deleted cues and tracked music), and a huge part of Attack of the Clones’ climax didn’t even have music written for it because I believe Lucas told Williams his intent was to track in Phantom Menace music for most of the Geonosis battle (and some of that tracking doesn’t sound great).

I don’t know that the “Williams sent Lucas a letter” story has any truth to it - it’s one of those “facts” that fans regularly trot out that never has a lot of linking back or validation to follow it up. I find it unlikely mostly because I can’t imagine Williams would have to write him a letter to voice his displeasure, or that if he was THAT displeased that he’d come back for future scores. Williams has no problem walking away from legendary scores if he doesn’t feel like it would be worth his time (Superman, Jaws, Jurassic Park, etc)

I can understand why people would choose to look at the isolated score as “this exposes the editing flaws” but I don’t see that as being their primary utility, nor would it really “expose” the fact the film was edited (there are much more clear, telltale signs of post-production shenanigans than music cuts). The fact is that even though there are obvious cuts and tracking going on in basically every movie to some degree (and some more than others) there are also TONS of cues that have never before seen an official release, and that music doesn’t exist anywhere else. I can’t imagine anyone’s primary concern at Disney re: isolated scores is “but if we release it this way they’ll KNOW WE EDITED THE MOVIE”

Yes, any isolated score wouldn’t be a PERFECT presentation of the unaltered music as Williams initially wrote it, but I also don’t NEED it to be for this. The option to toggle a score-only version of the movie while watching would probably be, for me, the best extra that hasn’t yet been made available for the OT/PT.

That’s why I said “accompanying” it. I know it wasn’t on the disc, but thank you for the correction. Any isolated score inclusion, on-disc or not, that accompanies this set’s release, is welcomed, and would earn my purchase of this set by itself.

Again - I understand some people saying “no Original Versions, no sale” but I don’t agree. I don’t know if I’ll be getting this set yet, it really does depend on the new transfers, and whatever documentaries might be included, but of primary interest to me is seeing whether or not Isolated Scores will be included.

The original versions at least saw A release during the DVD era. Yes, they were the Def. Edition laserdisc masters, and I know how that doesn’t really “count” for many (myself included) but still - they at least got added as a bonus feature at SOME point in this saga’s long home video history.

There isn’t a single Star Wars release on DVD or Blu-Ray that’s EVER had an isolated score accompanying it, aside from The Last Jedi. I would 100% pay full price for a box-set that gives me the option to toggle to watching the movies with John Williams’ score. Or further, with alternate takes mixed back into the picture. That’s definitely pie-in-the-skying it, but still - if this set has isolated scores for every movie on it - that’s a must-buy for me.

It’s closer to 2.5x budget, and even then that’s maybe outdated at this point. But 2.5x is the rule-of-thumb now. I think it has something to do with studios aiming for large international numbers despite the fact international money usually only returns somewhere between 20-25% of a ticket, where domestic is 50% of a ticket.