Broom Kid

$175.5 dom, 373.5 worldwide.

if WOM continues to solidify as mixed-to-negative (and it’s probably going to, if that happened with The Last Jedi despite better reviews and higher box-office, I can’t imagine it won’t happen here) there is probably no way it crosses $1 bil.

This has made less than Incredbles 2’s OW, and is making less worldwide than Batman v. Superman did in its opening weekend.

“Own the originals last time” was 1995. The prequels wouldn’t come out for another 4 years.

He went back on that anyway 10 years later.

Projections for today are putting it around $48-50 mil. If it has a typical Saturday-to-Sunday drop, we’re now in $180-185mil range for the OW.

With that opening (especially if it’s closer to 180) we’re looking at an increased possibility it misses a billion worldwide.

Honestly, for this set, the OOT isn’t even my biggest hope, partially because I’ve had years and years of accepting the fact it’s not a priority at Lucasfilm or Disney.

I’m hoping for isolated scores. Especially since The Last Jedi’s isolated score seemed to be a pretty big success, and was actually NEWS for a day or two. It seems weird that a feature that was - if not standard - commonplace in the DVD era is now newsworthy, but still. If The Last Jedi can get one, I’m hoping they’ve decided this Skywalker Saga set will include isolated scores. I’d prefer they be on disc, but if it’s the same sort of “online extra” thing, I’m fine with that too. However we get them, I want them.

Neverar just won post of the year.

“Ow.”

IIRC, The camera isn’t even shaking during the TIE Fighter attack in Star Wars. The shot was locked down due to the way the gunner shots were set up. They’re moving the frame around in post to simulate the camera shaking, aren’t they?

That’s definitely not “shaky cam”

“Shaky cam” is basically what happens when people who don’t have the vocabulary for an established film technique create a term, and that term gets popularized through common usage. “Shaky Cam” was what people who didn’t previously know what handheld photography was called came up with to describe what they were watching. The internet made that sort of adoption of terminology a lot faster than it used to be. Sometimes that speed basically renders words and terms more or less meaningless. Sort of like how “Reboot” essentially replaced “Remake” and is now used almost interchangeably with “sequel.” Or, in the world of videogames, how the term “cinematics” became “cut-scenes” despite the fact “cut-scenes” basically doesn’t make any sense as a term.

Anyway, physically grabbing the camera and shaking it to simulate environmental vibrations isn’t really “shaky cam.” “Shaky Cam” is just handheld photography. It’s “shaky” because the frame is unstable. That’s it.

It’s even funnier when you see the shots as they appear in the movie.

He’s yanking the hell out of the mag on the camera and in the film it registers as a slight vibration on the edge of the frame. But it definitely gives the impression that the camera is sitting on a platform that has a giant beam of energy shooting out the bottom of it, so it ultimately worked.

I bet the closest we get to deleted scenes in any usable fashion will actually be the Art Of book.

Once he decides he’s going to be Ben he absolutely starts peppering parts of his performance with subtle nods to Harrison Ford, that’s a great call.

Imagine being Adam Driver, knowing that back in your trailer you have the scripts to “Marriage Story” and “The Report” just sitting there, waiting to be memorized and performed, and that’s the day you have to do a scene where “You’re a Palpatine” has to come out of your mouth.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but Kylo Ren’s last words are “Ow.”

I think a large part of being a Star Wars fan for a large section of its fandom is in the exercise that goes along with classifying, quantifying, and for lack of a better word, TRADITIONALIZING what Star Wars is and can be. Whether that’s a conscious decision or not, it’s what a ton of people have been doing for a very long time, and I think this (kind of odd) discussion about the directorial style of JJ Abrams and “Star Wars” is interesting, in that it seeks to nail down an almost immovable visual vocabulary for Star Wars - without recognizing that the primary reason Star Wars’ approach to classic mythology resonated to young people was partially because Lucas’ visual style hadn’t ever been applied to the myth like that.

Star Wars worked in the first place because that’s not how you were supposed to shoot fantasy and myth. It wasn’t supposed to look, move, or sound like that. And it’s because it didn’t that young people were more easily able to key into the universal (and ancient) themes and meanings in its mythology.

I think part of why The Force Awakens worked so well for a lot of people is because it freshened up Star Wars’ visual language on a larger scale than it had been over the 30 years prior. And that language was always evolving and changing anyway. Empire doesn’t look like Star Wars very much at all, and it certainly doesn’t move the same way. And Jedi has its own visual language.

A lot of the “rules” about what Star Wars is and how it can look like literally don’t exist anywhere but in our heads, codified and quantified through group discussions among people who don’t have any actual control over what Star Wars is or what it looks like. Snap-zooms (and hand-held photography!) didn’t exist in Star Wars until Attack of the Clones. Slow motion didn’t exist in Star Wars until Empire Strikes Back. Dream Sequences didn’t exist until Revenge of the Sith.

If the myth (whatever shape it might take) is to survive with modern audiences, the visual language of its telling needs to shift accordingly. Star Wars itself taught us this. To argue that Star Wars itself can’t continue along that path because it’s not “Star Wars” once you do that is self-defeating.

You have to let this thing grow otherwise it becomes stale. And if that means hand-held photography and whip-pans, so be it. Just use them well, is all.

Mendelson is terrible

“People didn’t reject TLJ because their emotional maturity wasn’t up to the task”

Some people obviously did though. The idea that NOBODY did that doesn’t make any sense. It’s an overstatement you’re making in response to an overstatement he’s making to arrive at one of his bigger points (which I find lucid and relevant). It’s not total nonsense to suggest people didn’t understand the Last Jedi, especially not in the face of two years of people very loudly not understanding it in front of as many people as possible.

There’s no point in attempting to reject observable reality simply because it doesn’t align with your personal viewpoint. You’re not the people he’s talking about, and that’s fine. You don’t need to then try and further argue that the people he’s talking about don’t, and have never, existed. They did, and they still do. You aren’t among their number, and don’t need to count yourself among them for your opinions to have validity.

I don’t take your arguments against the review as an attack at all, but I do think trying to erase the group of people he’s talking about doesn’t help anything.

Further - I don’t think there’s anything really sanctimonious about the tone of the review at all because he’s also describing how he understands, and sometimes indulges, in the headspace he’s also criticizing. He’s saying that he’s been there, and he still visits semi-frequently, but it’s because he knows of what he speaks that he’s able (and willing) to make the criticisms he’s making.

I posted what I think is my favorite review of this movie earlier, but its author tweeted something that is very relevant to the discussion.

https://twitter.com/mangiotto/status/1207423051404431360

"The thing about giving fans what they want is it holds a mirror up to the sad limits of a fan’s imagination. Not just for possible paths to evolve their objects of veneration, but for their own potential growth as human beings. “Look! Look! This is all you think you deserve.”

That’s an effective description of the creative impulse behind this movie. It really is.

(that review, again, if you missed it: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2019/12/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker.html)

A B+ CinemaScore for a giant blockbuster on its opening weekend isn’t great, no. Again, the scheduling might save it from a severe drop, but the comparison points I’m seeing used quite a bit aren’t great ones: Batman v. Superman, Justice League, and Venom.

Venom is a positive comparison, really. But the problem there is Venom broke out the way it did thanks to overseas numbers, and so far The Rise of Skywalker isn’t doing very well overseas, and won’t have the sort of domestic/international split that Venom had. Star Wars even at its MOST popular was always closer to a 50/50 split than most huge earners (which run between 40/60-30/70 in a lot of cases)

If this opens at 195 and has TLJ’s multiplier, it ends its run at $546 mil domestic. But that CinemaScore (and whatever media narrative might evolve between now and Christmas) makes a 2.8x run a little more of a question.

If it has a multiplier closer to Justice League’s, we’re looking at this movie just barely crossing $500 mil, and finishing under Rogue One domestically.

EDIT: 90mil Friday (including Thursday previews). If it matches either Last Jedi OR Force Awakens’ weekend arcs - this movie isn’t making $200 mil OW.

I think making “sense” of the movie is most easily done if you look at it from the POV that it’s still 2016. It’s a story that - again - isn’t really ABOUT anything, thematically, and isn’t really saying anything beyond “here is how our plot is closed out,” and the decisions made to close out that plot seem to be focused almost solely on answering every last fan-chewed “mystery” that was hashed out in the early months of 2016 before many of the principals started disengaging from the media entirely.

Seriously, it’s not so much getting mad at The Last Jedi, or going out of its way to retcon it. This movie is more or less pretending it didn’t happen, save for the Force Projecting. Everything else is basically a race to answer a checklist of the main questions (whether they were already addressed or not) posed by The Force Awakens as fans understood them in 2016:

“Who is Snoke and what is his backstory?”
“What is Rey’s parentage and how did she wind up there?”
“Why is Rey so strong in the force” (The “Mary Sue” complaint, basically)
“Do Rey and Kylo want to kiss?” (This became “Reylo” eventually)
“Is Finn Force sensitive?”
“Who are the Knights of Ren?”
“What was Luke doing for all that time?”

That’s literally all this film IS about. Answering those questions. But the answers to those questions don’t POINT anywhere thematic or even mythical. They’re just plot - pure plot - and that’s why this movie feels so empty, emotionally. And that emptiness is compounded by the fact the answers they arrived at (and then rushed through) depend on more or less ignoring a better film that answered some of these questions much more simply and effectively, and most importantly, THEMATICALLY.

I know!

It’s a pretty broken movie!

I think that’s his daughter?

Yub Nub!

Well… it’s a TV show now. Or a TV franchise, rather. That’s where it’ll live for now, and that’s likely where it thrives and satisfies for the near future.

We did it, you guys. We lived long enough to see Star Wars become Star Trek.

What a weird and wonderful time to be alive.

But the “It undid ROTJ” arguments happened the second TFA hit, and were only more loudly repeated in the wake of TLJ. The Rise of Skywalker’s existence doesn’t change the underlying point I’m making. It makes the argument overall uglier and dumber, yes, but the content of the argument maintains its consistency. It’s an argument in which one side is upset that “happily ever after” wasn’t maintained - but the basic myth that Star Wars is built on never allowed for that anyway. Arthurian myth goes past the part where Excalibur is pulled from the stone, and deals with what happens past the point of initial triumph. The Sequel Trilogy is concerned with plumbing those parts of it and coming up with equivalents for our time, and delivering lessons for the youth living through a rise in global fascism in the 21st century despite the fact those youth’s grandparents and great grandparents bravely fought and died to defeat that fascism in its initial form in the past. That the Sequel Trilogy was pursuing that thematic goal doesn’t nullify the thematic drive of the Original Trilogy, nor does it cancel out the arcs that were built and completed in that story.

Or at least, it appeared to be pursuing that goal. It had the potential to do that. That potential was wasted in this last movie, unfortunately, because this movie isn’t really about anything at all. It’s about deleted scenes solving a plot puzzle created by a real-life death, and resurrecting a dead villain for the sake of adhering to the superficial (and already solved) mystery about the main character. Neither of those things are a theme, or have anything to do with theme, and that’s why the movie feels hollow and flat. There’s nothing it wants to say, and so it never says anything at all.

This is the best review I’ve read about the movie so far.

https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2019/12/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker.html

I think the art of book got pushed back because having evidence in print of what this movie was supposed to be before it got dismembered and glued back together would have made its legs even weaker.

We’re going to find out in May what this thing was intended to be, and it might not be better, but the game of what-if that spins out of that is going to take over all discussion from that point forward.

If WOM gets bad after this OW, having the most advantageous release date (and they do) won’t matter much if the legs are affected. They need repeat views and I’m unsure they’re going to get them. Nobody making any predictions was likely predicting with the idea that this was going to be the worst reviewed Star Wars since The Phantom Menace - and considering Phantom Menace’s current score got adjusted downward thanks to the 3D re-release giving critics a second bite at the apple, this would technically BE the worst reviewed Star Wars film otherwise.