Official Thursday preview number: $40 mil.
https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1208059178566082560
So, unless Saturday/Sunday overperforms, this will likely be a $185-195mil opening weekend.
“Shaky cam” is just a colloquial synonym for “hand-held photography.”
Nobody’s actually shaking the camera, it’s just not stabilized on a dolly or tripod or steadicam machine.
It’s not in this movie, OR in The Force Awakens very much.
Haha, either way I’m going to be wrong (being wrong on the internet never hurts anywhere near as bad as people seem to think it will. I’ve gotten a TON of practice anyway, LOL).
Because according to Deadline - this is doing Thursday preview numbers similar to The Last Jedi.
https://deadline.com/2019/12/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-opening-weekend-box-office-cats-bombshell-1202814594/
It’s gotta be, but the flat-out refusal to consider an option where she’s not in the movie just… I know retrospect makes geniuses out of the biggest dummies (hi there!) but she shouldn’t have been in this movie. The idea shouldn’t have been pursued, and that maybe would have freed them up to pursue different storytelling avenues.
I also was resistant to the idea that Abrams was actively going out of his way to “retcon” what Johnson did but there are actually two or three moments on the level of “This will begin to make things right” where it’s beyond obvious Abrams is breaking the fourth wall to comment on what came before. The most notable is Luke solemnly talking about “disrespecting” the weapon of a Jedi. And if that was meant to be a self-deprecating joke at Luke’s expense, (like a ha-ha smartass “remember when I did that? LOL what a dummy I was” sort of thing) it wasn’t acted, shot, or cut like that at all, so that interpretation is almost impossible to make. Luke (whose hair was trash! Why did it LOOK like that?) was essentially a platitude machine. The only part of that whole scene that works? The part of the scene that is riffing on the infinitely better scene from Empire Strikes Back.
Again, I know Abrams isn’t the most graceful director, but there is so much that is structurally FUCKED about this movie and its characterization and arcs that I have a hard time believing this was actually what he wanted to make. Just going from TFA to this, it’s such a MESS comparatively - I believe PARTS of what he actually wanted to make are IN here, but they’re stitched and glued together very, very sloppily.
Revised list!
S-Tier
1 - The Empire Strikes Back
2 - The Last Jedi
A-Tier
3 - The Force Awakens
4 - Star Wars
5 - Rogue One
B-Tier
6 - Solo
C-Tier
7 - Revenge of the Sith
8 - Return of the Jedi
D-Tier
9 - The Rise of Skywalker
10 - The Phantom Menace
F-Tier
11 - Attack of the Clones
12 - The Clone Wars
I think SOMETHING happened either during production, post-production, or even both, because this movie just doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. It’s not just retconning things and moving too fast for its own good (there are not a lot of “moments” in this movie, and it hurts a lot of the emotional punches it’s consistently failing to land), it’s referencing plot points that didn’t happen prior to their referencing, and half the time it’s not finishing off things that they ARE setting up. (What was Finn going to tell Rey? Why was Lando talking to Jannah at the end like we were supposed to insinuate… something? Why is Rey kissing Kylo at all?)
I’m also convinced Palpatine is lit and shot the way he is to cover up his mouth, because more than half of his dialog is completely obscured as he’s speaking it. I don’t think he was supposed to be there as much as he was, and I think he was deployed as a narrative patch job above and beyond “we needed to wrap up the whole saga.” I wouldn’t be surprised at all if something went really sideways on this movie and this was the best effort at making whatever it was they had left work.
Also I understand the refusal to not write Leia out between movies but that would have been preferable to what they did here. By far. She became a literal PROP by the end. And her presence in the scenes she was “active” in was utterly false, no matter how good the CGI lighting and costuming was. There was no feeling that she was acting with anyone, or that anyone was acting with her. There’s good reason for that, of course, and I feel like trying to glide over that unavoidable reason through movie trickery just called more attention to it. The only Leia scene that carried any of the weight it was intended to was Chewie reacting to her death, and even THAT had nothing to do with anything happening in THIS movie, but relied on literal decades of familiarity from previous, much better movies.
This is the worst film Abrams has directed, and I have a hard time believing it’s turned out this way solely because of bad vision and worse execution. Something about this movie just seems straight up broken in multiple ways, and not in the “What else could I do look what I was left with” sort of way, but in the “I have a release date I have to hit no matter what and this movie doesn’t work the way it is but I’m literally out of time so hopefully we can cobble SOMETHING together.”
For the first 45-50 minutes, it’s a sort of bland, speedy, superficial bit of fluff & fun in Star Wars packaging. And then it just keeps skipping and stuttering through whatever its story is trying to be for the five seconds it can maintain focus. I know he’s a flashy, superficial director but this is bad even for him, and it really does seem like there are some extenuating circumstances we might not know about.
It might also be why Abrams decided to work with WB for the foreseeable future and to leave Disney/Lucasfilm behind.
Oh, they absolutely should have pushed this back a year and let Rian finish it. Kennedy asked him before she asked Abrams, IIRC.
I also think SOMETHING happened either during production, post-production, or even both, because this movie just doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. It’s not just retconning things and moving too fast, it’s referencing plot points that didn’t happen prior to their referencing, and half the time it’s not finishing off things that they ARE setting up.
I’m also convinced Palpatine is lit and shot the way he is to cover up his mouth, because more than half of his dialog is completely obscured as he’s speaking it.
Something went really sideways on this movie and this was the best effort at making whatever it was they had left work.
Also I understand the refusal to not write Leia out between movies but that would have been preferable to what they did here. By far.
What a goddamn mess
The bright side of this travesty is that now Disney will never make another Star Wars trilogy without planning it out in advance.
For as much as this is championed by fans the truth is almost no creatives currently working at any studio actually does this, and it’s almost never BEEN done, either.
The problem with film series that end poorly isn’t that there was lack of overall planning for the entire saga, it’s that whoever executed the plan for THE LAST CHAPTER didn’t do it well. You don’t need to plan out the whole thing beforehand, you just need to not agree to a bad plan for the last one.
The idea that people who are paid millions to literally create fiction out of thin air can’t come up with a good part three unless someone else pre-chewed their food 5 years prior is kind of weird, and not very much based in reality.
What’s real is that people make bad decisions and other people agree to them. That’ll happen with any plan.
Day-of-projections now between $160-180.
Rocknroll41 & Dr. Dre looking pretty good right about now.
I sincerely doubt this movie won’t make at least $200m opening weekend. I mean, there’s barely any competition.
I don’t disagree, I just wanted to indulge a little prequel memery 😃
I think the “defeatist” attitude you’re seeing is what happens when about two decades of making the best, most salient, most thorough argument doesn’t lead to the results we want. There isn’t any more argument to make, really. They’ve ALL been made, as clearly as possible, for 15 years. Parts of it are so thoroughly consumed and metabolized by an entertainment media more than happy to cover this on our behalf that they became memes, as you said. “Where are the originals” is such a knee-jerk question at this point it still comes up, in 2019 press junkets. It’s usually the first thing inserted into the 2nd or 3rd paragraph on any story about ANY rumored or reported on new release of the original trilogy.
It’s not a question of having all the arrows in our quiver, or having bigger and better ones that we haven’t thought of yet. It’s not a question of ammo at all, really, or of our being able to “convince” the giant corporation of their responsibility to making salable catalog product we want to buy. We’ve made our case, and had our case amplified and further made for us. There’s basically nothing else to do but wait for them to change their minds. It’s completely out of our hands, and we have no control over them or their decision making process. That’s not defeatism. That’s acceptance. They know who we are, they know what we want, they know how many of us there are, they understand the arguments. Abrams isn’t the only person in the industry with a copy of Despecialized. Odds are pretty good it was someone at Lucasfilm who gave them to him. But there’s no argument, no hidden magic bullet just waiting to be discovered and fired that’s going to make Disney do what we want.
The only thing we actually seem to have any control over is how to make for ourselves the thing that we want in the meantime. And this community has taken that control and turned out amazing work that is appreciated by a lot of people. Will Disney finally decide to do the thing we’ve wanted them to do at some point? Maybe. But there really isn’t anything more this community can do to make it more clear that we’d like them to do that, to make a case stronger than the one they already have before them that they’re deciding to ignore.
It’s out of our hands.
The Rotten Tomatoes number has become its own narrative. That’s… not good news.
It’s time to inform the Senate that our ability to clear $200 million opening weekend has diminished.
I’ve heard people call it “The Bow TIE” and I like that.
Also, this is the first episode of this show that I’ve REALLY liked. Characterization was good, the interaction between the characters was good - it was the first episode that seemed to be making some serious choices and following through on them. Plus the pacing was GREAT.
Deborah Chow and Rick Famuyiwa are easily the two voices on this show with the best handle on how to make it all work.
That just… doesn’t make any sense.
Which is a thing I don’t know why it still surprises me to say. “I was wrong” and “That doesn’t make any sense” are phrases that have gotten heavy, heavy workouts in the last 10 or so years, haha.
We’re in trouble!
Even if it noses above 60% by this Friday (which is possible, no doubt) that would still make it the 2nd worst reviewed Star Wars film on RT. Just above The Phantom Menace, which only sank to rotten status thanks to the 3D re-release giving critics a second shot at appraising it with 10+ years of hindsight.
If that re-release hadn’t happened, this would likely be the worst reviewed Star Wars film on that site. (well, not counting The Clone Wars, directed by Dave Filoni)
Whether that affects the legs, who knows. This holiday season is still almost perfectly primed for a very long, record-breaking run for a movie that really keys into public sentiment in a big way. But I don’t know if Rise of Skywalker ended up being that movie. It might have the runway paved and only jog halfway down it.
I mean, if this movie is a big overstuffed mess, I’ll be okay with it. Attack of the Clones didn’t ruin Empire Strikes Back or A New Hope. This won’t ruin The Last Jedi. Kevin J. Anderson didn’t make me stop reading books. It’s perfectly Star Wars for Star Wars to end on a weirdly overstuffed and kinda unsatisfying note (ROTS, ROTJ, TROS I guess?) so I’m… fine with it. There are other movies to watch this Winter (Uncut Gems, 1917… CATS, hahaha - Oh god, what if that movie gets a higher RT score) so I’m not too worried about whether Star Wars, which is only barely more good than it is bad as a film series (which makes it pretty good so far as long-running film series go) ends on a shrug.
But that essay is sort of weird. It almost reads like a eulogy for all the time that guy spent writing about Star Wars on fansites people don’t read. “I’m sure it’s trash but I’ll like it anyway” is an interesting choice of epitaph for 20+ years of volunteer work.
That big fat 56% on Rotten Tomatoes may not make much of a difference on the opening weekend, but I’m starting to wonder if the legs are gonna be a lot shorter than expected.
This is HILARIOUS
https://twitter.com/JeremyRMedina/status/1207330912251203584
Seems like an educated guess at this point, though I’d love to be wrong.
There’s nothing educated about the guess, though. It’s literally a reaction rooted in personal headcanon/fiction and nothing more. Someone asked themselves on a forum once “what could possibly prevent me from getting the product I want to purchase” and the first thing they came up with was “Lucas put a clause in the contract.” It sounded good enough, and a lot of people ran with it. But it’s not sourced to anything. It’s literally spec that people decided to accept and promote because the notion that Disney just doesn’t want to contradict Lucas’ wishes was too unbelievable for them.
Broom Kid you sort of prove my point when you dismiss one filmmaker over another, just swap the names.
Broom Kid said:
I see what he’s trying to do, and I understand why he’s trying to do it. I just think he’s not doing a very good job of communicating it.this basically sums up my TLJ feelings, and why I made the comparison to begin with, both are using characters that have die hard fans who say the filmmaker broke the “rules” i.e. Batman doesn’t kill/Superman wouldn’t do this, and so on. But depending on which camp you’re in, one is heresy and the other is just fans mad they didn’t get what they wanted.
This doesn’t really make any sense. I’m not dismissing him, I’m assessing him. My assessment is that as a storyteller and a filmmaker, he’s ultimately very thin and surface, and he doesn’t have much more to offer as a filmmaker than anything he’s done beyond that surface decision. If my assessment is a dismissal, and dismissal is bad, why are you then directly comparing it to what you’re also doing? Either dismissal is bad, and neither you and I should be doing it, or you only consider it “dismissal” when you disagree with the assessment.
“Depending on which camp you’re in” gets to the other point I was making, which is that a lot of this discussion is about the discussion itself, and the grievance to be found once you spend enough time in there. What you’re finding fault with right now isn’t so much that I might disagree with you, or that others don’t share your opinion, it’s that you think it’s unfair that you’re being judged to be in “the wrong camp” because of that disagreement. At that point, nobody’s talking about the movie anymore at all. They’re talking about themselves, and their grievance at being misunderstood and “dismissed” (there’s that word again).
I don’t really understand why it matters what “camp” you’re in at all. It doesn’t actually affect you, and anyone who IS willing to cut you off and/or dismiss you based on nothing more than their perception of your camp and not your actual ideas that you’ve supported with your own thoughts is someone who has shown themselves to be not worth the concern anyway.
As an aside: Simply having the intent to do something isn’t enough, when it comes to storytelling. The execution counts so much more than the intent does. With your Snyder example, his intentions are made very, very clear, and there’s no real mistaking them once you see them. The problem I’ve had with basically everything he’s done since “300” is that his execution never improves, and in many cases has gotten worse over time.
If a movie is to be judged based on how well it’s trying to do what it wants to do, I find his films lacking not because he wants to do something I wouldn’t do, but because he ultimately doesn’t do it well enough to take me on his journey with him. He CAN do this, and he’s done it before (Both “Dawn of the Dead” and “300” are really good examples, and to a lesser extent, so is “Sucker Punch.”) but he doesn’t do it very consistently, and when he messes up, it’s very noticeable.
That, however, isn’t a judgment of you, or your character, or your person. It just means I don’t like the guy’s movies as much as you do. That doesn’t put you in a camp, nor does it invalidate your opinions.
Sure if you are empathetic to Rian Johnson’s vision (this is if you don’t already like the movie) and look through his lens you can see where it was coming from, but I hardly see people do the same for Zack Snyder when he attempts his own interpretation on legacy characters that have already been rebooted.
Zack Snyder and Rian Johnson aren’t very comparable as filmmakers or storytellers, though. But even if the comparison is made, I don’t find a lot of examples of people who criticize Snyder’s take on superheroes without taking his POV into consideration. Speaking for myself (which is really the only thing I CAN do) it’s not that his POV isn’t being considered - I see what he’s trying to do, and I understand why he’s trying to do it. I just think he’s not doing a very good job of communicating it. Essentially, with Snyder, the choice isn’t supported, elaborated upon, or really built upon - the choice more or less IS the entirety of what he’s doing. It’s a POV that is entirely about itself. It’s a choice whose whole aim is to say THIS IS THE CHOICE I MADE and then there’s no real attempt to make something more of it than that.
I understand people not liking the decisions Johnson made regarding storytelling and Star Wars, but I don’t know that people can argue he didn’t try to go somewhere and say something with them. Most of the complaints (the good faith ones, the thoughtful ones, at least) acknowledge they don’t like where he started from, and thus where he ended up wasn’t satisfying to them, but they at least acknowledge the start and the end were different points. With Snyder’s take on superheroism, there’s no real journey anywhere. It’s just sort of a very loud, posed, rigid stance that doesn’t lead to any further understanding or thematic depth beyond its own superficial opening statement, because all it’s really trying to do is justify itself.
I liked the Last Jedi video everyone’s talking about, not just because it’s self-deprecating in general (I’m a sucker for that sort of disarming leveling of the playing field) but it tends to get at the two major factors that I think prolong this argument/fight/discussion/anger surrounding the film: The idea that rules were broken, and the idea that voices aren’t being heard. Much of the conversation about the Last Jedi isn’t even really about the movie itself, but about the people “discussing” it, and the grievances they hold at any insinuation their POV isn’t being carefully considered, or flat out ignored. The Last Jedi has become not much more than a grievance mill, and personal grievances are what much of the discussion is about. Any video that acknowledges those conversational practices in an effort to steer discussion back towards the movie itself, and what the movie is actually trying to say about people, is worth watching, whether the person who made it absolutely loves the movie or not.
Seems like Comic Book is citing Fantha Tracks which is citing a Dutch website that’s, so far as I can tell, essentially just guessing?
I believe dates for the digital/blu-ray/4k releases aren’t decided until after the 2nd or 3rd weekend, because that gives them a better idea as to when the meat of the theatrical run is going to be over, and gives them a better idea of how much distance between the end of that run and their release date will be.
I could be wrong, but that seems to be the general practice?
I think this was probably the best directed/shot/edited episode of the whole run to this point, but I also think that unless these last two episodes significantly improve their quality (a rising tide lifts all boats and all) this is going to be, like Clone Wars Season 1 and Rebels Season 1, an overall dud. Mediocre at best.
The best thing to come out of this show is easily its soundtrack. I’m still waiting for the episodes themselves to live up to the music scoring them. It hasn’t quite happened yet.
In keeping with my volunteer role as keeper of the dim flame that is but a fool’s hope, I’m posting the transcript of this conversation with JJ Abrams, and reminding people that JJ Abrams is a very cautious and careful political animal when on the PR circuit, and chooses his words very carefully, ESPECIALLY after he burnt himself on the press tour for Star Trek Into Darkness.
Interviewer: Would you as a fan like to see the theatrical versions made available commercially?
Abrams: Yes, and I have asked about this-
Interviewer: -really?
Abrams: Well, 'cause who wouldn’t wanna see that? But I’ve been told that, for reasons that I don’t quite understand, that that’s not necessarily possible.
And then the interviewer goes on to misrepresent the whole Library of Congress anecdote and Abrams pokes fun at him for it, so on and so forth, but that’s the relevant bit.
Here’s the cracks of daylight that might be poking through the maybe not all the way closed door:
Abrams might have asked awhile ago (like, circa 2013/14) and… just never asked again, and so he doesn’t know what the current plans are, since he’s been very busy making a movie and all.
The words “not necessarily” carry a lot of weight, as does his “reasons I don’t quite understand.” It says he’s at a remove, and he’s not clear on what it is that’s actually happening with it, and more importantly, that he never really followed up.
The most simple explanation is that someone (Kennedy? Iger?) told him the same thing we’ve all come to understand over the same 5-6 year period: They don’t come out because Lucasfilm doesn’t want to piss off George Lucas if they don’t have to, and they know this isn’t a thing he really wants, so out of courtesy, they’re not doing it.
That’s confusing and weird to a lot of fans (to the point we’ve created out of whole cloth and perpetuated for the last 5-6 years a crackpot theory about contractual clauses) so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be confusing to Abrams in a quick conversation with Kathy Kennedy or Bob Iger four years ago, either. Especially if he’s coming at it from the standpoint of “but you guys own it. And you have access to better equipment than literally anyone else trying to do this work.”
But he’s still being careful. He asked once, was told a thing, and is still hedging bets on its possibility. Just because he directed the newest Star Wars movie doesn’t necessarily (hey, there’s that word) mean he knows what the rest of Disney/Lucasfilm is planning on doing with the other films, any more than John Landis (who doesn’t even work there) knew what they were doing a few years ago when he told everyone the originals were coming because he was talking to George one day.