This wasn’t a good episode of television.
Not sure how you waste Amy Sedaris and Ming Na Wen like that.
I see it this way:
ANH: Vader (together with Tarkin) is the villain who killed Luke’s father and his mentor.
TESB: Vader captures and tortures Luke’s friends to get him and later reveals to be his own father.
ROTJ: Luke is said to defeat Vader, yet their conflict relationship brings them together and overthrow his master.
To me, it’s all about their relationship, one way or another.
Those first two examples aren’t really a relationship. There’s no real back and forth. They don’t interact directly at all in the first movie, only briefly interact (albeit dramatically) in the last act of the second movie, and Luke, it can be argued, doesn’t really know WHO that guy was that killed Ben by the end of Star Wars.
The third movie is where any actual relationship really happens, has an arc, and resolves. The very last 20 minutes of the second movie sets up a relationship that COULD happen. But again - you can’t really describe the first 2/3rds of Empire as a “relationship.” They don’t interact. Luke doesn’t even know who Vader IS.
And again - Vader being Luke’s father was never any part of a plan. It was introduced very late in the game and almost specifically to deploy a cliffhanger so out-of-nowhere that audiences would feel compelled to see the third movie to see how that resolved.
Spoilers for new Star Wars movies are always pretty revealing in how so much of what we enjoy about Star Wars are things we enjoy because we only ever saw the final product sans any “discourse” that consistently surrounded all aspects of production. Things we take for granted as great storytelling are often taken as such because we hadn’t yet infected ourselves with a veritable rulebook of mythology that we can’t wait to break out whenever we hear about stories that we haven’t seen yet, to pre-emptively show how deeply in violation they are.
The most impactful reveal in all of Star Wars history (and honestly, film history) was pretty much pulled directly out of Lucas’ ass VERY late in the game on the second movie alone. It turned his trilogy’s hero into the son of a genocidal fascist, and the most direct representation of evil in action up to that point.
Describing that story as a “relationship” developed over three movies is mostly untrue. There isn’t a relationship AT ALL for most of the first two movies. You only find out there’s a legitimate connection deeper than “You killed my father prepare to die” at the very end of the second movie. The third movie is the one that has to actually develop that relationship into something, and it’s arguable how well that was done. The heroic moment on Vader’s part carries a LOT of that weight.
“Universe shrinkage” ceased being a problem that was ever going to have a solution back in 1999. It’s been 20 years.
I don’t understand why Rey being the hidden/lost daughter of a Palpatine is so sacrilegous when Luke was the hidden/lost son of Darth Vader.
What is Star Wars if not the story of love being stronger than hate, even (especially) when that hate is coming from your own family?
Why wouldn’t a lost Palpatine meet Skywalkers and decide love is so much stronger? What’s out of bounds about that?
edit: My understanding re: “the original” version of the Trevorrow story, before it got canceled and Abrams was brought in, is that Leia still died in the movie, and her role wasn’t that big. Trying to remember where I read that, though.
If they’re going so far as to swap out all HD versions across all the digital outlets for the new masters they’re going to make 4K DCPs available. They’re pretty easy to create and duplicate. There’s no reason not to have it done.
That’s a really good point to keep in mind - the legs on this are going to be better than The Last Jedi’s whether it’s a better movie or not simply because of the calendar, and the placement of this film’s opening on that calendar.
And if this ends up being a film that’s more liked than The Last Jedi was, and the positive word of mouth is higher and louder, then those legs will be even longer. There’s a point at which the length of a run becomes self-marketing in and of itself, too. That sort of happened on The Force Awakens, but the best examples are still Avatar and Titanic. There were points in January and February of the following year where business was unprecedented because… business was unprecedented!
You want your movie to be in a position where its success becomes tautological, haha
It’ll probably change.
For comparison’s sake, here are Deadline’s tracking articles for the previous entries:
$185-210m - The Force Awakens
https://deadline.com/2015/11/star-wars-the-force-awakens-box-office-opening-estimate-1201636913/
$200m - The Last Jedi
https://deadline.com/2017/11/star-wars-the-last-jedi-200-million-opening-1202213679/
$205m - The Rise of Skywalker
https://deadline.com/2019/11/star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-box-office-projection-reasons-why-1202796194/
The tracking numbers usually go up closer to release, but then again, tracking numbers are kind of… weird. It’s been written about multiple times that tracking past a certain point is basically magical guesswork because it’s hard to really plot what a movie might make in its opening weekend when the numbers get that large. $185-200 in 2015 was considered a HUGE bet - and yet the movie hit 249. Last Jedi ended up being $20m over its first projection.
Plus, the primary utility for tracking seems to be figuring out a way to add another hurdle for a movie to clear before it can be considered a “win.” It’s not enough that it makes a certain number now, because if that specific number is under whatever this TRACKING number is, that tracking is going to be held against it. It’s how you end up with movies almost doubling their budget in three days getting labeled as “a disappointment,” because industry insiders (who have admitted they’re not great at guessing these huge numbers) stuck an estimate on the film’s earning potential pre-release and the actual money that came in didn’t hit that.
Tracking is literally a set of goalposts that move behind the regular goalpost.
I wonder if this will finally cause studios to stop being so freaked out by the possibility of “spoilers” when it turns out this weird, hugely overstated fear of spoilers is costing them a lot of holiday money now.
But didn’t it come out after the reboot which would have meant granting it an exception unnecessary?
It got released a month after the de-canonizing, but comics scheduling means the whole run was already written and the first two issues (if not three by that point) had finished art. They had to decide to save it or not way before that date.
Ha! Those are my two favorite bits of the trilogy upon a re-read a few years ago, and I do think there are ways to transplant THOSE aspects of the tale into the new canon, and I really hope they do that at some point. It’ll probably have to be animation, but I don’t mind, I think animation is one of the best possible mediums for Star Wars. Maybe even better than live-action in a lot of ways.
They’re already starting to give us a little more Wedge, so who knows…
I think it’s off the table primarily because if they ever actually wanted it to be on the table they’d have made an exception to it’s being de-canonized like they did for Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir.
Not sure I understand what you mean, I didn’t think Son of Dathomir was ever not canon.
They made an exception for it while it was being made, before de-canonizing everything. When the great de-canonizing occurred, that was the one title that was spared, due to it’s being adapted from a Clone Wars script. But it was still a Dark Horse comic, and everything else from Dark Horse’s run got turned into Legends. Son of Dathomir was basically singled out for sparing.
If they were willing to single that title out, they would have been willing to single out Zahn’s trilogy. But they weren’t. Probably because they’d already decided at the time there was not future in adapting it directly. And I think there isn’t for the reasons you laid out: Zahn wrote a Star Wars trilogy that is really more like a 6 or 9 film series in terms of how much story is packed in there, and the tone of it is definitely more like a crime procedural and a military fantasy than the space opera Star Wars is.
It was Zahn writing a great sci-fi military adventure using Star Wars characters. But I don’t know that it would work as an animated Star Wars story. It’s why they’re plucking out the star character and reinterpreting him instead of bringing the whole thing to bear.
I think it just wouldn’t fit with what the sequel trilogy is working with.
I think it’s off the table primarily because if they ever actually wanted it to be on the table they’d have made an exception to it’s being de-canonized like they did for Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir.
They’re going to part it out (Rukh’s already dead in Rebels, isn’t he?) and use pieces of it as needed to augment whatever original stories they’re pursuing in the canon, but I don’t think Thrawn Trilogy is ever going to see an animated adaption.
Maybe when they reboot the entire series in 20 years, they’ll re-think it.
I don’t think they’re going to do that. Adapt OR Eviscerate it. It worked as a book but I can’t imagine an adaptation working at all. For 1991, in a Star Wars-starved time, it felt right. But it’s never been a trilogy that really FIT with the films, even then, and nothing about the way it plays fits with the movies now, either.
Comedy is all about confidence. Own your joke, deliver your joke, and move on asap. The problem with “They fly now” is that the joke is done the second Threepio delivers the line. There should be a cut back to the action at that point because your’e not topping that.
General Hugs is perfectly fine, it just goes on too long, too. Star Wars comedy is often very irreverent and of its time (the fact Han is calling Leia sister in Star Wars is some very of-the-moment '70s stuff too. I don’t know that I’d call it “SNL Cringe” but I think you probably could if it was 1979) but what keeps it fresh is that confidence and that timing.
Clips don’t really build hype, and none of the ST clips have either. Clips in general are just like, tiny tastes for talk show blah-blah. I get why we all hyper-analyze them, because we’re obsessives, LOL. But they’re not going to deliver a solid, intriguing scene for free for the late-night circuit. They’re saving those moments for when we buy tickets. This is more like the best of the mediocre-est. That’s what goes out on the press tour.
Who knew there were HUGE Dorme fans.
Filoni is probably on board for a lot of reasons.
But I wonder if it’s the Mandalorian thing that was the primary one. Especially considering that’s how Favreau interfaced with Star Wars. Through mandalore, through Filoni.
“Get me the Mandalore guy I was on the cartoon with. He knows what’s up with the Fetts and shit.”
FWIW I don’t see Filoni “ascending” to President of Lucasfilm. Mostly because I don’t get the sense he even wants that. It’s not really a reward, honestly.
I think the only way Jabba could be improved in Star Wars is either by complete removal (the way it should be) or a complete re-render and new compositing. Especially considering how well ILM can make a digital creation look and feel like a puppet now, there’s no reason they can’t re-model Jabba so he looks and moves in a way that is much closer to how he looked in 1983 than any of the digital recreations, none of which are all that close, not in texture, not in shape, not in coloration.
Jabba is, like many things Lucas did with Star Wars, a “good-enough” effort, but not the best one.
I wonder if this storyline is the primary reason Filoni was brought onboard? It’s sort of like how Ronald D. Moore essentially became “The Klingon Guy” at Star Trek, because he was more or less the de-facto expert on their culture after reshaping it through his episodes.
Filoni is that for Mandalorians, probably. Especially since it seems almost like Mandalorians are the Star Wars version of Klingons now.
Completely off-topic, but: For what it’s worth, she’s really good in Jennifer’s Body. I think Megan Fox’s career got sort of derailed very early precisely because a lot of people in the industry wrote her off as nothing more than eye-candy, because Michael Bay is sort of an inherently disrespectful sort of guy and he basically put her on the map that way.
True! Although they could have just left it alone, too, since it wasn’t ever an error.
IIRC at the time, everyone swore up and down it was evidence of bad continuity (He’s not wearing a jacket! Now he’s wearing his vest! Now it’s back off again) but shortly after the change was made, I think a behind-the-scenes video of that scene’s filming revealed the set lights coming on and casting those shadows on him.
But FWIW, this new change does look better than the last one did.
I might be seeing things - but I think they re-did the shirt coloration “fix” (which was never a fix) on Han Solo just before carbon freeze?
Here’s the screencap from the blu-rays
https://i0.wp.com/caps.pictures/198/0-starwars5/full/star-wars5-movie-screencaps.com-11293.jpg
And here’s what I’m seeing on Disney+
https://i.imgur.com/ChQ9Cc7.jpg
Looks like they basically re-did the shirt texture entirely
Godspeed, rebel.
If we’re going to be throwing the word percentage around it should come with a rough number and not just some vague idea of percentages.
1.3 billion movie tickets were sold in North America 2018.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187073/tickets-sold-at-the-north-american-box-office-since-1980/
That’s a decent representation of the General Audience’s potential. That obviously doesn’t mean 1.3 billion people separately bought one ticket to one movie, obviously. Most adults do only go to the movie once a year or less, but a good number of adults do go about once a month, and a small percentage goes more than once a month.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264396/frequency-of-going-to-the-movies-in-the-us/
So if we wanted to roughly ball-park how big the general audience probably is… I guess you could go with the idea that about 500 million people is a decent-enough figure. That’s the 40% of the moviegoing audience who says they go occasionally. That seems like a lot still, since the total population for all of North America is 580 million, but then again, going to the movies is a pretty big cultural thing still, even as attendance has declined and ticket prices go up. People DO still go to the movies, they just go a lot less frequently than they used to. So when people say “The general audience,” we’re basically talking about 500 million folks. Give or take 50 million maybe (shrug).
Let’s use The Force Awakens release year for the next example. in 2015, the total box-office in dollars was 11 billion. The Force Awakens accounted for 936 million of that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187069/north-american-box-office-gross-revenue-since-1980/
So Star Wars at its most popular on the box-office, accounted for 8.5% of the industry’s total revenue in North America that year. That’s pretty crazy.
Anyway, you get the picture - fandom as we understand it, the collection of people who dedicate large chunks of their lives to making “I like a movie” into a legitimate hobby that includes going out of your way to converse with total strangers online on a daily basis and/or spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars on associated merchandise annually (or attenting conventions dedicated to that fandom), is by any account, a tiny slice of an already smaller slice of a very large pie. Even when the slice in question is Star Wars, and even when Star Wars is doing its best at appealing to the widest possible audience, you’re looking at concentric, shrinking circles of relevance until you arrive at the very loud, very noisy, but not very meaningful concentrated dot that is fandom.
Fang Zei said:
What about the theatrical prequels and the 120 minute imax cut of AotC?
That AOTC IMAX cut (Burtt edited it himself, correct?) is like the holy grail. Many have tried to replicate it, so far as I can tell none have figured out how to get it exactly right. I’d love to see it again - I only saw it the once, almost 20 years ago now, and would love to check it out again.
voltwaffle said:
the people who have been adamant about boycotting it have only become more emboldened as time has gone on and information has leaked out. I honestly don’t see a way that this movie doesn’t upset a large amount of fans one way or another. Only time will tell though.
Star Wars fandom is a very small percentage of the general audience, and the percentage of that fandom who is adamant about boycotting is a tiny fraction of THAT already small percentage. The fandom is a reliable source of income despite whatever protestations or threats they might make, but that income total isn’t very high compared to the general audience whose investment in “fandom” basically starts and stops with “I like Star Wars, this looks good, I’ll buy a ticket.” The number of people who never even CONSIDER going online to join a forum, or a facebook group, or find themselves following hashtags on social media, etc. - that number VASTLY dwarfs the number of people who consider themselves part of Star Wars Fandom.
All this movie has to do is look entertaining enough to appeal to everyone who isn’t part of that fandom, but does generally like Star Wars. If it does a good enough job of that, the praises and complaints from Star Wars fandom won’t much matter, because the people who comprise the much larger dollar amounts being chased after wouldn’t even think to check in with that fandom to see what they might have to say. It wouldn’t even occur to them. They’re not there as part of a fandom exercise. They’re there to enjoy a movie.
