Free Republic

Ron Howard has said that online trolls were partly to blame for the lacklustre box office performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The Oscar-winning filmmaker, who is currently promoting upcoming documentary Pavarotti, told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that “aggressive trolling” was a crucial factor in the film’s financial under-performance but that he still greatly enjoyed the creative experience of making the film. “I wish it could have lived up to the box office expectations,” Howard said. “That’s disappointing. Why didn’t it? Maybe that’s the release [date], maybe it was too nostalgic, maybe pushback from the previous movie…some trolling,...

Beware the “Soloists” - A Concern for the Protestant “Solos”: Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia Msgr. Charles Pope • June 7, 2018 • There are a lot of “solos” sung by our Protestant brethren: sola fide (saved by faith alone), sola Scriptura (Scripture alone is the rule of faith), and sola gratia (grace alone). Generally, one ought to be leery of claims that things work “alone.” Typically, many things work together in harmony; things are interrelated. Very seldom is anyone or anything really “alone.”The problem with “solos” emerges (it seems to me) in our mind, where it is...

...All due respect, Solo: A Star Wars Story is not giving audiences everything they ever want, everything they ever need, right in front of them....Walt Disney and Lucasfilm’s ill-advised and ill-fated Han Solo prequel flick earned just $8.153 million on its second Friday of domestic release. That’s a huge 77.2% drop from its not-great $35.6m Friday (which included $14.1m in Thursday previews) and it gives the film just $127.745m in eight days of domestic release. ..That’s a slightly larger drop than the 76% Friday-to-Friday fall of The Last Jedi, and this Star Wars story won’t have two weeks of “Christmas-to-New...