Posted on 06/26/2018 10:44:50 AM PDT by servo1969
If you don't want to watch, here's the quick written version:
Disney staged a big "secret" conference call with ranking people in the Star Wars division. Security guards were posted outside the doors at offices to prevent eavesdropping. Pixar and Marvel representatives were able to listen in on the call, but not speak on it. Apparently this was allowed to get feedback, I guess at a later point, about the Star Wars situation.
Disney's head Bob Iger wants to fire Kathleen Kennedy, but there's a problem: No one they're willing to offer the job to is willing to take it. JJ Abrams (Randolph reports) was offered the job, but turned it down flat. "Several" were approached.
One person that's brought up as a possible replacement for Kennedy, Dave Filloni, isn't being considered for the job by Iger, I guess because he hasn't run anything big like a studio.
Randolph says (speculating, I think) that no one wants the job because the Lucasfilm team is divided between old-guard Star Wars people and Kennedy's handpicked loyalists.
I would speculate myself that, assuming this claim that no one wants the job is true, it's because the brand is broken, and people know that, and it's a no-win situation: Everyone seems to think that Star Wars is supposed to make money automatically. That's no longer true post-Solo, but people still think that, so any head of Lucasfilm is in a situation where the best they can do is meet expectations (make money), and the worst they can do is fail spectacularly.
There's no upside. Well, except a huge pile of money, but I imagine the people being approached are already getting huge piles of money from other ventures with more of an upside as far as their reputations.
So no big-name person would want to walk into that situation. Smaller names would take that chance, but apparently Disney hasn't gotten desperate enough to offer it to a smaller name. Yet.
Randolph says that Disney feels that Star Wars is too targeted to "older SJWs," instead of its traditional fan base of men, and this is also hurting Star Wars in its merchandise sales, as "older SJWs" don't really buy movie tickets and certainly don't spend a lot of money on Milennium Falcon playsets.
She also reports that all the Star Wars "anthology" movies are indeed on hold as Disney tries to figure this out, except maybe for one: The Obi-Wan movie, which Disney thinks it should have made instead of Star Wars. However, while this movie is not officially on hold, it's also not on the front-burner, either.
Lastly, while "Episode IX" is still on (it's already started filming), it's "too late for any major course corrections." Kathleen Kennedy has ceded all creative control to director J.J. Abrams, maybe to spare herself further blame, maybe because she wants to just sit this one out, or who knows, maybe because Disney wants the ball in someone else's hands.
One point she alludes to, which she made before: She thinks that Star Wars never appealed to Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy didn't like the franchise, because it was, indeed, a boys' adventure franchise.
Instead of making a boys' adventure franchise she didn't get and didn't like, she made it into something she could like: a girls' empowerment fantasy.
This kind of sums up the problem with Social Justice Warriors taking over male-skewing sections of pop culture: They just don't like it. They never did like it. Some of them even feel that these parts of pop culture encourage "toxic masculinity," and therefore are evil.
And therefore must be subverted and remade into something they never were before.
So you... put multimillion dollar companies into the hands of people who don't like the product those companies sell and in fact might even hate?
Well, good luck with that, I guess.
Doubling Down and Redoubling Down: Apparently an official employee of Lucasfilm, writing for the "official" StarWars.com website, has decided to inform people that they are not "customers" of Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm owes them nothing at all, not even polite treatment.
She seems to be echoing Kathleen Kennedy, who has previously declared that she owes nothing to the male fans of Star Wars (who, let's face it, have maintained the value of the franchise for 40+ years):
"I have a responsibility to the company that I work with. I don't feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way. I would never just seize on saying, 'Well, this is a franchise that's appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'"
Yes... yes... reach out with your Hatred... all is proceeding precisely as I envisioned...
Mallory Millet if anything would agree with you on that front. She even thinks we LOST the Cold War despite the USSR collapsing because of what feminism has wrought in terms of damages.
Mel Brooks kinda covered that in Spaceballs. lol
Hence, the reference. ;)
And anyone younger than 45 probably doesn’t understand your tag line. lol
That’s THEIR problem. :)
$100 million? Pocket change. Disney did just shy of $10 billion in net profit last year. Disney’s first three Star Wars movies are all in the top 10 grossing movies of all time. Last Jedi is the #1 selling Blu-ray this year and was the #1 theatrical release of 2017. Despite the angry fanboys who got far more attention in the media than their numbers would suggest, the franchise is doing just fine. Solo’s problem is that it just wasn’t that good, and Disney knew it was a problem when they fired the original director and brought in Ron Howard to salvage what they could. Lone Ranger and John Carter were much bigger duds for Disney. And those don’t seem to have phased them.
and the new Star Wars Land will bring another bill to disney starting next year
disney has guaranteed income. Every generation of kids want to see the classic film and now they have dozens of them. Families from around the world still flock to the parks.
In terms of actual Star Wars sales (not just sales made by Disney or Marvel or any other properties owned by Disney, but stuff strictly relating to Star Wars), however, they have yet to actually get back the $4.06 billion that they paid Lucas for the franchise (not to mention Indiana Jones, which reminds me, they haven’t seemed to touched Indiana Jones at all).
Someone on Breitbart actually gave a step-by-step process of how they’re doing with Star Wars regarding the sales:
A. Disney pays Lucas 4.06 billion dollars. That means at this point Disney is in the red at -4,060,000,000 dollars.
B. Disney makes a net profit on Force Awakens of 780 million dollars. That means at that point they are still -4,060,000,000 + 780,000,000 = -3,280,000,000 in the hole.
C. Disney makes a profit on Rogue One of 319 million dollars. They are now at -3,280,000,000 + 319,000,000 = -2,961000,000 in the hole.
D. Disney makes a profit on Last Jedi of 418 million dollars. At that point they are at -2,961,000,000 + 418,000,000 = -2,543,000,000
D. Disney makes one billion in merchandising and video. That means at that point they are -2,543,000,000 + 1,000,000,000 = -1,543,000,000 in the hole.
Still in the red but slowly digging themselves out but then:
E. Disney loses 250 million on Solo. At this point they are therefore still-1,543,000,000 - 250,000,000 = -1,793,000,000 in the hole on the deal.
So the long and the short of it is, they still haven’t come close to getting out of it. In fact, they’re barely even close to halfway to paying it off.
Also, Rotten Tomatoes viewership rating was pretty bad as you can see here regarding Last Jedi: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_wars_the_last_jedi/
Also, regarding other duds, you forgot to mention A Wrinkle in Time.
Your road not taken post is a good summation of where the next generation reboot of the franchise under Disney went off of the rails: Rey’s character is all wrong based on the story line and details concerning the nature of the Force and training of Jedi built up in the six Stars Wars movies that preceded her introduction. You cannot trash all that and have the dedicated fans not be disheartened.
However, let’s look at this from a business standpoint. This franchise started in 1977. I took the future Mrs. Rhino to see it on our second date. Forty one years later, the franchise is still making Billions. But the original fan base is aging out of the population and the millennial generation is raising families. The fan base to sustain the franchise into the mid-century is the post-millennial and subsequent generations. Those fans have had the SJW/LGBTQxyz agenda shoved at them relentlessly since elementary school. And all the heroes and villains in all the other CGI-heavy movies they watch have magical superpowers and abilities. So the new Stars Wars ensemble of heroes and villains needs to be adjusted to fit the new social “reality.”
E voila! Rey is a millennial chick of yet to be determined sexuality with superpowers. And, twenty to thirty years from now, assuming Disney finds the audience sweet spot and keeps the franchise going, it will change again.
So, in one sense, Kennedy is right. The older male fan base is not the future of the franchise.
What she fails to realize is the subversive power of AI-based custom content creation. Going to the movie theater will be supplanted by individualized versions of movies populated with characters whose attributes reflect the viewer’s preferences. All gay characters? No problem. Pornographic sexual interludes? Sure. Graphic violence? In slow motion? and lots of light saber action? All Black actors and actresses? All Asian? All Muslim? Happy to oblige. Include some now dead actors and actresses? Certainly. We will just summon them from their avatar minicomputers in the studio network. They are happy to continue acting (and making money for their estates) even after they pass away. (For some, thanks to AI, death might not be the end after all.)(This could create new branches of law!)
The “movie” will become a shell that all this changing detail is fitted into similar to how a written play is just a scaffolding that the actual presentation is built upon. Except, no two person’s versions of the movie will be exactly the same. Multiple versions of the movie, all equally valid, will be in circulation.
Water cooler discussions of the latest Star Wars movie will get complex.
Welcome to the future.
No, Solo’s main problem was that The Last Jedi was horrific and people chose not to attend - this was compounded by the multiple insults hurled at the fanbase by LucasFilm’s current SJW leadership and the admission they are using Star Wars to push a left-wing political agenda. The Last Jedi’s DVD BluRay sales are not good for what they should be- they may barely make Rogue One’s numbers which was not even part of the episodic saga.
You are quite spin doctor for the Left’s behavior in trying to appropriate Star Wars - the fans are rejecting it. That is reality. A Star Wars movie not even being able to break even is a disaster of epic proportions.
The loss of interest / investment income on the spent $4 billion only adds to that.
It is no small accomplishment to make a Star Wars movie that is a money loser. Solo itself from what I have read was a mediocre film, but even a mediocre Star Wars film would make money - it was the horrific The Last Jedi that was most at fault for Solo’s demise as it caused people to lose interest in the franchise or deliberately make a conscience decision not to go in protest.
The toy sales have also collapsed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xayw6RfPa50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZPRuhTFkxc
This is sad to watch.
Well, to be fair, Star Wars was always meant to push a left-wing political agenda (George Lucas created the film series specifically to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War as well as giving solidarity to the Vietcong, and don’t get me started on how the Prequel Trilogy really makes its left-wing nature all the more explicit by making having any military at all to be a bad thing and in ROTS basically bashing Bush a few times), but still, even by Star Wars standards, what the current heads of Lucasfilm are doing regarding a left-wing agenda goes far beyond what even Lucas would have ever envisioned, and it seems the fans are now yelling “enough!” at the crap. When The Last Jedi makes the prequels look tolerable, TFA as well, you definitely know Disney screwed up big time.
Honestly, before now, the closest Star Wars EVER had to a box office failure was that Clone Wars movie. That should say something.
I’ll watch them, but I don’t think I’m going to be particularly sympathetic to George Lucas on this one (well, technically, I really have no sympathy for Lucas for even doing the sale in the first place in order to essentially cheat on his taxes, not to mention the whole thing about how he alters his films despite making a fuss at Turner Broadcasting doing the same earlier, or heck, him tricking audiences into rooting for the Vietcong, but this part leaves me even less sympathetic than all of the above), especially when he was apparently the one who handpicked Kathleen Kennedy to run Lucasfilm after he resigned. I’m sorry, but I fail to see why he thought it was even REMOTELY a good idea to have KK run it when she makes it clear she hates it. Had I been in Lucas’s position, I’d deliberately pass her over for promotion precisely BECAUSE I know she hates Star Wars and thus see zero reason to give her control over a franchise she hates. He has no one to blame but himself for this whole mess.
Whoops, that first part was actually meant to be to your response to that guy who defended the sales. But yeah, still stands.
It worked so well for “Space Balls”!
Have a good one.
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