They said we would get tired of winning, still not gonna watch their crud though. I’m open to it but I expect movies to exemplify craft, even if imperfect.
When Disney bought LucaFilms with the rights to the Star Wars franchise, they had a license to print money. This was a franchise with a massive global fanbase. And she shat upon millions of fans. It takes a special kind of talent to screw up things so badly when she could’ve just as easily remained faithful to the fanbase.
She produced 4 of the 50 top grossing films of all time https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross/?area=XWW
Say that pretty successful, how successful was the previous 20 years of Lucas films?
Her goal was making money not producing a vision. She was not going to sit on her hands for 10+ years like Lucas, waiting for film making technology to advance to pursue his vision and produce the well known master piece A Phantom Menace and introduce the world to Ja Ja Binks.
When one analyzes a decision, they have to contemplate the outcomes had a different path be taken.
For example, when a hiring manager is deciding who is the best person to hire for a job, that person might not be the person who does the “best” in interviews or has the “best” resume. The criteria is who does the job the best. The hiring manager must take into account that the process might not be the best at finding the right person and the “best” person for the job could be someone who didn’t do as well as other candidates.
You don’t know if you were right or wrong until after you have made the decision and even if the person selected does OK, it could still be a bad decision because the better candidate is out on the street.
Difficult isn’t it?
Does it matter? Yes, it does, especially when the stakes are so large. The bigger the company, the larger the role of the candidate, the more impact a choice has. We are talking about many billions of dollars here. Making a billion sounds nice but not when the opportunity lost is making two or three times that.
Kennedy helps us by providing some data points, thanks for the chart btw.
5 Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens $2,071,310,218 2015
22 Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi $1,334,407,706 2017
40 Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker $1,077,022,372 2019
The data shows that Star Wars had a massive latent audience and they showed up for the JJ Abrams TFA. The draw for the movie was its cultural capital, nostalgia. But what happens after TFA?
Star Wars lost about half its audience and anyone who has followed this knows, there were a large portion of the people who did pay to see the movies that were upset with them.
A hit series would see its audience either remain stable or increase but this didn’t happen and Disney had an opportunity loss of at least $2,000,000,000.
Disney had an opportunity loss of at least $2,000,000,000.
Well before “Engineer” points this out, I didn’t come up with the same figure. I am assuming opportunity cost would be the sum of the losses between the three.
Which would be what TFA grossed minus against what each of the other two grossed, summed. In this case we see:
1) TFA – TLJ = 736,902,512 (36% loss)
2) TFA – TRS = 994,287,846 (48% loss or 12% <TLJ)
3) Sum of two= 1,731,190,358
Or under 2 billion if I did the math right. Am I calculating this correctly? The trend line wasn’t doubling gross loss per episode over TFA (36% with 1 and 12% for 2 vs 1), but with only two data points it’s hard to know what the relaxation was, but clearly not in the direction of goodness.
I wonder if these ratios hold for all the 3 trilogies?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader…
Note that this is counting only the movie gross.
As far as I know there aren’t equivalent figures for merchandising income. But I’ve heard over the years that merchandise got Lucasfilm far more money than the movies themselves. If there was a similar drop there…
I wasn’t trying to be super precise, just round up. Normally I would say, “just under $2 billion.” But I was assuming the audience would grow at least a little bit for a franchise with such large cultural appeal.
It is an exercise in what could have been and the real world numbers get us close but they don’t tell the whole story. I think they would have done quite a bit better had they stayed true to the characters and didn’t attack their base audience.
Good eye though.
I think you are missing the point.
It’s not just about the money from the movies, it’s about the overall brand and the colossal amount of money that ‘should’ have been available to support the Star Wars franchise overall.
She is the death star.
Far too late. I won’t be easily persuaded to re-engage.
IMNSHO: there are only 3 Star Wars movies worth watching. In chronological order:
1) Revenge of the Sith
2) Rogue One
3) A New Hope
and if you MUST have a conclusion I’ll throw in two more:
4) The Empire Strikes Back (mainly for continuity)
5) Return of the Jedi (the weakest of the five, maybe ’cause I’m not an Ewok weenie).
All the rest (movies, made for TV serials, wearable bling, etc.) are imminently forgettable and I all but have (mostly) thankfully.
Star Wars is dead. Long live the legacy.
I no longer care about Star Wars. I read many of the novels that came out after the original trilogy. There was a rich collection of stories, not all good, but most better than any movie we got from Disney. Since Disney killed off those stories as relevant, then the franchise is dead to me.
Disney itself has become a toxic brand. Nothing they offer is appealing to me.
Until I watch her walking out of the office carrying boxes of unsold Acolyte merch I will not believe it’s true. Even then, I will remain vigilant for the possibility that “somehow, KK has returned”.
Yeah, the story of her stepping down is like the report that Justin Trudeau resigned as PM, both likely effective whenever they find a replacement that nobody seems in a hurry to find.
They said we would get tired of winning, still not gonna watch their crud though. I’m open to it but I expect movies to exemplify craft, even if imperfect.
When Disney bought LucaFilms with the rights to the Star Wars franchise, they had a license to print money. This was a franchise with a massive global fanbase. And she shat upon millions of fans. It takes a special kind of talent to screw up things so badly when she could’ve just as easily remained faithful to the fanbase.
She produced 4 of the 50 top grossing films of all time
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross/?area=XWW
Say that pretty successful, how successful was the previous 20 years of Lucas films?
Her goal was making money not producing a vision. She was not going to sit on her hands for 10+ years like Lucas, waiting for film making technology to advance to pursue his vision and produce the well known master piece A Phantom Menace and introduce the world to Ja Ja Binks.
When one analyzes a decision, they have to contemplate the outcomes had a different path be taken.
For example, when a hiring manager is deciding who is the best person to hire for a job, that person might not be the person who does the “best” in interviews or has the “best” resume. The criteria is who does the job the best. The hiring manager must take into account that the process might not be the best at finding the right person and the “best” person for the job could be someone who didn’t do as well as other candidates.
You don’t know if you were right or wrong until after you have made the decision and even if the person selected does OK, it could still be a bad decision because the better candidate is out on the street.
Difficult isn’t it?
Does it matter? Yes, it does, especially when the stakes are so large. The bigger the company, the larger the role of the candidate, the more impact a choice has. We are talking about many billions of dollars here. Making a billion sounds nice but not when the opportunity lost is making two or three times that.
Kennedy helps us by providing some data points, thanks for the chart btw.
The data shows that Star Wars had a massive latent audience and they showed up for the JJ Abrams TFA. The draw for the movie was its cultural capital, nostalgia. But what happens after TFA?
Star Wars lost about half its audience and anyone who has followed this knows, there were a large portion of the people who did pay to see the movies that were upset with them.
A hit series would see its audience either remain stable or increase but this didn’t happen and Disney had an opportunity loss of at least $2,000,000,000.
Disney had an opportunity loss of at least $2,000,000,000.
Well before “Engineer” points this out, I didn’t come up with the same figure. I am assuming opportunity cost would be the sum of the losses between the three.
Which would be what TFA grossed minus against what each of the other two grossed, summed. In this case we see:
1) TFA – TLJ = 736,902,512 (36% loss)
2) TFA – TRS = 994,287,846 (48% loss or 12% <TLJ)
3) Sum of two= 1,731,190,358
Or under 2 billion if I did the math right. Am I calculating this correctly? The trend line wasn’t doubling gross loss per episode over TFA (36% with 1 and 12% for 2 vs 1), but with only two data points it’s hard to know what the relaxation was, but clearly not in the direction of goodness.
I wonder if these ratios hold for all the 3 trilogies?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader…
Note that this is counting only the movie gross.
As far as I know there aren’t equivalent figures for merchandising income. But I’ve heard over the years that merchandise got Lucasfilm far more money than the movies themselves. If there was a similar drop there…
I wasn’t trying to be super precise, just round up. Normally I would say, “just under $2 billion.” But I was assuming the audience would grow at least a little bit for a franchise with such large cultural appeal.
It is an exercise in what could have been and the real world numbers get us close but they don’t tell the whole story. I think they would have done quite a bit better had they stayed true to the characters and didn’t attack their base audience.
Good eye though.
I think you are missing the point.
It’s not just about the money from the movies, it’s about the overall brand and the colossal amount of money that ‘should’ have been available to support the Star Wars franchise overall.
She is the death star.
Far too late. I won’t be easily persuaded to re-engage.
IMNSHO: there are only 3 Star Wars movies worth watching. In chronological order:
1) Revenge of the Sith
2) Rogue One
3) A New Hope
and if you MUST have a conclusion I’ll throw in two more:
4) The Empire Strikes Back (mainly for continuity)
5) Return of the Jedi (the weakest of the five, maybe ’cause I’m not an Ewok weenie).
All the rest (movies, made for TV serials, wearable bling, etc.) are imminently forgettable and I all but have (mostly) thankfully.
Star Wars is dead. Long live the legacy.
I no longer care about Star Wars. I read many of the novels that came out after the original trilogy. There was a rich collection of stories, not all good, but most better than any movie we got from Disney. Since Disney killed off those stories as relevant, then the franchise is dead to me.
Disney itself has become a toxic brand. Nothing they offer is appealing to me.
Until I watch her walking out of the office carrying boxes of unsold Acolyte merch I will not believe it’s true. Even then, I will remain vigilant for the possibility that “somehow, KK has returned”.
Yeah, the story of her stepping down is like the report that Justin Trudeau resigned as PM, both likely effective whenever they find a replacement that nobody seems in a hurry to find.