Solo: A Star Wars Story fell well short of box office expectations with a $101 million 4 day opening. Disney entered the weekend projecting a performance anywhere from $130-150 million for the four-day weekend and earlier had talked about double Black Panther pre-sales.
Star Wars the Last Jedi made $1.3 billion worldwide but was widely despised by many fans.
Rogue One was an anthology movie and opened with $155 million.
I am a fan of Star Wars but have only really liked The Empire Strikes Back and the original Star Wars. Rogue One had a lot that was good in it. The Force Awakens was mostly a remake of the original Star Wars.
Glass half full versus Glass half empty
The prequels had a lot of well known problems. It had good visuals and dynamically choreographed light saber battles. I enjoyed the prequels by performing live editing. In the theater watching the prequels I would pretend that the Anakin Skywalker dialogue was not happening.
The drop in tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story after the disappointment of the Last Jedi indicate that the fan rebellion against inferior movies and stories is hitting the Disney-Star Wars empire in the wallet. There has also been a drop in toy sales.
Star Wars became a merchandise dominated franchise since Return of the Jedi. Toy sales were about four times the revenue from the movies.
The hope would be that new writers and executives will make efforts to improve stories to make fan satisfying movies. This may involve some soft rebooting.
They should also look at stories and directing which make the universe seem bigger. A big problem with the recent shows is that the Universe that the characters inhabit seems smaller.
In Jedi, the entire rebellion fit on the Millennium Falcon.
There is no sense of a galaxy. Lord of the Rings gave a sense of larger battles and it was a fantasy setting with tens of thousands on part of a planet.
The Star Wars problem has not been the number of movies. It has been the stories and plot.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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