Star Wars : Rogue One

Their parents deserve to be fleeced for raising such unimaginative pussies. I have a scar on my scalp from when my brother and I sharpened sticks to use as light sabers in one of our epic rematches of Luke and Vader from ESB. I ducked one of his jabs but not quite fast enough (I was Vader, I was supposed to be wearing a helmet he said). My mom kinda freaked out while I was lying there bleeding from my head onto the lawn. I remember that shit like it was yesterday.

These young 'uns with their non makeshift gay little lightsabers. We had the real deal. Nothing but our wits. Mine was a grade A first class metal motherfucking silver flashlight that weighed five pounds. Not that wimpy plastic shit.

I'm kidding of course. Five year old me would have appreciated a cool looking lightsaber. We had to use our imaginations back then.

Feanor said:

These young 'uns with their non makeshift gay little lightsabers. We had the real deal. Nothing but our wits. Mine was a grade A first class metal motherfucking silver flashlight that weighed five pounds. Not that wimpy plastic shit.

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My first upgrade from raw vegetation tech light sabers was a wooden pop pistol that I had broken the plunger while playing years before but I still had the barrel portion lying around for some reason.



I got a wooden dowel rod from my grandma's house (this was back when most of the she folk did some sort of home crafts) that was just tight enough to jam down inside of it. A little blue paint and I had a newly minted, all-natural light saber.

zignor 4 said:

Star Wars has been selling mountains of crap to children since 1977.

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And Star Wars wants to continue to sell crap to the very same people who were children in 1977.

Guess this bombed in China.

Not sure what the Star Wars creative executive committee is going to do next. Shoehorning in Donnie Yen didn't seem to do it, maybe Jackie Chan next?

Valishar said:

Guess this bombed in China.

Not sure what the Star Wars creative executive committee is going to do next. Shoehorning in Donnie Yen didn't seem to do it, maybe Jackie Chan next?

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I like how they blame a stagnant Chinese box office, Star Wars being less popular in China, local films being given priority for better release dates, and record pollution levels but not 'its a shitty movie'.

I feel like China has the opposite taste in movies than the US. We want less CGI with better characters and an over arching story, while they want CGI shit shows with 'splosions! See Transformers...
R1 was still pretty meh though. "What are next?"

Rogue One didn't "bomb" in China. It just made significantly less than TFA, which is true for the US as well. TFA made 247 Million opening weekend domestic, R1 made 155 Million.

R1 is probably going to peeter out at around half a billion US domestic when all is done. TFA made twice that.

The insane TFA (and Phantom Menace) hype of a new Star Wars after many, many years of nothing likely cannot be matched easily once you have yearly releases. Episode VIII will probably also falls short of TFA. And "main trilogy" will likely always beat "anthology".

#8 Domestic
#41 Worldwide (with the highest domestic % all the way up to #27 The Dark Knight)

Or "The sky is falling!" according to naysayers. About a spinoff.

TFA didn't create a lot of converts to the brand in China either. The translation was poorly done and it failed to impress a lot of audience members in a country where Star Wars doesn't have a deep history to draw upon. So it's a bit of a tarnished brand now. I've also seen some people who live in China say that after the roll out media events that the movie has virtually no promotion behind it.

And while demand for CGI spectacles, explosions, and heavily choreographed fights might not be culture specific homage films often are and that is essentially what Star Wars always has been and continues to be.

This showed up in my youtube recommended videos. Thought some of you might find it interesting

The movie showed me that I'd watch a SW movie that is nothing but Empire vs Rebel combat. Two hours and thirty minutes of nothing but x wing, atat and laser fire. I'd watch and enjoy.

I could do with 100% less of Governor "Grand "uncanny valley" Moff" Tarkin CGI. What a creepy shot.

Rogue One's reshoots show how Disney saved the first standalone Star Wars movie

verge said:

At one point in the process, editor John Gilroy (Suicide Squad) joined the team, and the story was “reconceptualized,” leading to scenes that fleshed out characters like Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed). Cassian’s introduction and Jyn’s escape from the Imperial transporter on Wobani were scenes that came from that process.

Darth Vader’s film-stealing scene in which he butchered a slew of Rebel soldiers to try and recover the plans was one of the many scenes that was added as part of the reshoots.

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Man the original version must have been a piece of shit if the reshoots "fleshed out" Cassian and Bodhi, who were still terrible characters.

Saying the reshoots saved it is running on some assumptions. Very few people know, definitively, what the original edit was really like. Jyn's character was scaled back to add more to Cassian and Bodhi, so you can argue that it went from a single strong character and two weak supporting characters to just 3 characters that were all lacking to some degree. And while the Vader scene at the end was added, it supposedly replaced Vader taking out many of the team members himself, so it was just a swap out there.

And then there were costs from the reshoots. The soundtrack suffered because they forced a last minute change of composer.

Personally I think they ended up responding to one of the criticisms of TFA that required shuffling a lot of stuff around to accommodate very late in the process; Rey as a mary sue character that outshone all of the other characters in the movie. I think Jyn Erso was the same sort of character in the early edits, though I think part of the intention was to keep the supporting players smaller so as not to have you overly attached to them when Vader cuts them down. It takes away some of the joy at seeing him in all of his glory when he's chewing up characters you're attached to. The same wasn't true for Jyn because she would have survived.

It sounds like a small change by itself but it wasn't.

Big Phoenix said:

Extensive reshoots? Replacing the composer at the last second? Tacking on scenes? Almost sounds like it was just thrown together to milk some fanboy money.

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No way. The got the Suicide Squad re-shoot guy to do all the reshooting and patching. Impeccable resume boosting character plots and such. Loved his work on Slipknot and Katana. Really guarantees integrity and putting-fans-first-no-matter-what-the-money-execs-say right there, does it not?

Zweischneid said:

No way. The got the Suicide Squad re-shoot guy to do all the reshooting and patching.

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He handled the re-edit but it was another Gilroy that did the actual rewrites and directed the reshoots themselves, his brother Tony Gilroy. He wrote all of the Bourne movies except this last one (and directed one of them) wrote and directed Michael Clayton. He's no slouch.