Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Hateyou said:

Blows my mind that a movie bringing in only $1b is considered a failure nowadays.

Click to expand...

its a potential issue. lets say you were michael jordan's dad, and he decided he was gonna sell cars after college instead of play basketball. No matter how good a car salesman he might be, you will still be disappointed because he had the potential to be the greatest basketball star of all time, get himself in the history books, make hundreds of millions vs lead a perfectly normal life as a salesman.

There can only be 3 mainline star wars movies made between 2012 and 2020. They should have each hit $2 billion plus in worldwide box office, plus another $1 billion in streaming/rental plus a few more billion in toys, merchandise, etc. Plus get everyone excited enough about the franchise that they could have made billions more off ancillary movies, TV shows, comics, etc. Unfortunately the trilogy has soured the public so much that sales of pretty much everything Star Wars are down every year. There is only one Star Wars, it had built up the IP brand for decades, and Kathleen Kennedy and JJ Abrams (and Rian Johnson to a lesser extent) fucked it up.

Sure, Disney is making huge profits off its Lucasfilm purchase, they paid $4b and have probably reaped over $10b in revenue since then tied to Star Wars and over $3b in profit. By comparison though, Disney paid around $8b for marvel and has made over $28 billion in revenue since then. 28 BILLION. Thats the kind of numbers they were hoping/expecting, and its failed miserably by that yardstick.

Sterling said:

I mean when a movie costs a couple of hundred million to produce, then a couple of hundred million for marketing that's just the economics of it. I remember they made a real big deal when True Lies cost over 100 million to produce.

Click to expand...

its an even bigger flop when you find out this movie was completely reshot which means they probably spent 300-400m filming it and another 200-300m marketing it just to make, what? a 200 million profit?

Chukzombi said:

its an even bigger flop when you find out this movie was completely reshot which means they probably spent 300-400m filming it and another 200-300m marketing it just to make, what? a 200 million profit?

Click to expand...

Well, breaking down how much of the box office they actually get isn't real simple because different places get different percentages and stuff. But it's legit possible that at 1B they're still in the red.

Up to 80% of opening week goes to the studio for US box office, that share declines week by week so overall they end up with 50-60% gross depending on the film's legs. The goal in the US is to attract people that buy concessions which far exceed the price of a ticket. International is more straightforward the average is around 33% but can vary 20-40% based on country.

IIRC for China a Hollywood import only gets 25% but if they co-produce it with a chinese company that raises to a 40% cut.

Chukzombi said:

its an even bigger flop when you find out this movie was completely reshot which means they probably spent 300-400m filming it and another 200-300m marketing it just to make, what? a 200 million profit?

Click to expand...

300m was spent on re-shoots alone.

Budget estimate is potentially 700m before marketing.

jayrebb said:

300m was spent on re-shoots alone.

Budget estimate is potentially 700m before marketing.

Click to expand...

i cant even fathom that because they spent a shit ton of cash on marketing. like every commercial on cable was Star Wars related. insurance, fast food, cars, airlines, you name it, there was a SW tie in, they evn created TV specials just to "celebrate" the premiere of the film and they had a lot of media puff pieces on it too. granted a lot of it was on their own owned media, but when you divert others ads away to promote your own IPs, thats still lost ad income. 300 million for marketing isnt a crazy number. 700 million on the film alone would be a catastrophic amount of waste. even a megacorp like Disney would axe a bunch of CEOs over such a loss. add that with people cancelling their disney+ subscriptions due to lack of new exclusive original content til the end of the year and this is going to send some shockwaves along th company. black widow and disneyworld/disneyland isnt going to save them this year.

jayrebb said:

300m was spent on re-shoots alone.

Budget estimate is potentially 700m before marketing.

Click to expand...

The-numbers.com has the cost at 275 million total. You guys are worse than fucking fake news trying to come up with ways to shit on the movie lol. The movie wasn't great but you guys are all CNN over this shit. A 700 million budget would almost double the most expensive movie ever made currently. Which was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at 379 million.

Harshaw said:

The-numbers.com has the cost at 275 million total. You guys are worse than fucking fake news trying to come up with ways to shit on the movie lol. The movie wasn't great but you guys are all CNN over this shit. A 700 million budget would almost double the most expensive movie ever made currently. Which was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at 379 million.

Click to expand...

they shot two full movies and as many as 8-12 endings. fully rendered. its gonna be more than that pirates shit.

Chukzombi said:

they shot two full movies and as many as 8-12 endings. fully rendered. its gonna be more than that pirates shit.

Click to expand...

According to whom, Reddit? JJ has stated a bunch of times that Force Awakens had more reshoots.

Hell the editors themselves said there was just 3 scenes reshot over a few week period:

Speaking on the podcast The Art of the Cut, Maryann Brandon—who edited Rise of Skywalker alongside Stefan Grube—revealed that the film went back for a couple of weeks of reshoots in July 2019:

“We added a couple of scenes. We had two weeks back in London in July and we added a couple of scenes and added some dialogue that we felt we needed, and there were a couple of very small emotional moments that J.J. and I and Stefan decided would benefit the film, and we went back and got those.”

Click to expand...

What were those scenes, exactly? Well one was a biggie: the scene where Luke’s (Mark Hamill) Force Ghost appears in front of Rey (Daisy Ridley). And another was the first scene between Rey and Poe (Oscar Isaac):

“The scene on the island with Luke, when Luke sees Rey. The film kind of informed us, after it was together, what it needed to say so we went back and got that dialogue. There was like a funny moment between Poe and Rey when he lands the Falcon and it’s on fire, we wanted to have a more humorous exchange between them. Nothing major, no.”

Click to expand...

It’s unclear if Brandon is saying the entire scene with Luke was added, or if they just scrapped what they had originally shot and reworked the dialogue. As we now know, it’s during that scene that Luke gives Rey Leia’s lightsaber and encourages her to confront Palpatine, so it’s possible this dialogue was added because the story or structure changed during filming. We certainly know that the handling of Luke’s lightsaber in Force Awakens was changed significantly during reshoots—that’s why Abrams was able to use unused TFA footage of Leia handing Rey the lightsaber for Rise of Skywalker.

As for the Poe and Rey scene, I’d been told by someone with knowledge of the production that Rise of Skywalker originally opened with the Luke/Leia flashback scene we glimpse briefly later in the film, and Abrams admitted that the first act was the hardest to crack while crafting Rise of Skywalker, so this checks out.

To that end, Brandon also says that Rey and Leia’s first scene together was added during reshoots:

“We shot Rey’s introduction when she’s up in the air and the rocks are spinning around her, because we wanted to introduce Leia and her. I had to go back and find good shots of Leia that we hadn’t used in [The Force Awakens], and we had those and it kind of made us think, ‘Oh we could have this really fun scene to introduce Leia and Rey.’ So the film kind of informs you of things it might need.”

Click to expand...

Solo was just some pick-ups and set-ups that Lord and Miller missed during production.

Dom said:

Didn't they bring in an acting coach to help the main actor as a part of those reshoots? I'd assume it would have had to been more than just those if so.

Click to expand...

Yeah, apparently it was because Disney was basically trying to get him to act like Harrison Ford and not just this actor being Han Solo. It worked though, I thought he did a pretty passable job as Han.

Chukzombi said:

black widow and disneyworld/disneyland isnt going to save them this year.

Click to expand...

A special edition of the special edition of Endgame maybe? Like the original Blade Runner that made $27 million at the box office but 189 billion in DVD sales with the 400 different cuts it had.

It's a dissapointment rather than a flop but with multi billion dollar investments you have to consider opportunity cost too

They could have used all of the Star Wars time/resources on multiple other projects and potentially made more money that way. Like even a fucking Jumanji reboot nearly made a billion for a fraction of the Star Wars cost.

Rise of Skywalker was the fastest Star Wars movie to fall below 1m at the box office.

What a piece of shit.

Less legs than any Star Wars movie in history..

Harshaw said:

The-numbers.com has the cost at 275 million total. You guys are worse than fucking fake news trying to come up with ways to shit on the movie lol. The movie wasn't great but you guys are all CNN over this shit. A 700 million budget would almost double the most expensive movie ever made currently. Which was Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at 379 million.

Click to expand...

I can't recall Jayrebb ever posting a source for anything he cites but his LARP is funny.

I wonder HTF on stranger tides cost that much, did they pay Johnny depp 100m or something?

Maybe they were dumb and built an actual boat like that Steve Carell sequel. In Star War's case Disney built a titanic and then hyperspaced a chunky asian girlfriend into the side to sink it. They didn't even film it and had to redo it all as CGI in the movie.

This trilogy had a ~$7bn box office potential and they did ~$4.5bn.

I don’t care that $4.5billion is still a 'big number', or if they 'covered their costs', that is an absolutely stunning shortfall of investment potential. It’s even worse when you consider the marginal profit on that missing $2.5bn compared to the first $4.5bn. This has been an open-handed rebuke of the franchise by one of the largest and oldest fan bases in existence, and their play to engage new markets through ham-fisted social pandering has fallen laughably short.

What’s worse is by failing to capture new fans who are parents, while simultaneously alienating existing ones, they may have done irreparable damage to the brand among today’s children. Let’s hope the cartoons and TV series' can do some damage control, because if not, I think we’ve seen the last of Star Wars (as we know it) on the big screen.

Hopefully this is a lesson to the industry; get woke, go broke.