Star Wars is now officially a franchise that loses money.

The numbers are in for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and they don’t look good. The movie is projected to lose fifty million dollars for Disney. The company won’t, of course, suffer terribly; its Marvel and Pixar divisions are still running strong and are as popular as ever. But LucasFilm is in trouble. To give you an idea of how bad things are, here’s a chart laying it all out:

https://www.theatlas.com/javascripts/atlas.js

The numbers cited in the graph above are not adjusted for inflation, but I found an online inflation calculator and plugged in the box office gross for the very first Star Wars film from 1977. Adjusted for inflation, A New Hope grossed $2,480,653,465.35, more than Episode VII made just three years ago. Even adjusting Episode VII’s box office gross for inflation since 2015, it still doesn’t quite match the gross take for the original film. Remember: These are global, not domestic, figures.

The much-anticipated Episode VII: The Force Awakens, was at best a mediocre retread of George Lucas’ original 1977 film, directed by an uninspired hack whose biggest claim to infamy was dumbing down Star Trek to fit his shallow imbecile’s intellect. I suspect that most of the box office success of The Force Awakens comes primarily from advance ticket sales. Audiences left theaters feeling disappointed, yet hopeful that the next installment would answer the questions set up in the movie.

Those hopes were dashed by the utterly dismal Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, which was nothing more than an exercise in deliberately insulting anyone and everyone who is a Star Wars fan. Idiot Ruin Johnson, whose only major studio credits prior to coming on board the Star Wars franchise include the awful Brick and Looper, was tasked with continuing the story plan set up by Jar Jar Abrams. Instead, he tossed it in the trash and proceeded to use The Last Jedi as a platform to express his hatred for franchise and fans alike. As a result, the movie made only about half what its predecessor took in, and caused all manner of controversy as audiences were divided into people who don’t like having their intelligence insulted, and those who don’t care if they are insulted. LucasFilm head Kathleen Kennedy, with Abrams and Johnson ever playing the part of craven suck-ups, wasted no opportunity to try and shield the movies behind a wall of accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other condescending insults, rather than acknowledge the bad decisions being made.

The troubled production of Solo: A Star Wars Story has been well documented. Co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were removed from the project over creative differences, and veteran director Ron Howard was brought in to complete it. The production budget was roughly doubled as he effectively had to start over from scratch—the scenes shot previously were considered that unusable. Further, lead performer Alden Ehrenreich was reportedly so incapable of acting that a coach had to be brought in to get anything usable out of him. Why he wasn’t recast is a mystery; Anthony Ingruber, who played a young version of Harrison Ford’s character in Age of Adeline, made a demo video nailing the older actor’s lines from A New Hope’s famous cantina scene that quickly went viral. If the movie had to be almost totally reshot, the logical thing to do would have been to do it completely, replace Ehrenreich with Ingruber, and work from a new script. But this did not come to pass.

Instead, LucasFilm doubled down on the script and, unwilling to rethink its annual movie release model, held to its planned May 2018 release date. In order to try and salvage it at the box office, Avengers: Infinity War’s release was moved up so as to offer less competition. That backfired as the Marvel movie remains in cinemas and is still taking in healthy ticket sales. The release of Deadpool 2 also factors in. There is a parallel here to 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which Paramount released against Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Ghostbusters II, all of which were hits the popularity of which took away from Trek and combined with word of mouth to effectively end William Shatner’s directing career.

Compounding the problems for LucasFilm is that merchandise based on the Disney productions is not moving. The toys gather dust on shelves—action figures can’t be sold even at bargain bin prices. This is unprecedented, and may be a significant contributing factor in the closing of Toy ‘R’ Us.

What this means going forward is that now Disney’s plans to open up Star Wars theme parks and hotels are in jeopardy. If merchandise and box office ticket sales are meant to pay for these projects, and those sales are going down with each release in the franchise, that is a major problem for Disney. No sane investor will fund a movie on the pitch that he or she will probably be flushing money down the proverbial toilet, or that even if it comes back, there likely won’t be any interest on the investment.

It would be a different matter if the failure of Solo were a fluke, a one-time thing in an otherwise successful franchise. But it’s not. It’s part of a larger trend of diminishing returns, and this is borne out by the numbers as indicated in the graph above. This cannot be spun as “franchise fatigue”, as Disney is trying to do. If it were that, then the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be suffering a similar crisis, yet it’s not.

Disney C.E.O. Bob Iger has got to be making preparations to replace Kathleen Kennedy as head of LucasFilm as soon as someone suitable—and willing—is identified. Disney bought LucasFilm with the intention of churning out movies every year like on a factory conveyor belt. In order to do that, there must be a new movie released every year, new trilogies and spin-offs going on for as long as Disney can squeeze money out of them. That can’t happen, nor can related projects such as theme parks, hotels, casinos, and so on, as long as Kennedy remains at the helm. Her lack of direction and alienation of fans, without whom there is no Star Wars, has brought things to where they are now. The writing is clearly on the wall that Disney can’t wait to see how Episode IX will fare in theaters—its release date for December 2019 is not that far off, and if the corporation won’t push it back, then this means that Kennedy will have to go soon, so that someone who actually has a vision and a workable plan can salvage what remains of the franchise. Jar Jar Abrams cannot be counted on to fix the mess Ruin Johnson made of the present trilogy. The idea that Johnson will get to keep his announced “outer rim” trilogy is, at this point, laughable. These three have done what was unthinkable even during George Lucas’ prequel saga: they’ve made Star Wars a property that is no longer profitable.

The Wilk Report – 3 June 2018 – Solo: A Star Wars Catastrophe

This week Larry Bernard and I talk about the train wreck that is Solo: A Star Wars Story, and where Disney might proceed from this point on now that Star Wars is no longer a guaranteed draw.

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Star Wars: The Last Gasp

In 2012 Disney plopped down over four billion U.S. dollars to acquire LucasFilm, Ltd. from owner George Lucas, with the intention of churning out one movie per year as part of a plan to milk as much money out of the Star Wars franchise as it could before audiences grow bored from over-saturation and move on to something else. So in 2015, we were subjected to Jar Jar Abrams’ mediocre rehash of the first movie, the next year saw the release of the equally mediocre Rogue One, a quasi prequel centering on the theft of the Death Star plans leading up to the events of the first film of the original trilogy, and finally, late last year, was the truly abominable The Last Jedi, directed by rank amateur Ruin Johnson, a boy who despises Star Wars and anyone who is a fan thereof so much he felt compelled to utterly destroy it. This year, a movie based on Han Solo’s early years will be released to theaters to compete against the likes of Avengers: Infinity War, another Disney property, in effect forcing it to compete with the parent company’s other franchise. Solo is widely expected to be as much of a box office disappointment as The Last Jedi, if not more so, which alienated fans and failed to pull in the revenue needed for Disney to justify the four billion dollars spent on LucasFilm.

Still with me? Yes? Good.

I probably don’t need to go over all the reasons how and why The Last Jedi is a steaming pile of bantha poodoo. Others such as the people at Midnight’s Edge, World Class Bullshitters, Doomcock, and Mindless Entertainment, among others, have all chimed in with their opinions and I highly recommend you visit their channels to watch the video analyses of the movie. You can also read writer Sean P. Carlin’s excellent discussion about the cinematic refuse that is this movie and its effect on audience expectations.

I will, therefore, give my own (non-comprehensive) list of what’s wrong with the movie and how it insults the audience:

There are no characters.

Seriously, there is not even one actual character in this movie. What we are subjected to are concepts, and bad ones at that. They are not fleshed out characters with histories, flaws, sympathetic qualities, or any real motivation beyond getting from one “beat” to the next. Who are these “people” supposed to be? What drives them, that is, why do they do what they do? Are they supposed to learn and grow to become something better? According to Johnson, there is no answer to these and other questions set up by Abrams in the previous movie, and you’re an asshole loser for even expecting answers or trying to come up with any of your own. So even though Abrams implied that Ma-Rey Sue has some mysterious background we’re supposed to ask questions and speculate about, according to Johnson she is “nobody” and calls you stupid for even thinking she is anybody or has anything to do with anything previously established in the Star Wars universe. And it just get worse from there.

There is no reason or logic to anything that happens in the movie.

Nothing that takes place in this movie makes any freakin’ sense. There’s a scene in which Leia is blown into the vacuum of space, which according to logic means she would be dead within seconds. There is no way to survive being blown into space. None. Yet we’re supposed to believe that she has enough consciousness after being exposed to extreme cold, lack of breathable atmosphere, and lethal doses of unfiltered stellar radiation to use the Force to save herself. What the actual fuck!? I won’t even go into the ludicrously bad decisions made during the space battle by both sides, or the inane side stories that add nothing to the larger narrative.

All the stupidity in this pitiful excuse for a “story” simply breaks suspension of disbelief, that unspoken contract between viewer and storyteller in which the former agrees to set aside incredulity in order to become immersed in the tale being told. For example, in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, we set aside our disbelief that a man can fly without aid of technology or wings or anything other than his own apparent will. We set aside that people can’t fire lasers out of their eyes or have breath powerful enough to knock people about or freeze things. But Donner and the screenwriters (including legendary Godfather author Mario Puzo) knew well enough not to take things so far that the audience couldn’t agree to set aside disbelief. They kept things just realistic enough that the audience could immerse itself in the story for those two, two and a half hours.

Not so for The Last Jedi, or for that matter, The Force Awakens, or Jar Jar Abrams’ pathetic attempt to reboot Star Trek, or Paul Feig’s shitty Ghostbusters reboot, or CBS’ STD.

No, we get nothing that allows us, the viewers, to pretend that any of the crap going on in these movies could feasibly happen. Johnson assumes the audience is stupid, then berates the audience for failing to appreciate the insult to our intelligence.

The new movies go out of their way to disrespect, diminish, and demean the original trilogy’s characters.

In The Force Awakens, Han Solo dies like a bitch at the hands of his son, Emo Vader. In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker is depicted as a burnt out coward who is too scared of facing his former pupil to go in person to confront him, choosing instead to hide away on some distant backwater planet and ultimately fade away like a bitch; this is the guy who, as a young Jedi pupil, faced down the two baddest asses in the galaxy just to redeem his father from the Dark Side, yet here he’s a coward who seriously considered murdering his own nephew rather than let him fall to Snoke’s influence. Leia is depicted as an incompetent leader, a has-been, a relic of a rebellion that supposedly no longer needs her and yet can’t survive without her knowledge and skills. Carrie Fisher’s death in real life in late 2016 makes resolving Lei’s arc impossible now, but I’ve a feeling that the former princess, senator, and rebel leader would have met with an equally humiliating end for the sake of puffing up the hollow concepts Abrams and Johnson have foisted upon the audience. And speaking of how Leia is depicted…

For all we’re told how great the women in the new movies are and how sexist anyone is for daring to point out they’re not, Abrams and Johnson portray them in the most negative manner imaginable.

Supposedly Ma-Rey Sue, Admiral Holdo (played by Laura Dern, whose talent was complete wasted on the role), and new concept Rose Tico—this last being the closest thing we get to having an actual character in The Last Jedi—are the best-est evar! We’re supposed to “know” this because we keep being told they are. But we never get to actually see them being good at anything, because every single decision they make, every single action, is about the dumbest thing one can do in even the most poorly-written slasher movie. Criminally reckless behavior is on display in every scene, getting people needlessly killed, yet somehow we’re told that there’s nothing wrong with any of these bone-headed mistakes and you’ll find defenders of these concepts launching into convoluted, nonsensical rationalizations trying to justify them. But there is no justification because the actions in the movies are indefensibly stupid. There’s no thought put into anything that happens. And yet Abrams and Johnson demand that we blindly accept it all as genius and tell us we’re sexist, racist morons who are too stupid to see how brilliant they are.

So for all we’re told how great Abrams’ and Johnson’s female concepts are, what we actually see is that they’re stupid, incompetent, and shallow to the point we don’t care what happens to them. Can you imagine any of these one-dimensional cardboard cutouts holding a candle to Carrie Fisher’s Leia, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, or Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor? I sure as hell can’t. And it’s a fair bet you can’t, either. Abrams’ and Johnson’s concepts are so devoid of substance, sympathetic qualities, and ability, that the only way to puff them up is to debase and destroy the characters we’ve all grown up with and that were presented much better and more competently, because otherwise the audience would never be able to accept the concepts.

Far from having strong female characters, we’re shat upon with lifeless, brainless, incompetent cutouts. How is that even remotely feminist? John Carpenter and Debra Hill, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, and Dan O’Bannon, all wrote famous, strong female characters, that were truly feminist in both concept and execution. Yes, the characters are flawed, but in that way they’re just like real people, and because they are flawed we more easily identify with them and want them to prevail. We care what actually happens to them. We grow and learn with them as they evolve on the page and screen. THAT is how you write a strong female character who wins in spite of everything thrown at her. She either has or obtains the skills and abilities needed to fight the monster/villain of the story, in a more realistic manner that, while we may have to suspend our disbelief, doesn’t require us to suspend so much of it that it takes us out of the story.

There’s not even one thing in the Disney movies that is remotely original.

Everything seen so far in Disney Star Wars is a rehash of movies that have been made before. The Force Awakens is a shameless retread of the original Star Wars. The Last Jedi is an even more shameless retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, but deliberately insulting to audience intelligence, so much so that the Chinese, who typically gobble up Western cinema, actually said as much in explaining why the movie was dropped from 92% of screens in the second week in what is arguably the largest foreign market.

It would be bad enough if this was all part of some plan that failed because of poor decision-making by producer Kathleen Kennedy and her stable of no-talent directors. But Ruin Johnson appears to have tossed out even the half-assed plan concocted by Jar Jar Abrams, thus leaving the Star Wars franchise basically without any overall direction or structure. Given the episodic nature of George Lucas’ seminal creation, this is unacceptable. Small wonder, then, that the new movies are falling short of minimum profit requirements Disney needs in order for its four billion dollar investment to pay off.

The bulk of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of Kennedy, who seems incapable of imposing any order at LucasFilm, or any guidance with regard to where cinema’s biggest and arguably first blockbuster franchise should go from here. It would be laughable if not for the realization that, if she ultimately causes Star Wars to tank, there is little likelihood that it can ever recover enough to be resurrected at any point in the future. With Carrie Fisher dead, Harrison Ford at age seventy-five, and Mark Hamill at age sixty-six, the chances of seeing either of the surviving main cast members reunited once again to do a reset are pretty much nonexistent.

And the saddest part of all this is that it didn’t have to be this way. Disney could have hired someone to helm LucasFilm who actually has a vision and isn’t afraid to lay down the proverbial law with regards to what can and should be done with Star Wars. Instead, the suits behind the Mouse arrogantly thought that the franchise would practically run itself, without any need for vision or legitimate storytelling. They assumed, like CBS, that, because the property they own came with a built-in audience, they could simply churn out product like on an assembly line without regard for quality. The inevitable result of such hubris is that what was once a popular, almost guaranteed money-maker is now no longer that, because fans who grew up with the originals have been so alienated that they’ve turned away, and that means the future of the franchise is in the hands of audiences who’ve never seen the originals and therefore could take the new movies or leave them, and they aren’t enough to sustain the franchise.

At least there’s Marvel…I guess…