Shadow1980 said:
That's the thing. Nobody knows. Disney never told anyone how much they expected TLJ to gross (if they did, Google doesn't know about it; I've looked). People who hate the film simply assume that TLJ, a massive financial success at the box office by any objective measure (#10 overall domestically for the 21st century), was a "disappointment" because it didn't gross as much as TFA did (an unrealistic goal, seeing as TFA was by far the highest-grossing film of the past 20 years). And now they look at TLJ's respectable Blu-ray sales (esp. when you take into account the decline in overall physical media spending on home video) and once again go "Well, it was a big drop versus TFA" as if failing to become at least the #5 best-selling Blu-ray ever is evidence of "disappointing sales." Some people just make up whatever arbitrary goalposts they want with no real supporting evidence, and engage in a bunch of special pleading when confronted with with anything that works against their arguments. The first entry in every main SW trilogy besting the second & third ones by a massive margin? "Well, that's different because reasons." Streaming continuing to eat into physical home video sales? "Well, that's different because reasons." |
I'd think a reasonable expectation for The Last Jedi would have been about two-thirds of what The Force Awakens earned at the box-office, seeing how that's what The Empire Strikes Back earned compared to A New Hope, and Attack of the Clones earned compared to The Phantom Menace. And guess what? That's exactly how much money The Last Jedi made!
Heck, even Solo was only as much of a disaster as it was because they basically shot the movie twice. If they'd just released the Lord & Miller cut (assuming it would have earned the same as Howard's version) then it'd have been underwhelming for a Star Wars film, but still mildly profitable.
