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thismeintiel on 28 December 2019
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NightlyPoe said:
thismeintiel said:

I'll update when weekend numbers come in.  Of course, the big test will come next weekend, which saw The Force Awakens drop a mere 40% WOW, while TLJ dropped a whopping 67%.  Will ROS drop like TFA, or TLJ, or somewhere inbetween?

Still running the same narratives from 2 years ago I see.  As I pointed out to you long ago, The Last Jedi was hurt by the calendar.  Two of the worst box office days of the year, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve fell on a Sunday.  Additionally, many schools were still in session during its first week (and beyond that Jumanji became a breakout hit).

Without Christmas shopping eating away its first weekend, Rise of Skywalker will surely do better than The Last Jedi this weekend.  But I can further make a confident prediction that The Last Jedi will do much better on weekdays next week.

It's fairly easy to predict these things, and it probably cost The Last Jedi about $75-100 million that it could have gotten if it had the same calendar as The Force Awakens which had Christmas on a Friday and no competition, which is just a perfect setup for maximizing box office.

Only problem with your theory is that Fri, which had nothing on the calendar going against it, saw a drop of 76% compared to TFA's 59%.  And sure, Christmas Eve isn't the greatest day for the box office in the holidays, but don't act like no one goes out to watch movies on that day.  The TFA dropped 28% on Xmas Eve from the day prior, and still made $27.4M.  ROS dropped 31%, making $20.3M.  TLJ dropped 40%, making $17.6M. 

Even if you wish to move the money around to give the 2nd weekend a smaller drop, which would just mean a larger drop the 3rd weekend, it isn't going to change how it ended up performing as a whole.  People who would have gone Xmas Eve would have just watched it days later, maybe the following weekend, which actually seems to be what happened.  In the end, it would have ended up with same total and be seen in the same light.  As an underperforming disappointment that hurt the franchise and was worthy of a retcon just two years later.  And not just by people who didn't like it, but by Disney, as well.

OlfinBedwere said:

All this talk of The Last Jedi somehow being this massive financial disappointment is doubly hilarious to someone who still has vivid memories of Star Trek: Nemesis failing to defeat one of J-Lo's lesser romcoms in its opening weekend, and then experiencing what at the time was the absolute worst second weekend of any major movie release in history. And people want to crow about how The Last Jedi being the #1 movie of its year and the 13th-highest-grossing movie (in unadjusted dollars) ever is some kind of under-achievement? Seriously...

I suggest you get up with Disney, then.  Tell them to stop looking at it as a disappointment that needed to be retconned and made fun of.  They're just the ones that saw the financial decline of the series, after all.  What do they know.

Last edited by thismeintiel - on 28 December 2019