I'd agree she didn't turn him all the way, but he did want to bridge a new way forward with both of them, which didn't necessarily mean dark. It would have made the movie a lot more interesting if she had accepted.

Record-high gas prices are a better explanation than the VCR. People may have been less likely to drive to the theater in 1980 with gas approaching nearly $4/gallon in today's money, especially with cars having shitty gas mileage compared to what they get today. Adjusted box office revenues did start to steadily rise throughout the 80s & 90s, despite increasing competition from home video, cable TV, and video games. That's why I don't buy the argument that the VCR was responsible for ESB doing worse than ANH. Not only was ESB in theaters at a time when hardly anyone had a VCR, but people were going to the theater more and more despite home video and newer types of media becoming an increasingly popular thing. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted gasoline prices were on a long-term decline throughout the 80s & 90s, concurrent with the aforementioned long-term rise in movie ticket sales. And box office revenues took a hit in 2005, a year when gas prices really started to spike, and never really recovered. Between, January 2005 and July 2008, the national monthly average for a gallon of gas grew from $1.57 to $4.06. And while we did get a break at the pumps during the recession, gas remained above $3/gallon from Jan. 2011 to Oct. 2014.

The gasoline theory has weaknesses of its own, though. Gas prices cratered in fall 2014 thanks to the shale oil boom, bottoming out at $1.76/gallon in Feb. 2016, and averaging in the $2-$2.60 range for most of the past two years. Not as cheap as it was in the 90s, but keeping a vehicle fueled is a lot cheaper than it used to be, especially with more fuel-efficient vehicles being more commonplace. However, this hasn't resulted in increased ticket sales. Also, the overall correlation isn't so strong as to suggest that gas prices are a primary driver. At best, it is a contributing factor. Honestly, the whole situation is more complicated than it looks, and honestly I could write an entire article about the factors driving box office trends (in fact, I've been thinking of doing just that). But in any case, the idea that VCRs were the reason ESB didn't do nearly as well as ANH is an incredibly weak one. ANH was simply something totally unlike anything that came before, and it set the movie-going world on fire. It was and still is the second most successful film ever after Gone With the Wind, and there was no way any sequel could match it, VCRs or not.

As for the smaller population at the time, 1980 was also a time when the really big multiplex theaters that are now common were much rarer, and smaller theaters more common. So, there was likely less to pick from at any given time, though I can't say for sure. But we do know that ANH's only real competition for the entire spring & summer of '77 was Smoky & The Bandit, and ESB's only real competition was... well, it didn't really have any until Airplane was released a month later, and that only grossed less than half what ESB did. Going even further back, when my parents were kids, theaters often had just one screen, maybe two, so if you wanted to see a movie your selections were often limited to how many theaters your town had.

There's a reason why so many of the films with the highest inflation-adjusted grosses (excluding revenue from re-releases) were released prior to 1980, and, considering what we saw with the box office in the 80s & 90s, I doubt home video is the culprit. The only films released in the past 40 years (meaning everything past ANH) to do over a billion in adjusted box office revenues were E.T. and Titanic (TFA came close, grossing well over $900M). This tells me that it takes a very special movie to do these kind of numbers, especially in modern times. It's more likely that increased competition among movies themselves rather than between theaters and other formats/forms of entertainment is responsible for the relative paucity of movies making close to or over a billion in adjusted revenues over the past four decades as opposed to the previous four decades. Big spectacles like Star Wars are a lot more common than they used to be, and sometimes they get crammed into relatively narrow time frames, which is sometimes cited as a possible reason why some big, anticipated, well-received films end up underperforming at the box office.

It'll be interesting to see how close to, or far away, TLJ comes to ESB. Adjusted for ticket price inflation, ESB made $704M in the US and $1.53B WW, without the greatly expanded markets we have today.

At this point in time, TFA had made 80.1% of its total domestic gross and ~73% of its WW gross. Considering TLJ's foreign take keeps hanging around the same 50% of the total that the domestic take represents, where TFA's foreign take represented 54.7% of it WW revenue, I think 80.1% of its WW take is probably a better case scenario that TLJ can look forward to. That would put the final domestic total  at $690.5M, which is 26% down from TFA, better than the ~30% it's been hovering at, now. However, WW that would be a final total of $1.32B, down $750M or 36% from TFA.

Of course, that's a better (not quite best) case scenario. We'll have to see if TLJ has as much staying power in the coming weeks as TFA had, at least percentage wise. TFA didn't start losing theaters til its 5th weekend. I have a feeling TLJ might start losing some this weekend, it's 4th.

I'll hand you a few points - if TLJ really ends up at 1.3 billion WW, then that will be dissapointing.

I can also say that I agree TLJ's plot wasn't the best, and also that it wasn't an amazing film. It was good though.

Understood. The franchise not having loads of great scripts makes The Last Jedi's script fine.

If anything the problem with a script is never really the concept. A Queen signing a treaty to stop a trade route blockade, okay that might not be the most interesting concept ever but if the execution is good (it wasn't), that isn't a problem. The only problem a concept can ever have is being complete nonsense or just very dumb, which is the case for The Last Jedi and its "let's just drink some tea while we wait for this Resistance ship to run out of gas"... but even then, if they executed it well it'd be fine. Even Empire Strikes Back if you look at it, the Millenium Falcon crew's plot is basically "run away from the bad guys" throughout the whole movie, but because they fill it with great dialogue, interesting character development and a couple of slower scenes, it flows really well.

Well, I did say it's a complicated subject, and the cost of going to the theater most definitely cannot be excluded as a factor. Inflation-adjusted ticket prices, while they have dipped a bit since 2010, are still noticeably higher than they were in the 90s, having grown some 25% or more from 1997 to 2017. Large format and 3D tickets also cost several bucks more than a regular ticket. Concessions aren't cheap, either, but unfortunately there is an extreme lack of pricing data on them.

Just stop, there is no way to influence or to "buy" millions of critics from hundreds of different countrys around the world. This bulshit conspiracy theory has gone too far.

Disney somehow always buy critics and yet Warner, Sony and other studios don't

its nonsensical to the extreme that anyone actualy believes that. Seriously ppl the answer here isn't some crazy scheme, it is the simple fact the movie is great. Is it different from the usual Star Wars film ? Ye it definetly is, very different Id say so. But all that aside, as a movie, evaluating solely what is being presented on screen, it is a fantastic piece of cinema.