Shadow1980 said:
thismeintiel said:
Again, you're spouting fake news. No one, at least to my knowledge, said it was a catastrophic failure at the box office. What was said repeatedly is that it greatly underperformed, so quite using that line. $1.8B was the expectation, but only did $1.33B. That, and the loss in merch revenue is why TLJ was retconned in ROS. If TLJ actually performed satisfactorily to Disney's expectations, and merch sales were of no concern, Disney would have continued on with the lore that TLJ created (or destroyed, however you want to look at it.) But, they didn't, thus cementing that those that didn't like TLJ were not some small insignificant minority, as TLJ fans have been trying to say the past two years. This fact cannot be ignored, now.
And TLJ vs Endgame is apples to oranges. Endgame was the culmination of 11 years worth of films that all saw success. A lot of people rushed out to see the film to witness what some saw as the end of the Avengers storyline, and to avoid spoilers. Regardless of what you want to say about legs, it still ended up the #1 movie WW, not taking inflation into account. Even if you take inflation into account, it has TFA beaten WW. When you open so big, $100M over TFA domestically, it's hard to not have a big drop off. It also did better than the Avengers film that came before it.
TLJ was a movie that opened only 15% below its previous installment, which seemingly cemented the ~$1.8B. It probably could have closed that gap if it was a better film. Instead it came up ~$475M-$500M short of expectations and increased the gap to 36%. And then increased that gap to 54% when it came to home video sales.
|
Sure, very few people explicitly said TLJ was a financial failure. But the way a lot of its haters harped on about it and all the general hyperbole coming from them, you'd swear they thought it was a failure. Also, don't talk to me about "fake news" after some of the stuff I've seen you say in other discussions. But that's not pertinent to the subject of box office revenues, so I'll leave it at that for purposes of this thread.
Re: TLJ vs. Endgame. Special pleading, as usual. Either legs matter or they don't. You can't just selectively decide when they do, regardless of whatever conjectures you may think justifies your decision to do so ("people want to avoid spoilers" can apply to just about any film in a major long-running franchise). Also, it's not like Endgame was the only MCU film—or popular film in general—to be very front-loaded, and they don't have the excuses you offer for Endgame. Plenty of popular movies with relatively weak legs don't get criticized for it, and conversely many movies with relatively strong legs don't get held up as examples of superb box office performance. As for me, I say legs aren't nearly as important as the lifetime gross, especially once you get so far out from opening day. Most major movies these days make 85%+ of their lifetime gross in the first four weeks anyway, so I argue that what happens past Week 4 isn't a huge deal. While money made after Week 4 can pad the lifetime gross a bit, whether a film makes, say, 90% of its lifetime gross in the first four weeks instead of 85% is more of an academic curiosity than an indictment of the film's performance. Could Endgame have had better legs? Maybe. Maybe not. There's no way to know for sure. And it's probably not important. Regardless of how good its legs were, it did very well, regardless of the overall shape of its box office curve. Same for TLJ. There's no reason to single out TLJ, which was my point in bringing up Endgame. But because it's Star Wars that puts a big target on its back for anyone who doesn't like it. It's cherry-picking at its finest.
Re: TLJ's opening weekend. Opening weekends are scattershot as hell when it comes to projecting lifetime grosses, regardless of any other factors. Even when trying to determine just the first full week's gross from the first weekend's involves a significant margin of error. That margin of error grows even more when trying to project a lifetime gross from just the first weekend. You can't just say, "Well, Movie B's opening weekend was 15% less than Movie A's, so it should have a lifetime gross about 15% less than Movie A." It's unreasonable to assume that any movie will keep pace proportionally with any other film, even if they're from the same series, because you rarely see any such similarity in their overall box office curves (it's just like how no two consoles have the same sales curve, to liken this to discussions on game sales). Especially in this case. TFA was one of the least front-loaded major films of the decade domestically, at least in terms of how much its lifetime gross was represented by its opening weekend (though if you look at post-Week 4 numbers, it was more front-loaded percentage-wise in its first month than many other blockbusters). And FWIW, sequels are often more front-loaded than their predecessors. This ties back into what I was saying about legs earlier.
Were you or anyone else serious expecting TLJ to gross $800M lifetime domestic (which would have put it at #3 or #4 for the whole series and #8 to #10 for all movies of the past 45 years) and $1.8B global? How is that in any way, shape, or form reasonable? I could see it have maybe gotten up to $650-675M domestic had it legged it out better past Week 3 (maybe even $700M in the absolute best-case scenario), and a global total of about $1.4-1.5B assuming an unchanged 46.5% domestic share. But anywhere close to $800M domestic and $1.8B global? No way. Only 12 films ever have passed an adjusted gross of $800M domestically (in 2019 ticket prices) for their initial theatrical releases, and of those only 7 of those were in the past 45 years (and of those only 3 were in the past 20 years). Not even TPM managed to do that (its adjusted domestic gross is currently about $764.8M, excluding re-releases) and it was the first new Star Wars film in 16 years after the OT ended.
TLJ did well, and to say it was a box office disappointment is an exaggeration, or at least a claim based on overly optimistic assumptions. You can say "But it's Star Wars" all you want. While people may want to put Star Wars (or at least the OT and the idea of Star Wars in general) on a pedestal, thinking that every movie in the series ought to be absolute god-tier box office monsters with legs so strong they'd put a kangaroo to shame, the idea that the second entry in any Star Wars trilogy ought to have only at most a modest drop from the first is simply placing unrealistic expectations upon it. I've already written about this at length to you multiple times in past threads (the home video thing was already discussed last year as well). I stand by my points and will not spend time reiterating them here.
If you want to continue this, I suggest we either create a new thread or resurrect the old TLJ box office thread, because I want to move on to The Rise of Skywalker now.
I have spoken.
|
