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I feel like Solo's biggest problem was in (poor) marketing. It wasn't ground breaking, but it was entertaining, and excellent eye candy. But it was coming off the back of the negative reactions to TLJ, had all the buzz about problems in production, and then for some reason received very little promotion - probably damage control, which would also be why all the major events were crammed in, just in case the other two movies didn't end up happening.


Regardless, though, if Disney's intent was to remove all of the old characters from the franchise, this is a movie that just wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Solo also broke the "Star Wars movies are gonna release on Christmas" rule. It came out like 4 months after the most divisive star wars film of all time. If they had kept it to the "once a year every December" schedule it probably would have performed much better than it.

It also wasn't helped by the projection issues in a lot of chain cinemas, which led to some folk who did see the film and like it telling people to wait for home media.

It's a shame, if Disney had held it back until the anticipated Christmas slot and given it some modest marketing, I think it would have done all right for itself.

 LunarSol wrote:
Ep6 was more when they decided to quit pushing the movies, but it was far from the end. I think the original plan was 12(?) including an Ep0 and old man Luke passing the baton.

That doesn\t really giive much reason to think disney stops at 9 either. And just because lucas might have been willing to do more filler movies after conclusion doesn't mean disney would stop after 3 more filler movies.

As it is the 7-9 are just retelling of 4-6 with new actors and new cgi so can't really conclude anything. You would actually need to tell new story to conclude original. Not just rehash old one. As it is no reason to believe disney to not stop it. Just retell the same story over and over and over again. 7-9 already proved it works. Makes it easy movies for them to tell the same story and make millions out of it There's always another apprentice to fall to dark side, another hero from tiny desert planet to be taught light side, another super weapon to be destroyed and another palpatine to be killed on 3rd movie.

And disney's coffins keep getting millions.

If there was room after ep6 for movies it would have been to show what happened between emperor dying and the celebration scenes at the end of ep6 as logically they would have to be time wise quite far apart. And even then from story point of view that wasn't needed any more than in LOTR it was important to know what happened in the lonely mountains during war of the ring.

balmong7 wrote:
Solo also broke the "Star Wars movies are gonna release on Christmas" rule. It came out like 4 months after the most divisive star wars film of all time. If they had kept it to the "once a year every December" schedule it probably would have performed much better than it.

This was probably the strangest bit. I get they didn't have Christmas faith in the film, but its release window fatigue incarnate. Not only was TLJ fresh in everyone's minds but they were also reeling from Infinity War. Absolutely no one was hungry for Solo.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galef wrote:

Voss wrote:
Its mostly just the big time skip, and the child actor. Episode 1 is just completely unnecessary in every way. Padawan Anakin assigned to protect Peace Party senator Amidala would've covered everything relevant in 2 & 3 with no trouble, and then they could have had a movie between 2 and 3 that actually covers some of the war parts of the 'Clone Wars' and develops Grevious and the other throw-away characters that aren't developed at all, so we know who they are for movie 3.

I totally agree with this.
Ep1 should have been teen Anakin being discovered during the eve of the Clone Wars.
Ep2 could then have been the Clone Wars itself with a more grown, but still teen Anakin
Ep3 then is adult Anakin and his fall as the Clone Wars end

That arc would have allowed the use of the same actor for Anakin for all 3 movies and could have developed Anakin and Obi-wans relationship as the main 2 Protagonists.
Then you still with the SAME baddie/baddies for all 3 movies. Maul/Dooku/Grevious easily could have been condensed into 2 main Antagonists working for Sidious.
Ep1 Could introduce Maul, who gets defeated, but not killed
Ep2 Maul is back with robo legs, but because of his "failure" Sidious has a new General, which could be a former Jedi like Dooku
Ep3 both get defeated for good
-

It's kind of infuriating, because in a lot of ways TPM is the best structured movie of the bunch. I'd actually make very few changes to it:
- Anakin is played by Hayden Christensen as more of a Han Solo role who offers to help them out by winning the race if they get him off this rock.
- The debate in the senate is whether or not to deploy the clone army to break up the blockade of Naboo. Clones arrive at the end to save the day but the use of force prompts several worlds to declare independence (per the opening crawl of Ep2)

There's a lot of tonal things worth reconsidering, but those are honestly the only two things I think the film really needed to do differently. It's the only one with solid bones.

For TPM, it’s mostly just wasted screen time. Overall, we don’t need to see Anakin that young.

And given Darth Tyranus describes Qui Gon Jinn as a friend, expressing he might’ve understood, I’d prefer to have seen some kind of dissent with the Jedi Order.

Not in a particularly political way, more philosophical. Such as ‘we’re meant to be peace keepers, we can’t just wade in’ contrasting with ‘we need to take action now to prevent things escalating which will only cost more lives’.

Such a split would’ve given Palpatine more an ‘in’ to manipulate things.

But having said His name, Palpatine remains the best character in the prequels.

The Phantom Menace was entirely to get a new crop of kids interested in Star Wars. Need to get all those young Anakin-age kids buying action figures.

There's no other reason for it to have a child main character, or such cartoonish situations.

 Yodhrin wrote:
It also wasn't helped by the projection issues in a lot of chain cinemas, which led to some folk who did see the film and like it telling people to wait for home media.

That was very strongly my personal experience with the movie. It was incredibly, unwatchably dark - and it opened with scenes in caves or sewers or whatever which didn't help. When they revealed whatever they revealed in the dark, I still have no idea what it looked like.

Even in bright scenes, like in the mountains, the movie never went above "dark grey".

As willing as the director and cinematographer were to shift blame onto theater management, the fact remains that I think the onus of responsibility is on the former for not having a grasp of what the realities they could expect in visual range - if I buy a sandwich at a gas station at 2 am, I don't decry the lack of michelin stars, and when almost a thousand movies a year are released theatrically without this problem...

 Ouze wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:
It also wasn't helped by the projection issues in a lot of chain cinemas, which led to some folk who did see the film and like it telling people to wait for home media.

That was very strongly my personal experience with the movie. It was incredibly, unwatchably dark - and it opened with scenes in caves or sewers or whatever which didn't help. When they revealed whatever they revealed in the dark, I still have no idea what it looked like.

Even in bright scenes, like in the mountains, the movie never went above "dark grey".

As willing as the director and cinematographer were to shift blame onto theater management, the fact remains that I think the onus of responsibility is on the former for not having a grasp of what the realities they could expect in visual range - if I buy a sandwich at a gas station at 2 am, I don't decry the lack of michelin stars, and when almost a thousand movies a year are released theatrically without this problem...

Nah that's BS man, filmmakers shouldn't be forced to make an inferior/compromised product just because the late-stage scumbags who run cinemas have found every little shred of costs to cut even where that ruins the experience of watching actual movies because, in the end, their business model is selling gakky food not films.

To torture your analogy a bit; what they made was a gourmet sandwich, what you ordered was a gourmet sandwich, but what you got was a gourmet sandwich that had been sat in a hot warehouse for a week. The person at fault there is the delivery company who failed to deliver the sandwich promptly, not the people making the sandwich for choosing to make the product both they and you wanted rather than a cardboard & preservatives gas station job that could survive the delivery company's incompetence.

The fact is these films get sent to the theatres with instructions on how to show them properly, which they are no doubt contractually obligated to obey, and many of the theatres just ignore them because either they're not willing to pay one of their wagies to show up and actually do the work, or because they pay their wagies so badly that they don't give even a teeny-weeny gak about their jobs and so just slack it.

And yet again, the 800 other movies released that year didn't run into that issue. Adjusting lighting conditions to what the market is actually going to experience isn't producing an inferior product; releasing 2 hours of a movie that appeared to be shot in the dark did.

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

 Ouze wrote:

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

The overwhelming majority are going to watch it at home, where (at least going by my Bluray copy) the lighting is fine.

 insaniak wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

The overwhelming majority are going to watch it at home, where (at least going by my Bluray copy) the lighting is fine.

Indeed. And also, it's utterly bizarre to me that someone would blame the artist for making art in a style cinemas are perfectly capable of accommodating, rather than the cinemas for doing a shoddy job of presenting the art purely out of greed and lack of any concern for quality.

It's not like we're talking about some kind of onerous burden being placed on cinemas, literally all they have to do is input a couple of settings on the digital projector's control software and actually bother to switch the projector lens out when they go between 2D and 3D showings, which is what they should be doing anyway for every movie they show. The fact that this particular movie made stylistic choices that highlight a deficiency in cinemas that is always present just not as noticeable would, to any reasonable person, be an opportunity to highlight what a shoddy business cinema chains are, rather than a stick to beat a director with.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

The overwhelming majority are going to watch it at home, where (at least going by my Bluray copy) the lighting is fine.

Indeed. And also, it's utterly bizarre to me that someone would blame the artist for making art in a style cinemas are perfectly capable of accommodating, rather than the cinemas for doing a shoddy job of presenting the art purely out of greed and lack of any concern for quality.

It's not like we're talking about some kind of onerous burden being placed on cinemas, literally all they have to do is input a couple of settings on the digital projector's control software and actually bother to switch the projector lens out when they go between 2D and 3D showings, which is what they should be doing anyway for every movie they show. The fact that this particular movie made stylistic choices that highlight a deficiency in cinemas that is always present just not as noticeable would, to any reasonable person, be an opportunity to highlight what a shoddy business cinema chains are, rather than a stick to beat a director with.

And yet it was the only movie to have this issue pretty much ever that I can think of and it was an issue in multiple countries and different chains so really it seems to be an issue with the product sent out rather than where it was played.

SeanDrake wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

The overwhelming majority are going to watch it at home, where (at least going by my Bluray copy) the lighting is fine.

Indeed. And also, it's utterly bizarre to me that someone would blame the artist for making art in a style cinemas are perfectly capable of accommodating, rather than the cinemas for doing a shoddy job of presenting the art purely out of greed and lack of any concern for quality.

It's not like we're talking about some kind of onerous burden being placed on cinemas, literally all they have to do is input a couple of settings on the digital projector's control software and actually bother to switch the projector lens out when they go between 2D and 3D showings, which is what they should be doing anyway for every movie they show. The fact that this particular movie made stylistic choices that highlight a deficiency in cinemas that is always present just not as noticeable would, to any reasonable person, be an opportunity to highlight what a shoddy business cinema chains are, rather than a stick to beat a director with.

And yet it was the only movie to have this issue pretty much ever that I can think of and it was an issue in multiple countries and different chains so really it seems to be an issue with the product sent out rather than where it was played.

No, it's an issue with the way the places playing the product operate because while it was an issue in many places, it was not an issue everywhere(even within the same chains in the same countries) - this isn't some grand mystery, the problem is specific and was identified at the time; in order to minimise staffing costs, chain cinemas cue up whole days, even whole weekends' worth of showings as a playlist. If they do that and also A; show both 2D and 3D movies on the same projector, but refuse to switch out the 3D lens, and/or B; don't bother to input the specific projection settings that are provided with the film(because most films don't need specific settings, they fall within a range that is presented adequately enough with the defaults that your typical cinemagoer won't notice a difference), then you got a gakky Solo showing.

Seriously, that people are actually trying to defend this nonsense is just bizarre to me. It wasn't that long ago that loads of films had to come with specific instructions for projecting them off their reels, and if they weren't followed and the viewing experience was gak as a result the idea you would blame the filmmaker and not the people you're literally paying to project the film for not properly projecting the film would have been laughable.

The cinema chains were provided with everything they needed to show Solo correctly, and many failed to do so because it would have required a non-zero amount of effort on their part. Case closed.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The Phantom Menace was entirely to get a new crop of kids interested in Star Wars. Need to get all those young Anakin-age kids buying action figures.

There's no other reason for it to have a child main character, or such cartoonish situations.

Lucas wanted us to see Anakin as an innocent child so we'd get behind him as the hero of the story. My gut says that he was a little too married to the Ep0 idea for some reason and shoved it in even though it really wasn't intended to be part of the prequel story arc.

 insaniak wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

It's a poor director who doesn't in any way understand and adjust for the actual experience the overwhelming majority of moviegoers are going to see.

The overwhelming majority are going to watch it at home, where (at least going by my Bluray copy) the lighting is fine.

That is an response to a totally different question that whan i said, though, right? BecauseI explicitly included the word "moviegoers".

But, supposing that is what I said, it's probably because the Bluray copy of the movie was significantly brighter than the theatrical or 4K versions (additional source) (additional source).

 Yodhrin wrote:
The cinema chains were provided with everything they needed to show Solo correctly, and many failed to do so because it would have required a non-zero amount of effort on their part. Case closed.

And yet Black Panther, Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Into the Spider-Verse, Ready Player One, Aquaman, and 800+ other movies didn't have this problem that same year. Solo's unwatchability contributed in part to a $50 million dollar loss and Disney being forced to slow the pace of Star War movies. Arguing "but achtually" is really just being contrarian for the sake of arguing.

Case closed

SeanDrake wrote:

And yet it was the only movie to have this issue pretty much ever that I can think of and it was an issue in multiple countries and different chains so really it seems to be an issue with the product sent out rather than where it was played.

Except it wasn't the only movie with this issue. Movies being too dark on the big screen is one of the most common complaints about cinemas, anywhere, particularly since cinemas starting moving towards more automated systems. It was more obvious with Solo than with many other movies, because the movie featured a lot of dimly lit scenes... in a brighter movie, the fact that it's being shown too dark isn't always as noticeable, but that doesn't mean that the audience isn't missing the 'proper' visual experience as a result, and it doesn't make it a problem with the movie.

That's a much better argument/point.

 LunarSol wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
The Phantom Menace was entirely to get a new crop of kids interested in Star Wars. Need to get all those young Anakin-age kids buying action figures.

There's no other reason for it to have a child main character, or such cartoonish situations.

Lucas wanted us to see Anakin as an innocent child so we'd get behind him as the hero of the story. My gut says that he was a little too married to the Ep0 idea for some reason and shoved it in even though it really wasn't intended to be part of the prequel story arc.

But... he wasn't at any point the hero of the story. Any of the stories.
Even anti-hero would be a stretch.

If Lucas ever thought that Anakin's actions in the prequels fall under the category of 'heroic' he has severe problems in judgement.

Movie theaters are staffed by minimum wage kids who are paid to push a button and get yelled at while cleaning all the stuff people dump on the floor rather than bother carrying 20 feet to the door where the garbage is. They should strive to be better if they want to stay relevant but at times I'm surprised they're not worse.

On that note, I REALLY need to watch Thor again. I've only seen it once and the chunk was projected in 3D in a showing where no one paid for or had glasses for it.

Voss wrote:


But... he wasn't at any point the hero of the story. Any of the stories.
Even anti-hero would be a stretch.

Wins the Pod race for Qui-Gon, blows up the trade ship ending the occupation of Naboo, thwarts an assasination attempt on padme's life, Leaps valiantly to Obi-wan's defence when Dooku is about to strike, saves the Chancellor while carrying Obi-Wan on his back, gets an attractive, older woman pregnant with twins, saves Lukes life and destroys the emperor ending his reign of galactic terror.

Now where did we put those Clone Wars dvds?

SamusDrake wrote:

Voss wrote:


But... he wasn't at any point the hero of the story. Any of the stories.
Even anti-hero would be a stretch.

Wins the Pod race for Qui-Gon, blows up the trade ship ending the occupation of Naboo, thwarts an assasination attempt on padme's life, Leaps valiantly to Obi-wan's defence when Dooku is about to strike, saves the Chancellor while carrying Obi-Wan on his back, gets an attractive, older woman pregnant with twins, saves Lukes life and destroys the emperor ending his reign of galactic terror.

Now where did we put those Clone Wars dvds?

Indeed. He wasn't particularly likeable... but the prequels very clearly made it all about Anakin, and sparked Lucas' rebranding of Star Wars as the 'Skywalker Saga'.

Again today heard that rumor about Lucas being legally entitled to some of the royalties for the original characters, and spurring Disney to purge them all.

Not going into the spoiler rumors I heard, but if true the spoilers... well, don't hope for a happy future for anyone from the classic trilogy. Looks like they're getting 66'd.

Once again, if the issue was royalties over existing characters, we wouldn't have had Solo. We wouldn't be getting the Obi Wan series. Darth Vader and Princess Leia wouldn't have appeared in Rogue One. And the latest movie most certainly wouldn't be called 'The Rise of Skywalker', because Disney would be doing everything they could to back away from that name.

Given that most of the Original Trilogy actors are in their 70's, it's really not too surprising that they might get killed off. Seriously, it's not some big conspiracy. Just people getting old.

 insaniak wrote:

Given that most of the Original Trilogy actors are in their 70's, it's really not too surprising that they might get killed off. Seriously, it's not some big conspiracy. Just people getting old.

Theme park is entirely focused on the new trilogy as well.

Kinda seems like a lost opportunity.

Definitely a lost opportunity. Disney backed the wrong space horse.

I kind of wish Disney never revisited any of the original characters, even if it meant we got no Rogue One and no Solo. Better to leave them off celebrating with Ewoks than show them all end up as miserable failures or whatever.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

Theme park is entirely focused on the new trilogy as well. .

Of course it is. Makes far more sense to base a theme park around the current story than on the 40 year old source material.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

I kind of wish Disney never revisited any of the original characters, even if it meant we got no Rogue One and no Solo..

That's exactly what would have happened if Doritos' conspiracy theory were true. TFA would have just been a hard reboot of the setting. Which, in hindsight, would have been a much cleaner way to do it, as then we wouldn't have the current uncertainty about how much of the old EU material is still canon...

I just think Disney should have waited to see if the new trilogy was actually good before investing, what, $100 million? on a theme park based on it.

 insaniak wrote:

That's exactly what would have happened if Doritos' conspiracy theory were true. TFA would have just been a hard reboot of the setting. Which, in hindsight, would have been a much cleaner way to do it, as then we wouldn't have the current uncertainty about how much of the old EU material is still canon...

I don't want to speculate on how poorly that would have performed. I think Disney needed to tie their direction to the old characters.

Honestly, they went too far with it. Had they been brief cameos, and maybe a better swan song for Luke... it could have been more tolerable. But the way it seems, like I said elsewhere: "This new things is awesome, look how awesome it is- it's beating the crap out of all the old stuff you liked!"

Star Wars is a sandbox. They could do a lot, at any point in the Galaxy, and be less restricted had they just avoided this one particular time period and group of characters. And with that, they could have gauged the fans' reaction and made adjustments without tooling around with classic characters and pissing a lot of fans off. And if people didn't like it, it didn't feel like it meddled too much with something classic.

As for 'conspiracy', well- Lucas to some degree could very well hold some rights or otherwise be entitled to royalties. Something about the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement, which I haven't read in full. As I understand, you can still get royalties to something you create- selling the rights doesn't mean you lose that always, it just means you're legally selling the property to someone else to use as they see fit.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
But the way it seems, like I said elsewhere: "This new things is awesome, look how awesome it is- it's beating the crap out of all the old stuff you liked!"

You mean like how Kylo Ren 'beat the crap' out of Luke by letting the old jedi outwit him, outfight him without even being in the same solar system, and letting the remains of the Resistance escape out the back door?

Or like how Kylo Ren beat the crap out of his mother, who subsequently woke up in space and used the Force to pull herself back into her ship?

It seems more like you're seeing what you expect to see, to be honest.

As for 'conspiracy', well- Lucas to some degree could very well hold some rights or otherwise be entitled to royalties. Something about the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement, which I haven't read in full. As I understand, you can still get royalties to something you create- selling the rights doesn't mean you lose that always, it just means you're legally selling the property to someone else to use as they see fit.

You've misunderstood. Lucas having (or not) royalty-entitlement to the old characters wasn't what I was referring to by the 'conspiracy theory' reference. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if he's entitled to writer's royalties for the characters that he created. What I was dismissing as conspiracy theory was the idea that Disney is actively killing off those characters to avoid paying royalties... because that theory makes no sense. Aside from the things I mentioned earlier, if they didn't want to put Luke Skywalker on the screen, they could have, you know, just not. They even gave themselves the perfect setup for it: Luke is missing. Nobody knows where he is. All they had to do was leave off the last 5 minutes of TFA, and leave Rey chasing around the Galaxy following an always-cold trail and never actually finding him.

They could have had R2 missing with Luke. They could have killed Chewie off when Kylo killed Han - it would have made perfect sense for the wookie to go out in a blaze of glory taking revenge for Han's death. They could have just left Leia floating in space.They could have had C3PO standing on the bridge beside her when it blew into space. And they sure as hell wouldn't be introducing more old characters in the next wave of movies and books.

Honestly, what's more likely - that Disney is actively trying to sabotage the property that they paid a swimming pool full of money for and continue to throw truckloads of money at, in an effort to avoid paying some royalties to the original creator... or that some characters died, because in a story setting where the galaxy is in an almost constant state of war, sometimes people die?