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I was thinking that but it would be horrible.

 Manchu wrote:
I mean, the fact remains that people pay to see multiple MCU movies per year regardless of theoretical super hero movie fatigue.

Are you now saying people only want to see one movie per month and the movie for May was Infinity War?

No, I'm saying that people are probably likely to go even less than once a month. If I go to a movie and pay for two tickets and no drinks or popcorn, it'll cost around 25$ US. Not terrible, but I can also wait a few months and rent it on line for a fraction. Ad kids and/or concessions, and that price goes up dramatically. Online or whatever rental you choose is still going to be the same price. Sure the theaters are worth it once and a while, maybe even twice in a short span, but three times in the span of a month? Especially when one of those movies is looking dubious? Do you think a MCU movie with similar set issues to Solo, casting doubts on how good it will be, will perform well against Avatar 2 and a new Fast and the Furious movie (both with good press backing them) in the same timeframe setup?

OK but again people find MCU movies worth it multiple times a year.

Stop.

Take a step back.

I can’t speak for anywhere else in the world, but in the U.K. the cinema is well expensive.

Pretty sure I paid around £16 to see Solo in 2D.

Now, I do alright. And I wanted, I could go see films every week.

Except.....except, a new release DVD I can pick up for £10. Blu-ray, typically £15.

So unless I’m seriously intent on seeing it on the big screen, base economics kind of point out it’s cheaper to wait for the DVD.

And no, I don’t pirate. I have strong feelings in that direction, which I shan’t burden others with.

And yet again, people still find it worthwhile to see multiple MCU films a year.


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Pretty sure I paid around £16 to see Solo in 2D.

Is that a "standard" showing? I paid $8.75 to see the standard 2D matinee Solo. I just bought a ticket to see it again tomorrow for $18.65 - this time, Friday night, IMAX 3D. For reference, a new release bluray costs about $30 in the States (generally $20 for a DVD). You can rent new movies to stream on Amazon for $6.

This is all just FYI stuff. None of it really eats into the fact that a ton of people who just saw Black Panther also went to see Infinity War.

I use movie pass. 9.99 a month usd. I can see 1 movie every day included in the price point. No 3d (good i hate 3d) with no black out dates. I watch ALOT of movies.

Black Panther is the first MCU movie with a black super heroe lead and Infinity War is something that has been building since at least Captain America 1, which you saw even if you didn't see all the movies. I'm not surprised that they got a lot of people out to see them in a short period of time. I suppose a good indicator of fatigue might be how well it performs. Also the Justice League belly flop might be an indicator of super heroe fatigue as well.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
My daughter went to see Deadpool 2 with her school friends, but isn't it a kind of post-modernist subversive spoof superhero flick? (I haven't seen either 1 or 2.)

Deadpool is... complicated. Answering, "yes" and "no" to that is completely accurate. Basically, Deadpool is ridiculously easy to screw up and to turn it into something like 'The Mystery Men' sort of thing. But due to, I can only call it the sheer skill and talent, they've avoided it.

The best sort of 'nutshell' I can give you is the song for Deadpool 2.




So yeah, that's completely barking mad, ridiculous. It has Celine Dion, the singer of the most famous love ballad in cinema, telling a comic book character to beat it.

Yet it's also completely genuine and serious as a song that does have direct relevance to the film.

And the movies do much the same thing. Considering all the X-Men movies that have been out for the past 18 years, it still has some of the best interpretations of various characters (EG Colossus) that is most consistent with what is loved about their comic versions. So, at the same time the film is making fun of 'Superhero landings' or what have you, they're also saying. "Hey, isn't this fun? Let's enjoy our love for comics and heroes together."

Contrasting with TLJ's message of, "let the past die, kill it if you have to."

So Deadpool is sort of a double subversion.



More on topic, I think there's a lot of issues relating to Solo not doing well and I don't think you can really easily determine which is a deciding factor, or whether some had any statistical significance at all.

Infinity War and Deadpool ate up a lot of peoples cinema-going time in the same month.
Reshoot and bad press problems due to troubled production (see also Justice League)
TLJ dislike / boycotting.
Science Fiction fatigue.
It's only been 5 months since the last Star Wars film.
Prequel fatigue.


Heck, I've not seen it yet because I was on holiday last week.

People didn't go see Solo for 3 reasons:
1) TLJ was incredibly divisive and there are a lot of people who won't go see Solo because of that
2) No one asked for a Solo film
3) The trailers for Solo were extremely unimpressive

Post Avengers MCU, starting from the lowest:

Ant-Man 519m: Didn't get rave reviews and no one really cared about him to begin with

Thor: The Dark World 644m: About a 200m increase over Thor despite being incredibly boring and getting mediocre reviews

Dr. Strange 677m: 2nd best debut (best was GotG) at the time despite lukewarm, albeit positive reviews

The Winter Soldier 714m: Surprisingly low considering how good it was, but understandable to a degree as The First Avenger was mediocre and this was the first sequel to be clearly better than the intro film

GotG 773m: IMO, benefited greatly from TWS's strong showing and renewed faith in Marvel

Thor: Ragnarok 854m: Another 200m jump for Thor. I don't think anyone can complain about this take.

GotG 2 863m: Almost a 100m jump, again can anyone complain?

Spider-man: Homecoming 880m: At the time this was the best debut film. Benefited greatly from his appearance in Civil War. Somehow overcame superhero fatigue as this was the 3rd iteration of Spider-man in 10? years.

CA: Civil War 1.15b: Kind of low if you look at it as an Avengers film. Great for the third film in a character arc.

Iron Man 3 1.21b: Dreadful film IMO and it was certainly divisive. This likely drove down the box office of Phase 2.

Black Panther 1.34b: Best debut as of yet. Definitely benefited from his appearance in Civil War. Also the fact he was the first black superhero in a film not called Blade.

Age of Ultron 1.4b: Mediocre film that didn't stand up to its predecessor. Likely had a negative impact on pre Civil War phase 3 films. AKA Ant-Man...

Infinity War 1.9b+: With this film's success I can see Captain Marvel cracking 1bil and Ant-Man and the Wasp breaking 750-800mil.


Iron Man 3 benefited greatly from post Avengers hype, but was a disappointing movie that hurt the box office of Dark World and The Winter Soldier. IM3+DW fresh rating on RT averages out to 73, the second lowest 2 movie stretch by Marvel. Worst is Incredible Hulk (67) followed by Iron Man 2 (73) in phase 1. Despite being good TWS paid for its predecessor's shortcomings.

TWS and GotG produced the highest 2 movie rating at the time (89+91) and IMO this hyped up Age of Ultron enough that it survived subpar reviews by critics and fans alike. Age of Ultron's mediocrity hurt Ant-Man and Civil War. Civil War is 6th in the MCU WW gross and Domestic gross despite being arguably a top 3 film in the MCU. It did however pave the way for phase 3 to be a massive success.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

I can’t speak for anywhere else in the world, but in the U.K. the cinema is well expensive.

Pretty sure I paid around £16 to see Solo in 2D..

Damn. Thats almost double what it costs in the US. Here its about $11 for an adult ticket. Add 3-5 if its a 3D movie.

For those wondering why solo bombed, apparently it was because, I won't say her name, didn't like it. who'd have thought the feminists who had been catered to in the last 3 movies would object to having a white male as a lead. Disney just really couldn't win with this movie.

I'm not sure if she actually believes this or just knows how to keep her name in the conversation.

As far as L3 goes

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I've never watched any of the Marvel films. In fact, I didn't actually understand what MCU meant until the context of later posts revealed it. But that's not film fatigue so much as the fact that I dislike superheroes in general.

My daughter went to see Deadpool 2 with her school friends, but isn't it a kind of post-modernist subversive spoof superhero flick? (I haven't seen either 1 or 2.)

Since the comic was a post-modernist subversive spoof superhero comic, that means they did it right and gave the fans what they were expecting.

Turning TLJ into a post-modernist subversive movie full of fools instead of a swashbuckling space fantasy is what hurt it.

If by "modern feminism" you mean the views of people like Anita Sarkeesian, I think you are right to say it isn't taken seriously. But I don't think making L3 a parody for folks like Ms. Sarkeesian is a dark joke. People with severe, doctrinaire ideological views who insist on continuously ranting about them are embarassing and irritating. Even to their friends.

Wow, that Ethan guy is certainly up himself, as a British friend of mine would say. He managed to get me to look into Feminist Frequence reviews of Star Wars to look at the opposing view point was. I'm not finished yet but generally I find nothing extreme about them. Anita's views actually kind of moderate.

Rogue One she characterized as being good for having a female lead but was ultimately surrounded by a bunch of guys who were more interesting. Even then the conflict overshadowed the characters and they under utilized Forest Witticker. I'd say that's kind of a fair assessment.

TFA she liked while she watched it but kind of fell apart when you looked at it later. Mostly the relationships seemed tied together by string like Finn and Rei's friendship and Han as a father figure to Rei. The strongest criticism I saw was actually that Finn was so ready to kill guys who were in the exact same child soldier conditioning he was in. I get they were trying to kill him, I agree that touching him not pointing towards many of the Stormtroopers being actual victims is kind of a loss. Then again I think TFA was a loss anyways.

TLJ review is on an hour long record radio show so I haven't finished it all yet and I need to sleep soon. It was Anita and two others. They seemed to like it about as much as TFA but still remained critical of it. For instance one did not like how they didn't use the time to really develop character relationships like ESB did. Anita was actually critical of Holdo as she stated that a few seconds of convo would have saved a lot of needless running around and you are intentionally setup not to like her for most of her screen time. They all seemed to think Finn/Rose was shoehorned into the story.

Some other things I learned was that she wasn't a SW fan who'd grown up with them as a kid, like I did. She only first saw them in her twenties and had no real attachment to them. This is kind of important to my only real sticking point in her tweets. I agree with most of it, though I believe TFA is the worst, I honestly believe that L3 was not an attack on feminism or activism but a quirky droid that is a popular element to SW who is designed as a great counterpart to Lando. Had it been any other character besides Lando, it wouldn't have worked. Since I am a fan of many forms of SW media that is how I take it. I can easily see why someone who isn't can take it that way though. I actually liked Solo, but I don't really go into it for the acting or dialogue. The latter of which Ford and Guinness had famously pointed things to say about it

Overall I didn't find anything extreme so far. She brought up how SW was pretty much dominated by white men in the beginning and that the increased diversity. She actually started the Rogue One video with a clip of Carl Sagan on the Tonight Show talking about that. My friends and I would often make critical jokes about Lando being the only black person in the galaxy or about how few women there were. I enjoy SW, but I can still be critical of it.

It is extreme to criticize a movie for having the main character work out the plot to save the day when the alleged problem with this is that he's a man whereas the ancillary character she thinks should have saved the day is a woman.

I was far more interested in Solo before Lord and Miller were fired. Ron Howard is a fine director, and was put into a very difficult position, but the original directors had a more appealing vision for the movie.

The visibility of “Solo” was dependent on the projection standards at individual theaters, and many of them weren’t up to par.

At the heart of this controversy is a disconnect between lax projection standards and a very specific creative agenda — namely, the work of “Solo” cinematographer Bradford Young, who is known for experimenting with low-light cinematography.

“The problem is digital cinema brought automation, and there’s no longer a trained technician checking that a film is projected correctly,” he said. “These machines drift, bulbs dim, and they need constant adjustments. You can save a lot of money, but the problem is if we aren’t showing movies the way they are meant to be seen we are giving people yet another reason not to come to the movie theater.”

link

 Ctaylor wrote:
I was far more interested in Solo before Lord and Miller were fired. Ron Howard is a fine director, and was put into a very difficult position, but the original directors had a more appealing vision for the movie.

Was their vision leaked? Not having a pop, genuinely interested to know if I can read a script or something.

I heard in their version Chewy was going to be killed off dramatically in the third act.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Stop.

Take a step back.

I can’t speak for anywhere else in the world, but in the U.K. the cinema is well expensive.

Pretty sure I paid around £16 to see Solo in 2D.

Now, I do alright. And I wanted, I could go see films every week.

Except.....except, a new release DVD I can pick up for £10. Blu-ray, typically £15.

So unless I’m seriously intent on seeing it on the big screen, base economics kind of point out it’s cheaper to wait for the DVD.

And no, I don’t pirate. I have strong feelings in that direction, which I shan’t burden others with.

Seems it's a bit cheaper here in the states. Movie watching has become a lot better though when they started assigning seats when you buy the ticket so you don't have to show up early to get a good seat. Plus threatres have pretty much addopted the standard that seats should be large recliners. I love the movies these days. So comfortable I've actaully fallen asleep in a movie.

 Manchu wrote:
And yet again, people still find it worthwhile to see multiple MCU films a year.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Pretty sure I paid around £16 to see Solo in 2D.

Is that a "standard" showing? I paid $8.75 to see the standard 2D matinee Solo. I just bought a ticket to see it again tomorrow for $18.65 - this time, Friday night, IMAX 3D. For reference, a new release bluray costs about $30 in the States (generally $20 for a DVD). You can rent new movies to stream on Amazon for $6.

This is all just FYI stuff. None of it really eats into the fact that a ton of people who just saw Black Panther also went to see Infinity War.

Yep that’s a standard showing, not including snacks or anything, London can be even worse depending where you go.

For me it was £16 x 4, me my sister, niece and Mum, then shacks, nearly hit £100, that’s rare though as usually I just go with the Mrs, she refused to go and see it though because she is a maga Star Wars fan and hated TLJ.

 Manchu wrote:
It is extreme to criticize a movie for having the main character work out the plot to save the day when the alleged problem with this is that he's a man whereas the ancillary character she thinks should have saved the day is a woman.

Or maybe she just felt that the idea that Han Solo having a major part in helping the fledgling Rebellion, something other people have criticized on this thread, was rather much? That's how I took her tweet and thought it was a non-issue until you brought it up. It actually took me a moment to figure out what you were referring to because of it. The whole "he's a good guy, not a bad guy" dialog made me cringe when it was brought into focus, almost like that time where he let Greedo shoot first especially when. Are you sure your not just projecting more onto this "cuz Saarkisan hates men"? She doesn't say anything about Qi'ra, which would probably be the easiest female role in the movie to nitpick if you go in specifically to do so.

Having watched several of her videos now, I find nothing really extreme about her views as she's basically trying to get people to do the critical thinking a Soc 101 class would do. If anything, I'd say she isn't an extremist but a feminism for beginners guide. For me the videos were kind of dull as I took Soc 101 years ago and still try to make use of that critical thinking I was taught. I found videos whose titles were more extreme in the related videos of my YouTube feed like "Women are ruining Star Wars" (which is funny because I thought most people claimed George Lucas already did that with the prequels).

I took a critical look at what Anita was saying about SW. Can you claim the same thing or are you just going off other sources like the video above? I have an atheist friend who debates with people of faith. Do you know what the first thing he does to prepare is? He reads their holy book because it's the best way to attack were they're coming from. Unsurprisingly, he hasn't started believing in "magical sky men" due to exposure. The video above is a terrible attack an her position as all it is a bunch of stupid mockery. Her name sounding like a SW character has about as much relevance as the fact he sounds like he's trying to get off the entire time, it means nothing. Next thing you know people will start making a thing about the color of Holdo's hair.




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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Ctaylor wrote:
I was far more interested in Solo before Lord and Miller were fired. Ron Howard is a fine director, and was put into a very difficult position, but the original directors had a more appealing vision for the movie.

Was their vision leaked? Not having a pop, genuinely interested to know if I can read a script or something.

An article I read said that they were really trying to take it in a very comedic direction. I don't know how truthful it was but they sited that the guys previous successes were all comedies apparently.

Well if so I’m glad they got canned. Solo as a comedy wouldn’t have worked well, it needed to be grittier.

Do you think it's possible to create a comedy film within the Star Wars universe?

I mean obviously it is, but how would it go down with the audience?

What if there was a Sergeant Bilko in Spaaace film about a quartermaster on some backwater Imperial base running a variety of scams.

@Skaorn

You go on and on about actually reading what she said ... but you apparently didn't. Here is the relevant tweet (spoiler tags because it contains spoilers):First off, Ms. Sarkeesian is wrong about the plot of the movie:OK setting aside how Ms. Sarkeesian misstates what happens in the movie in order to criticize it on racist and sexist grounds, we can move on to her ideological criticism: a character played by a mixed race woman should have saved the day, but instead a character played by a white man does, regardless that he is the main character and also happens to be the title character.

I don't know how Ms. Sarkeesian could nitpick Qi'ra. Qi'ra is portrayed as a sleek, hypercomptent badass. There is even a line where she says she may not know everything but she knows more than Han - and we have every reason to believe her. IMO Qi'ra suffers from the trend in pop culture right now of women being absolutely effective all of the time. Fortunately, the character is saved from being outright boring byI'm also really, really glad that sheQi'ra could have easily been another boring "she's a woman so of course she is a badass" character or another boring "she only exists to guve depth to the male lead" character, but she is neither.

@Kilkrazy

The rumor is that Lord and Miller were making a comedy movie out of Solo. Obviously, Disney cannot produce products making an overt mockery of the core of the franchise. But let's imagine a SW movie that has nothing to do with the characters or events of the hallowed OT. OK, well, that is pretty hard to imagine Disney doing. So, too, and for the same reasons, it's hard to imagine a SW movie that is pure comedy. Humor is and has always been an important part of SW movies. But I think adventure is the most important ingredient.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Well if so I’m glad they got canned. Solo as a comedy wouldn’t have worked well, it needed to be grittier.

My understanding is somebody had leaked that they were actually trying to make it another Guardians of the Galaxy with Solo being a member of the crew.

It's why 70% of the movie had to be reshot.

I don't think a comedy has to be a mockery, but perhaps that's a cultural thing.

It can be very hard to get humour right, of course, especially with a very wide audience.

The issue I can see is SW has never really been a comedy in that SW has never really had jokes. It has funny situations. There are comedic moments. But actual out and out gags don't fit.

And while they COULD, a Solo movie is probably not the place to shift the tone to that. If you want the general feel of the film to reflect the title character then a Solo movie should be scum and villainy with a hidden heart of gold. And I think the movie we got nailed that.

So.

How a can we help Solo along? It’s unjusitifablg struggling, in a way that genuinely reminds me of Dredd.

Both are excellent films. Both didn’t do the business they deserved.