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[Jopax]

Thing is, you can have a movie with a strong feminist message and strong female leads without it being dumb or preachy about it, doesn't have to be contemporary either if it translates the issue/struggle in a sensible way. Goddamn Mad Max Fury Road is one of the more feminist pieces of work in recent years and not for a moment did it feel preachy or dumb about the issue.

TLJ on the other hand was so hamfisted and dumb about pushing these issues that it was offputting. You could have an animal rights talk in a SW setting (because it's so large and diverse that there's plenty of places/races/plots to pick and choose from) and it could be a good movie that doesn't piss people off. Or you could cram in a pointless 30 minute segment about it with zero consequence or relevance to the rest of the movie and just have a character explain the stance the movie has about it in the dumbest and laziest way possible. And this was true for almost every other issue the movie had opinions about.

As Reelya put it, people usually dislike getting ideology pushed at them so blatantly, even if they might support it to a certain extent themselves something like that can just drive them away, especially if there's a media frenzy about it afterwards that calls them bad people.

As for Solo, it could be a brilliant movie, I have no diea, but TLJ killed any and all interest I had in future SW anything, it was that offputting and irritating that I just don't want to bother with SW anymore, don't think that's ever happened to me before when it comes to a franchise, so it has that going for it atleast :V

[ChairmanPoo]

Havent seen the movie yet. Tbh I did not even know it was out. After reading a synopsis, it doesn't sound bad.
But some comments:
- movies have always pandered to fashionable issues.
- big authors/franchises always get better critics all things being the same. I think it's a form of nostalgia.
- movie directors have always made all sort of excuses to justify their flops

What is kind of new (but not absolutely new. Makers of Christian movies have been using this excuse for a while:  see Kevin Sorbo) is actually blaming it on the audience's politics.  "My movie didnt fail because it's a flop! It failed because it's actually about -X- and it makes the audience uncomfortable!" Is the new "People are not ready for my art!".

I think it probably does not have a direct impact on movie attendance.  I  may or may not go watch Solo (being in exile makes going to the cinema less likely by default. I dont really know anyone and I dont like going to the cinema alone).  I will probably watch Star wars 9, despite the lameness of star wars 8, if only to see how they attempt to solve the plot

[Reelya]

Whichever way, Solo isn't doing so great.

There was a lot of hype for how well it would do, but one youtube video points out that many news articles were saying that the movie's predicted performance compared positively to pre-release polling figures for a number of other popular movies, but 100% of the cited comparison films were also Disney movies, suggesting that it's Disney themselves provided the polling figures and planting the stories throughout the media.

Current figures are that Solo made $148 million in the weekend, with $84 million of that being domestic and $65 million rest international. However, compare to TLJ, which made $230 million domestically, and $712 million internationally. e.g. it's about 1/3rd as popular with Americans as TLJ, but only 1/11th as popular with international audiences. There's the real kicker: it's broken the general trend of worldwide take being greater than US take, with international audiences falling off 4 times faster than domestic ones compared to the last Star Wars movie.

[ChairmanPoo]

To be fair IIRC Solo's production was a trainwreck. I think that might have been a more important counterpropaganda factor.

Or it might just be that the whole movie has been a trainwreck from beginning to end. Sometimes it happens. Waterworld was nowhere as bad as it was made out to be (Push comes to shove it was a mad max clone of average quality) but it wrecked

[Reelya]

However, Waterworld made up its budget from the international box office, which made twice the domestic. Solo has the opposite effect going. e.g. it's not great in USA, but it's absolutely abysmal outside the USA.

English-language news and delays are unlikely to be causing that, since foreign markets, especially China, can't really be explained since they're much less likely to follow the details of pre-production. Basically, only a relatively small fragment of total nerds even track these things in pre-production. I certainly didn't follow any of the Solo-related pre-production news and I'm fairly nerdy myself. I mean, which sites even give you news about that stuff? And how many people actually read those sites to know or care? Mabe Kotaku readers or some other fringe minority knew about the delays, but certainly not the general public.

So I really think that can't explain this. Most people don't care, don't know, until the movie is out. The proportion who actually give a shit about pre-prod details is a miniscule proportion of the market for these things.

[Kagus]

But did the movie get as much international support (language/advertising/distribution) as TLJ? I think it pretty much just flew under the radar for a lot of people.

I mean, I love griping about neofems as much as anyone else, but I think things get blown out of proportion a lot as well.

Hell, I legitimately didn't notice anything disjointed about TLJ's dances-with-kangarabbits segment, despite that apparently being a major point of contention. Then again, my brain had mostly turned itself off by that point anyways, so maybe not the best metric...

[Reelya]

neofems

Who even mentioned that? What I said, personally, was that the TLJ shit caused people to stay away from the new one. You have the example of me and of Jopax as two people who say that's the specific reason we aren't going to see this new movie. That's a minimum of two guaranteed tickets sales they lost, for that single stated reason, out of a sample size of just people who've read this thread in the last day.

What's in the new movie is entirely irrelevant to that.

[ChairmanPoo]

But did the movie get as much international support (language/advertising/distribution) as TLJ? I think it pretty much just flew under the radar for a lot of people.
 

I didn´t know it was out. I don´t know if at this point I rate as "international" given that for the most part I work (albeit in a fairly private manner) in a (mostly) English speaking country. But I came home for the weekend and I hadn´t heard anything about Solo here either.  Whereas during TLJ in both Ireland and Spain you could see merchandising and adverts in media, supermarkets, and social networks.

[Jopax]

Dunno, I've seen more posters and roadside ads for Solo than for TLJ, hell, one of the offputting things has been the amount of related ads I've also seen on TV (think Nissan or somesuch have a Solo ad which is just idiotic). Tho I guess it might be a regional thing as well, ie who has what deals with Disney to run this stuff and sell branded merch.

Also, another thing to consider here is the competition. TLJ came out around christmas time and iirc the only kinda big movie that would be comparable was Jumanji 2? (great fun that one, a positive suprise when it comes to reboots). While right now you have both the Avengers and Deadpool 2, each kicking ass and taking names both critically and financially, and personally I'd rather go rewatch either of those than go see Solo, because I know I'll enjoy them just as much as the first time, whereas Solo might turn out to be a slog and a waste of both time and money.

[scriver]

I felt absolutely no hype for the Solo movie. I'm probably not going to see it.

Only adds I've seen for it is a lacklustre tv commercial. And by lacklustre I mean "this is not a good trailer".

I have also not felt a single bit of excitement on the internet for a movie about Han Solo. Most of any excitement has been for Community-guy playing Lando. I think the studio gravely overestimated the amount of want there was for a movie about Han.

[Kagus]

I think the studio gravely overestimated the amount of want there was for a movie about Han.

This is probably the major thing... The whole movie stinks of cash-in from a mile off, and I think even the hardest-dying fans picked up on that. This wasn't "Disney does Rogue One", this was "Horse (deceased) viciously assaulted by studio executives".

Who even mentioned that?

I thought you did?

e.g. the dominant media narrative is that everyone loved TLJ except for a tiny sliver of neo-fascist haters. e.g. if the "male feminist" Solo thing is real (and it seems real given how the article is saying it's a good thing), then this movie was their chance to prove that the haters really are just a tiny, loud and non-representative group. Obviously, if that was true then overtly doubling-down on feminist stuff in the movie shouldn't tank the box-office take, since there shouldn't be enough "haters" out there to tank the sales. But of course, if you were already wedded to the narrative that sidelined the haters as a tiny irrelevant minority, then you'd always find another reason to explain away why Solo ticket sales collapsed (confirmation bias, circular logic, etc).

Unless you're just saying that neofeminists aren't to blame for anything, but that (as an aside) they would probably interpret this and this as such and such and react accordingly. Just as a fun fact, since it doesn't tie in to responsibility for either the film's make or its reception.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Star Wars is literally all ideology. That's all that there is to it. There is no "real non-political Star Wars" out there and there never has been, just a gap between original and prequel where a bunch of people forgot everything about Star Wars except their masturbatory fantasies of Slave Leia.

Solo didn't get seen because it's a disastrously produced, horribly advertised, inexplicably cast Extruded Star Wars Product that nobody asked for, just like The Force Awakens was. Big scary feminism has no relation.

[Wolfhunter107]

Solo was pretty fun.

[Reelya]

What I was saying there was more a meta-narrative. It's that if a false media narrative is pushed, then eventually people start believing it, including the people who hold the creative decision-making strings. e.g. if they convince themselves that the previous backlash was fake (buying into the whole "fake review bombing" idea) then they're more inclined to double-down on those sorts of themes. e.g. I was really thinking more of the canto bight scenes with the animal rights / class warfare related stuff, rather than anything feminist.

e.g. if you dismiss the backlash as just a tiny minority then you won't do anything to win back that audience segment, because you consider them too minor to matter. e.g. labeling those who dislike the movies as mere "Nazis" and "Trolls" absolves you of working out whether their criticism are relevant, and you then look at the praise for whichever themes the non-haters liked best. e.g. if you convince yourself that those with criticisms don't matter, focus on only the people who liked it then ask "what did you like most about it?" you're inclined to double-down on whatever that was, despite it being far from certain that this will net you more viewers or make things more "inclusive". e.g. only adding more of the things liked by those who like something most tends to make things more niche not have broader appeal. It's a type of confirmation bias. e.g. it's a way of only pandering to the current hardcore fans, whoever they might be.

And I was basing the rest, e.g. assumptions about what the new movie has in it, on stuff like this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/solo-star-wars-hero-feminist-gender-new-film-a8365446.html

Solo: A Star Wars Story shows us the hero all feminist men have been waiting for
...
Were Kylo Ren real and alive today, you strongly suspect he would be one of those enraged, hysterical followers of Jordan Peterson's morose YouTube ramblings

e.g. it's not us making the broader Star Wars narrative to be all about SJW stuff. e.g. making out that anyone not 100% on board with sjws are the "evil" side from Star Wars. And clearly, this guy is also implying that anyone not on board with the movie is in league with that same "dark side".

And then you have stuff like this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-soul-of-solo-is-a-droid/560969/

L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is no go-along, get-along machine. She’s a robot revolutionary, demanding equal rights and sowing dissent among servants. You might call her Star Wars’ first woke bot.

Yay, fembot liberation. I mean, i assume the movie itself isn't really all about that, but these sorts of articles are trying to pitch the movie as being exactly that: social justice "brand" sci-fi, and making out that if you're not down with their politics, they don't want you watching the movie with them. Even if the creators weren't buying into it, these sorts of voices are definitely trying to steer the series to conform with their own personal politics, saying you're evil/twisted if you don't go along with it.

[Frumple]

Solo didn't get seen because it's a disastrously produced, horribly advertised, inexplicably cast Extruded Star Wars Product that nobody asked for, just like The Force Awakens was.

Y'know, I haven't really felt like checking, but is this solo thing actually related in any way to the EU pre-movies solo trilogy books? Lando had something similar, and I vaguely remember one or both being kinda' neat.