Spoilers Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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I made a joke about the sort of person who Kylo Ren is obviously based upon. This prompted an attempted ‘Actually...’ education.
And I certainly did learn...that there is apparently still gamergators who honestly believe they can fool people other than themselves.
And I’m going to stop now before Timby really does hit me with a shepherds crook.
Run fast...
I don't deny there has always been female "eye candy", or as candyish as drawing and pixels can be, but there has also always been strong female superheroes and videogame characters that weren't used that way. There has also always been fans of video games and comics, myself included, who don't need or want the eye candy characters. I always viewed it as a lazy way to appeal to their primary audience, adolescent men, without actually needing to write good stories or have good gameplay.
In TLJ he's based on a random YA love interest character, like Jacob from Twilight with a lightsaber.
That's nice. I learned that when an industry tries to dump on their main target audience, it doesn't go very well. Someone forgot to tell Rian Johnson this very salient fact.
Who, precisely, is this "main target audience" of TLJ?
Except, Johnson didn't.
Twilight would have been so much more interesting if Bella had tried beating the crap out of the dudes when they pulled the ‘if I can’t have you...’ card.
In fact, having an Edward/Jacob character as the explicit villain addresses people’s primary criticism of Twilight and those characters. So what a...burn?
1. Where, oh where, have I heard this before.
- Kylo Ren : [to Rey] You know I can take whatever I want.
- Kylo Ren:[after Rey points out he’s a gasbagging twit] I'll destroy her. And you. And all of it.
2. Well, that attempt at denial didn’t last long.
3. Someone remind me, TLJ’s what...the twelfth highest earning movie of all time? Top 50 even adjusted for inflation? One of the best reviewed? And hasn’t finished its run yet?
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Sure there have been decent characters in the past, but they were far, far outnumbered by the eye candy and/or fridge bait ones.
Children.
TLJ doesn't "dump" on children, even though it's rated PG-13, so "You get nothing. You lose. Good day, Sir".
Oh, great, you're back. Didn't you storm off ages ago when, like, everyone dogpiled on you for saying Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn were simply looking for attention?
Edit: Okay, you didn't storm off, but you sure were mad about people not rushing to defend noted serial cheater and gaslighter Joss Whedon.
And this:
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Reality hasn't changed in that regard, I'm afraid.
Oh, and I didn't storm off. Just got too busy to spend much time online.
I was? Don't recall that, but if so Joss made his bed and he can lay in it. That's usually my stance when it comes to people who mess up.
Ironic though that you bring up a serial cheater and gaslighter while defending Quinn and Sarkeesian. Just saying.
And this:
Yeah.That dog sure was a misogynist.
I think so, that's for sure.
Except for the RT audience score being 49% and dropping. Even that is inflated, considering the vast majority of reviews give it 1 or 1/2 stars. I'm not saying professional film critics are scared of Disney, or were paid off or anything... but that would explain a lot!
As for the film's box office, it sure did drop off quickly, didn't it? Opening weekend take tends to be a response to the previous film. TFA is still very well regarded, and people wanted to know how that story continued. After seeing TLJ dropping all of the mysteries of TFA and saying it all doesn't matter, I can't muster up much interest in seeing how this trilogy ends. So we really won't know how audiences really felt about TLJ until they vote with their wallets and we see how Episode 9 does opening weekend. Or even Solo, though that one seems to be doomed already unfortunately.
Fans of Star Wars and TFA, presumably.
Right. The only children in the film are slaves, and the main characters free giant Chihuahuas instead of them. I'm glad to not be a child slave in the SW universe!
But sequels are not as likely to do as well as the prior film. So, it really isn't a accurate measure of quality. Otherwise, where does Transformers fall on quality? For that matter, Star Trek 2009 is the greatest Trek film ever!
Also, TLJ appears to have some staying power as well.
That's not how audiences work.
I'd say the target audience for something like TLJ is as many people as possible. A big blockbluster movie like this can't rely on the just the fans of the franchise to carry it.
Never paid much heed to the RT audience score. Besides never personally giving a much of a crap about the audience consensus, it’s always been a little bit too prone to being brigaded by either super fans or super haters. Either by design, or just the fannish impulse to take things to extremes.
It doesn’t help that it rarely seems to ‘match up’ with any of the other sites with bigger voting pools and are devoted to only consolidating audience feedback. For eg. The imdb, cinemasscore etc. It makes the so called consensus look a little...dubious.
Although I should note, the RT audience is still giving TLJ the average mark of 3/5. So for all the raging, they don’t seem that upset.
As for the drop-off, not particularly? It wasn’t even a surprise. The next week was Christmas, cinemas having been doing progressively worse in general, and all Star Wars movies (aside from the first in their respective trilogies) have had big drop offs.
It also didn’t drop off that much more than TFA (149 mill vs 152 mill unadjusted), but whatever.
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I don't pay attention to fan scores much either, mostly because for genre films they tend to be much higher than critic scores. This film is the only example I can think of where the audience score is so incredibly lower than the critic score, and where the reviews given by the fans seem to accurately reflect what is on screen. Not to say there aren't the typical "Star Wars is ruined forever" hyperbole, but they tend to reflect what I'm reading here, on other fan sites, and YouTube reviews.
I'm not sure where you got that number, but the two films had similar opening weekends, with TFA at $247M and TLJ at $220. The 2nd weekend of TFA dropped by 40^% to $149M, but TLJ dropped 67.5^% to $71M.
TLJ's 3rd weekend was $52.5M while TFA's was $90M. 4th weekend TLJ is $23M while TFA's was $42. Overall domestic take so far for TFA is $936,662,225 and for TLJ $578,595,635.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=starwars7.htm
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=starwars8.htm
Foreign totals are similar, with TFA at $1,131,561,399 and TLJ at $651,100,000. In China alone, TFA made a healthy $124M while TLJ is at a considerably lower $28.7M. Granted, both opened a few weeks later there, but the opening weekend in China for TFA was double TLJ.
I'm not saying the film is a bomb, but it's currently at 60% of the previous film and unless it makes up considerable ground it will be a major disappointment for Disney.
The original Star Wars films had incredibly broad appeal, so I know what you mean. Everybody loved it. Children, teens, adults, of all ages, colors, and backgrounds. This notion that SW needs to broaden it's appeal is ludicrous (not that you are saying this, but many are).
I am not sure about imdb, but just looking over Cinemascore's current scores they tend to differ drastically with RT.
Insidious The Last Key - CS B-, RT 54%
Bad Mom's Christmas - CS B, RT 49%
Daddy's Home 2 - CS A-, RT 57%
Downsizing- CS C, RT 25%
I don't know if that is because people have a longer time to think about it before they go to RT, or whether CS doesn't get the people who really hated a film, but their scores seem off.
Johnson didn't dump on the main target audience of either SW or TLJ, so there wasn't any need to tell him that.
Yeah, for the franchise to carry on, the target audience has to remain broader, or at least more numerous, than just the people who liked the previous entries.
Also, you're not speaking for them, collectively, anyway.
Looking at this: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars2016.htm
It's pulling in closer to Rogue One numbers for the domestic box office. And doing about $130 million better on the foreign front.
In retrospect they should have taken the earlier release date the SAPPRFT offered them for TLJ. But also the niche Sequel Trilogy fans are weirdly different than the ones in America and the EU.
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Urgh. Clumsy me was looking at an article from Christmas Eve. They were still talking about projections.
And in hindsight, considering the source was comicbook.com, I should have known fucking better.
From the last twelve months and my personal DVD shelf?
The Witch, It Comes At Night, A Ghost Story...
It’s not exactly unusual. Especially for anything outside of the cookie cutter mould.
That’s not exactly a large and diverse pool of opinions, man. One might even say it’s the definition of niche. The same niche,
The fact they’re different is my point. If all the different sites come to a different ‘complete audience’ consensus, then just one of them can’t reflect the consensus. Can it?
And no, your reasonings aren’t the only reason they’re different. CS has no issue with loathing something. Unlike RT, they were created to be a marketing reasearch tool. This is how Mintz (the creator) explained the grading system.
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