What Happened to Star Wars

I'm late to this party but I'm going to weigh in anyhow. Last Spring Solo, the 4th Star Wars movie managed to lose money. How did that happen?

I've seen a lot of arguing back and forth about over-saturation. This was the 4th Star Wars move released in 3 1/2 years and it came out just a few months after The Last Jedi. Yes, Marvel manages to release 2-3 movies a year and they are all hits. But Marvel does it by managing their expectations and by differentiating their movies. 2018 saw The Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Ant Man and the Wasp. They also Released Thor: Ragnarok in late 2017. And they were all huge successes. So what did Marvel do differently?

Marvel manages to release so many movies because they are all different in both tone and content. Thor was mainly improvisation directed by someone who specializes in comedy. Ant Man and the Wasp was sort of a heist movie with its own comedic elements. Black Panther was unique. Yes, the title character wears a costume but the story was closer to the Lion King than a comic book and no one has ever done a movie featuring Africans in such a positive light. Avengers: Infinity War was the culmination of a decade of story-telling. It should have gotten a Best Picture nomination but the Academy was doing well to nominate Black Panther. Nominating two comic book movies is beyond them.

Back in Star Wars, Disney released two sequels that killed off all the survivors of he original trilogy and they released two prequels that took place between the first trilogy and the first set of prequels. Disney can't let go of the original movie. The fact that they are making the stand-alone movies around the original says everything about their new trilogy. It's not strong enough to spawn it's own spin-off stories. So they are doing spin-offs and prequels to a movie that came out over 40 years ago. Given that and that Han Solo was more of a supporting character than the star, Disney should have tempered their expectations. Ant Man and the Wasp had a budget of around $175 million and grossed $622 million world-wide. So if was a big hit. In contrast, Solo had a budget of over $400 million (more like a half billion after publicity) and only grossed $392 million. If Disney had kept Solo to a budget similar to Ant Man and the Wasp's then it would have made a profit.

The Disney Star Wars movies all have a sameness to them that the Marvel movies don't. There's going to be fights on exotic planets with blasters and there's going to be a fight between space ships. There will be droids who act human. And there will be a helping of diversity that distracts from good story telling. That's how Marvel avoids saturation.

Even more important, the Marvel movies are better. Yes, there are ones like the first two Thor movies that don't hold up very well but they are still more enjoyable to watch for the 6th time than The Force Awakens is for the second time. Let's be honest, The Force Awakens was nothing but a bunch of scenes from the original trilogy recycled with a Mary Sue and a black character thrown in for diversity and topped off with a heaping helping of coincidences. There were all sorts of signs and portents but none of them meant a thing. Director J. J. Abrams just threw them in and left it to his successor to make sense of them. Rather than doing that, The Last Jedi threw them away while congratulating itself on subverting expectations. After that sunk in, people were in no mood for more Star Wars.

Solo might have done better if it had been released later but it came out while the after taste of The Last Jedi was still lingering in people's mouths.

Then there's Solo itself. It's just not engaging and it's way too long. Most movies are have three acts. Solo has four. First he escapes from the planet he was raised on but he leaves his girlfriend behind. Then we see him as a storm trooper who realizes a heist is about to happen and wants in (picking up Chewie along the way). The heist goes bad and most of the colorful characters we've just met die. So then we have another heist. Then we finally have a lengthy shoot-out where everyone betrays everyone else. And I hope you didn't care about anyone who wasn't in the original trilogy because they're all going to die. Plus they spent a lot of effort answering questions that no one even thought to ask (how did Han get the name "Solo"? How did he learn to fly?, etc)

This was not a movie that was going to gross a billion dollars. It only did as well as it did because of the Star Wars name attached. If the names had been changed to make it generic it would probably have grossed half what it did.

The final difference between Marvel and Star Wars is that Marvel respects their fans and makes movies for them. Disney seems to be embarrassed by Star Wars fans. They have made it clear that they are making movies for a different fan base in mind, one that's move diverse. Their problem is that the fans they want don't exist in the numbers they need.