ST Episode VII Box Office Discussion

It will set a record for December opening weekend that will likely not be broken for 5 years or more.

 

I used my own personal experience as an indicator in these conversations before, and you said it wasn't data-driven or numbers-based enough. Now I guess it is. I lived in England for four years as a kid, and in Japan for four years during high school. I still visit Japan almost every year. Based on my experiences in those two countries, plus in other countries (in Europe, Asia, and Australia) on vacations, I can confidently say that SW is very popular in those international markets, according to my observations.

 

I accept your observations as valid. On the other hand, we have the relative box office performance of the prequels outside the U.S., and of the OT, which wasn't significant at all relative to the current size of moviegoing audiences abroad. Star Wars was somewhat big in England (where I also lived as a child), where it was filmed, and in other English speaking countries as well. It never had the cultural impact in continental Europe and Asia that it had in the U.S., so mass public appeals to nostalgia for the OT will likely be ineffective as a marketing technique there.

 

Are you claiming you worked for Fox and/or Lucasfilm's PR department, and came up with the idea to attach a dollar amount to the number of people skipping work? That was your invention?

And because of your experience working in PR in 1999, the idea of projections reported on by THR must also be "PR Fluff?" Granted, projections any more than 2-3 weeks out aren't particularly reliable (and even projections within that timeframe aren't golden) but it really does seem, as this thread has gone on, that the appeal to authority you keep standing on isn't much more than your trying to pass off personal anecdotes as expert advice. Which is fine. A lot of people are using personal anecdote to explain/support their opinions as to why something will go the way it's going, but I guess they're managing to do it in a manner that seems a lot less strident and authoritative. If you're going to continue to use the prequels' earnings as the basic launching pad for most of your arguments regarding overseas markets and their feelings towards the Star Wars brand, you're going to continue to kneecap your argument by chaining it to decade old paradigms that don't necessarily apply, no matter how much decade old anecdotal evidence you want to cite.

And again - consistently trying to bring up adjusted numbers makes zero sense in a conversation about dollars earned in the here and now. People are talking about this film's box office potential in 2015. Bringing in estimated numbers from previous films in a completely different time/marketplace does nothing but obfuscate the discussion of today's market. Same with dragging your opinions on the film's rumored plot into your "calculations" as to the films potential. If you're familiar with box-office discussions, you should already know that the adjustments tack, as well as tying the film's content to its box-office that directly, are no-gos.

 

It was my invention, but it wasn't released by Fox or Lucasfilm's PR department. The magic of the sheer scope of Star Wars hype in 1999 was that you didn't have to be connected to Star Wars in any meaningful way to try to take advantage of it.

yeah that's just ignorant nonsense. People talk about adjusted dollars because without them no meaningful comparisons of economic activity are even possible across time.

 

There's no need to even make comparisons across time, though. Zero. It's a box-office thread about the potential of this movie, in this market. There's a reason the thread consistently gets caught doing cookies in a conversational cul-de-sac every 5 or 6 pages, and it's because bringing up old movies in old marketplaces causes people to get in arguments about old movies instead of focusing on the market as it stands today, and the films within that market.

It's not ignorant, it's correctly noting basic misdirection/obfuscation. Adjusted numbers are basically completely beside the point of the discussion, which is The Force Awakens in the year 2015. The only reason to even introduce adjusted numbers from old films in a different marketplace is to specifically steer conversation away from the focus of the thread.

 

The "just because" there is "just because... it's not really relevant."

And it isn't. None of the attempts to introduce adjusted numbers and box-office history have proven otherwise. Adjusted numbers discussions are just a nice, subtle means to smuggle goalposts in a backwards direction while pointing at aspects of box-office history that really have no bearing on the current market as it stands, or any film's performance in that market.

That it also allows you to speak at length on opinion based in personal anecdote presented as verifiable cultural/sociological fact is probably just a bonus.

 

No one is annoyed the prequels were a success, we are simply denying the fact that they were a success. No matter how much you want to rewrite history the prequels weren't overwhelmingly well received and were maligned by a huge portion of fans. Yes they made a lot of money, it's undeniable they were a huge monetary success. However as I have said time and time again money is not a good reputation of a movies success. The Transformers movies all make tons of money and yet I wouldn't call them massive successes by any means. Alice in Wonderland made more money than The Dark Knight. Does that mean Alice and Wonderland was more of a success?

As for the blue rays and all the new home releases still making money, in general the people that buy those are huge Star Wars fans. You said it yourself the complete saga outsold both the OT and the PT by quite a significant margin, and there is a reason for that. The Blue-Rays aren't getting bought by the GA. They are being bought by people who are Star Wars fans and want to actually own the Complete Saga in the highest quality possible. If you think the prequels are a driving force behind the Complete Saga Blue-Ray sales then you are out of your mind.

You couldn't be more wrong. I want Star Wars to be the most popular movie franchise ever. I hope TFA is the greatest movie in the history of cinema. If the prequels had all been good movies and had been well received and loved by the GA, then I would be the happiest person in the world. However that's not what happened and unlike you I'm not trying to rewrite history to fit my views. If you like the prequels that's fine. I like most of them too and I actually think ROTS is a really good movie. But the fact is that these aren't the universally acclaimed films that the OT, LOTR, and Nolan's Batman are. At the end of the day they were seen as disappointing and failures to at least half of Star Wars fans. And I don't believe that you can call something that half of the fanbase finds disappointing a success.

 

Star Wars movies by attendance (millions):

ANH - 142.7
TPM - 84.8
ROTJ - 81
ESB - 78.9
ROTS - 59.3
AOTC - 52


Fascinating!


Source

 

I already posted my in-detail opinion what could and most probably will happen this December and again, this time like a true innocent bystander/moviegoer that I am: The Force Awakens will make a lot. It won't cure cancer but box-office mojo will post articles upon articles, all the way into February if we're lucky (meaning there will be replay value).

 

it's an ignorant attitude. Wrong on all points as anyone who's even taken a semester of AP economics in high school would be able to tell you.

 

Sure it isn't.

 

so we'll make a deal that I'll continue to talk about Episode VII's box office potential, and you can talk about *whatever* you want.

What I like about Qui-riv, even though I disagree with many of his points, is that he bothers to make an argument, instead of just whine.

 

We don't need to make any sort of deal at all. We'll both post whatever we would like to post. Sometimes what I will like posting involves addressing your posts directly and pointing out the misleading/unneccessary aspects of the arguments you're making as a means to highlight how and why those aspects aren't really relevant.

You're not really talking about Force Awakens Box Office potential anyway. You're talking about personal history in PR/Living Overseas/Taking economics classes, and using Star Wars as a means to do so.

Which is, again, perfectly fine, and your prerogative as a member of the forums. Just as it's mine to point out how not-helpful that can be at times.

 

I have no problems whatsoever accepting the criticism about the rangy anecdotal stuff, but not about discussing adjusted numbers and past performance of Star Wars, topics which have always been directly on point.

 

Yeah AOTC was a complete clustermess!!! Sure it did well. $300 million (before 3D) is nothing to cry about but is certainly FAR below its predecessor.

People can say all they want about competition and whatnot but a drop of nearly 30 million tickets and a drop of $130 million is MASSIVE!!!!

 

But they're not. It's basically irrelevant to what's happening now. Wanting it to be relevant doesn't really make it so. I can see why it might seem that way, but previous performance of Star Wars films in vastly different domestic and overseas markets doesn't have much bearing on the way this particular Star Wars film might perform in this market. Any extrapolations on that point are bound to be all sorts of inaccurate, to the point they might as well not be brought up.

Look at what's happening last year and this year. Look at what gets the response it gets, and why it gets that response. Look at marketing campaigns, audience reception to those campaigns, look at number of screens, look at market growth, look at audience demographics. Look at all of that stuff, and look at the film in question, and how it fits into those discussions.

Talking about Revenge of the Sith in 2005 doesn't say anything about 2015, and the amount you have to stretch to make it seem like it does makes the endeavor almost self-defeating, unless of course the point is to discuss Revenge of the Sith in 2005 and use box-office as a means to enter sideways into yet another discussion on the quality of the prequels as films, which doesn't really have anything to do with the money-making potential of a completely different Star Wars film by a completely different creative team in a completely different worldwide market, sold by a completely different marketing team.

 

The brand problem of being arguably the most successful film franchise of all time?

That certainly is a poor place to start alright.

Considering though how well over ANH and TPM got over for what they did to present the audience with something so racially different in TESB and AOTC is not going to go over well near as well and they didn't.

AOTC was down 30% in domestic gross and 40% in tickets.

TESB was down 30% in domestic gross and 45% in tickets approx from final totals pre-SE.

To give some perspective of the time around it:

1st in 2000 How The Grinch Stole Christmas 260M 48M tickets
1st in 2001 Harry Potter 1 318M 56M tickets
3rd in 2002 AOTC 310M 52M tickets

 

3 billion .

 

AOTC and TFA will have one thing in common. They won't be the #1 movie in their respective years. (Spider-Man and Avengers 2)

 

I guess I'd like to see some data about the size of this "vast difference" that you're insisting on between 2005 and 2015.

If the performance of previous titles is irrelevant, why do people bother making sequels? Is there some other reason beyond studios assuming that the past performance of a brand is relevant to future performance? I know that my financial advisors always includes a boilerplate caveat about past performance not being an indicator of future performance, but that's always in the context of a report in which they go on and on in a great level of detail about how future performance is related to past performance.

 

Agreed. TFA will do astronomically well but it won't beat Age of Ultron.

 

We'll see, but I doubt that... I think TFA will beat Avengers 2.

 

If Disney is successful at marketing TFA like a direct sequel to the OT and TFA finds a domestic audience the size of The Phantom Menace audience, then TFA will earn as much as Avatar in the U.S. $750 million or more.

If we assume that TFA plays more at the box office like a sequel to the PT and reaches some fraction of the TPM audience, then it will likely earn something like $500 million in the U.S.

Anyone here would agree that it will be much easier to recapture that pre-TPM Star Wars level of anticipation in the U.S. than outside the U.S.

If Star Wars outperforms standard blockbusters, it is more likely to do it in the U.S. than outside the U.S.