ST Episode VII Box Office Discussion

Here's the sense I have, for what it's worth (not much) -- and unfortunately, this is a somewhat US-centric post because that's really the only pop culture I can opine on, but I suspect what I'm going to say here is true for much of the English-speaking West and countries heavily influenced by cultural trends in the English-speaking West:

Something has happened in the last 10-15 years, I can't put my finger on a defining event that started it, but it seems to have occurred post-PT and seems to be accelerating. Whatever you want to call this "thing" -- a trend, a movement, a meme, I dunno -- but whatever it is, it seems that Star Wars has transitioned from being a mere franchise to a layer of pop cultural substrate. This has always been true to some extent, but it seems to have cemented itself in the last 10 years. The characters, the iconography, the music, the dialog from the films ... it's all just become a part of the fabric of pop culture now. To me, something feels very, very different about the way Star Wars pervades the culture than just about anything else. I really don't know what to compare it to -- it's not a movie franchise anymore.


You ask, who wants to see a new Star Wars movie now? The answer is, literally, everybody. Except a few people, I guess, but effectively everybody, IMO. If it's a good film, a better question to ask is who is NOT going to want to see it? How can we have a phenomenon pervade the culture as deeply and expansively as Star Wars, and people think this movie is going to do standard tentpole business at the box office? (unless it absolutely SUCKS and gets killed via word of mouth, I guess). The limiting factor on this -- if it doesn't suck -- is going to be how many theaters can they get it into, and at what rate can people get their butts in the seats to watch it. It'll be limited by physics.

Try this experiment: walk up to a random acquaintance of yours (or a kid that you know, if you harbor this delusion that kids don't like Star Wars) and ask, "Hey there's a new Star Wars movie out. It's good. Wanna go?" See what kind of response you get -- and I'll bet you'd get vastly larger numbers responding in the affirmative now than you would have in 2005.

That's why the negative JW comparisons puzzle me. How is it that people look at the success of JW and think TFA will not do those kinds of numbers (over its entire run, at least in the US domestic market)? Yes, JW has dinosaurs, and kids love dinosaurs. But TFA has Star Wars, and everybody loves Star Wars.

 

You're off by about 35 years. Star Wars became part of the "pop culture substrate" (I love that term) in May, 1977. ESB added to it a bit with "I am Your Father" and Yoda impressions. This transition you describe never happened. It was more or less instantaneous with the popularity of ANH and ESB.

What happened though between 1999 -2005 is that the offputting Jar Jar Binks and the stilted acting and terrible dialogue of the prequels also became hardbaked into that preexisting pop culture substrate. Star Wars became this dual pop culture entity. The hugely popular OT almost universally beloved by its core audience, and the problematic aspects of the PT that became objects of good natured pop culture ridicule, but from a place of relative tolerance for its weakness, because Star Wars was still part of that pop culture landscape.

Now, Star Wars remains a pop culture institution, but a thing of tension. There's still tremendous goodwill toward the OT, but it comes saddled with some fond but also not so fond ribbing about the shortcomings of the PT. The marketing push and probably the entire way the new movie was constructed from the ground up represents a hopefully well founded belief that the appeal of the OT is still strong enough to drive lots and lots of people to the movies for a new Star Wars movie. Much the way Jurassic World is a statement that says "let's pretend that Jurassic Park 2 and Jurassic Park 3 never happened, remember how good Jurassic Park was?" TFA is a statement that says "Forget about the prequels, do you still love the original trilogy? If so, come see this."

The main difference however is that instead of 22 years going by until the return to the magic of the megablockbuster original, 38 years have gone by. The original audience is that much older, the luster of the brand has faded just a bit more.

 

I don't disagree with a lot of what you said, but I think something different has taken root in the last 10 years. I lived thru OT-mania (I was there, and literally, got the T-shirt -- many of them), I lived thru EU-mania, and SE-mania, and PT-mania and post-PT something-somewhat-less-than-mania.

I can't quite put my finger on it. All I can say is I don't think you could've published this book in 2005:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Star-Wars-Conquered-Universe/dp/1480532525

What happened between then & now? Dunno, but I think it's probably some parallel to the cultural dynamic that made The Big Bang Theory popular; i.e., the fact that geeks & nerds decisively won the culture war (or at least that part of it they were contesting).

 

http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/...-star-wars-marathon-before-the-force-awakens/

I guess this is the appropriate place to leave this. SIAP.

 

I don't see The Force Awakens reaching Avatar levels. $1.5 billion? Sure. But not $2.7 billion.

 

It's something you'd need to put your finger on before we can discuss it. To me it looks like the only major change in Star Wars since the prequels is the reverse-Star Trek foray into television, and that has been at best only marginally successful. I don't see more pop culture cross referencing now than I did in the 70s and 80s. Stuff like the classic Family Guy Star Wars episode...I'd say that kind of thing is much rarer now than it was in the 70s and 80s when everyone was trying to latch onto the success of Star Wars. Space Balls. Battlestar Galactica, etc.

 

Interestingly enough, the adjusted gross for ANH: SE would be $239 million in today's money. That's JUST the 1997 SE run alone.

Also ironic, the highest adjusted weekend ANH ever had in its original 1977 release would have been $24 million in today's money. That's $7.25 million in 1977. That was its highest weekend until the SE which would have made $63 million in today's money.

Apples to apples with ANH is VERY tricky to do. In 1977 alone, it made $195 million which equates to $713 million today.

 

well, there you go. $715 million domestic and TFA can lay claim to being bigger than ANH.

 

You seem to be forgetting about the off-putting Ewoks and the stilted acting and terrible dialogue of the originals that were hard-baked into the then forming pop culture substrate. Then of course let's not forget the racism charges against even the first film from some.

It's one of the more bizarre things as certain fans and fan critics decided to turn around and used the exact same arguments that had been already done against the originals by many regular critics at the time and then off-load them onto the prequels then rewrite history so that the entire OT was now and forever "always beloved" right from the start which really only actually even begin to apply to ANH. Certainly not TESB or ROTJ.

Relative tolerance? Hardly. The portion of the core that hated them to the core had to lie in wait to lie about the true story because they were utterly determined to tell the "real" story. Of course since the other 99.9 % of the population doesn't bother with that kind of thing and most fans can be bothered to hate something day in and day out for years and years this portion of fans created the story of the fan perception that the regular media goes with.

Again any preceived brand damage is from them not from the actual public who consumes the movies.

Which is exactly what the prequels already did so what is going to be the difference?

Nothing really.

Not for the new audience of only 10, 13 and 16 years ago as we know is the case.

 

Exactly! Talking about one and only one section of the fan base is very limited thinking. The only people into SW are not the ones who have been there since the beginning. They are still there, but there's a couple of a other generations there as well.

Right now, everyone seems to be blinded by anything relating to the new movie.SDCC featured pretty much nothing at all yet people all over the internet have been salivating from the meager BTS video shown at SDCC. People were foaming at the mouth over the scant appearance of a poster that features nothing more than the title on black space. As a fan, I've thought both of those were pretty much nothing. It goes to show that SW is huge and that anything movie related that is put out there is still big and, despite the critical opinions of the PT, people everywhere (at least in the USA because that's all I currently care about) are fuming over any tiny little thing relating to TFA. That's huge!

 

What I'm talking about isn't what's happening with the franchise itself -- i.e., new movies, new TV shows, new product of any kind, really. In fact, I'd argue (sorry Clone Wars & Rebels fans), that what is happening is happening in spite of the developments in the franchise.

It's more a feeling for how SW has settled into the culture. Again, the best example I have is Chris Taylor's book -- why was that published in 2014, if SW as a brand is decaying, diminishing in influence, something only 40-year old men care about, etc.? It doesn't make sense -- you don't publish books about some pop culture phenomenon "conquering the universe" 10 years after the most recent live action film release if the brand is losing mind share.

Another anecdotal example is the recent VW ad. Actually, it's not that recent -- I was surprised to learn it aired in 2011, 28 years after Vader was last seen on-screen.

So, here's the ad, which is still great, 4 years later:



And here's an excerpt from the WIki page for it (yes, the ad has a WIki page), emphasis mine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Force_(advertisement)

I don't know how else to interpret a reception like that except to say it's the mark of a franchise for which there is a deep and abiding love in the culture, the huge splits in its fandom nothwithstanding.

 

^Hell, on top of all of that, my wife and I saw a Target "Back to School" commercial, and what was the major item at the end of the commercial? An R2 D2 backpack. And the commercial involved a kid dressed like a jedi and a kid dressed like Darth Vader force pulling it between them.

But yeah, the brand is so "diminished."

 

Ex Machine is out on Red Box, btw. Not sure if it's being sold in stores though.

 

I agree completely about Star Wars having permeated U.S. culture, but I don't see it as a recent phenomenon. I know there's been a resurgence since the announcement of the sequel trilogy, but really these things have been ongoing and cyclical since 1977, waxing and waning with the recency of the films.

Just as an aside: who is the core customer of the VW Passat in that ad? Parents old enough to have a school-age kid. The ad aims squarely at professional working age adults with a sense of Star Wars nostalgia re their own childhoods. If I didn't already know how poor quality a car the Passat is, I'd rush out to buy one right now.

The message is 100% clear: If you want to sell something to older men: use Star Wars to sell it!

 

Oy, Jabba, you crack me up. Maybe you're right. I guess we'll see in December.

 

OT: Ex Machina is excellent. See it.

 

Yet there are a lot of back-to-school advertisements that are selling SW for backpacks and other items. Are you saying that kids don't want these but parents feel the need to buy these items for their kids because THEY like SW even if their kids don't?

Hate to ask this question Jabba, but how old are you? You do come up with some good points but every other post demonstrates what appears to be hatred toward people 40 and up.

 

I'm glad you finally understand. This is what I've been saying about Star Wars merchandise all along. It mostly serves the needs of the adults who actually purchase them.

 

I thoroughly agree with this. Stuff like the behind-the-scenes video and the poster were really not newsworthy, and had they been part of the campaign for (for example) Avengers, Jurassic World, or Harry Potter, they would not have made much of an impact. But many sites carried the behind-the-scenes video as the top headline (!) and somehow the poster which was utterly devoid of talking points still managed to create a lot of discussion. There is no denying that the interest in this film is unreal, and truly beyond anything I've ever seen.

I mean, just looking at that big 3-minute trailer for Batman v Superman - sure, it created a lot of buzz, but given how much of an impact the miniscule trailers and behind the scenes stuff for SW have made so far.... can you imagine how huge such a lengthy trailer would have been for Star Wars? It's just on another level compared to pretty much everything else in terms of hype, and I find it hard to dispute that really.

As a direct comparison: I'm a big follower of Digital Spy. Ben Affleck's casting in BvS (the lead of the whole film) made the top headline. Crystal Clarke and Pip Andersen's casting in TFA as two minor characters who will probably have barely a line between them, also made the top headline. Pretty indisputable evidence right there about the interest people have in this thing.

 

Uh...actually that was meant sarcastically. I didn't really mean that parents were buying SW things for their kids only because they wanted to despite the kids. I was just asking the question to see if YOU thought that was the case.

If the kid doesn't like it, they will let their parents know very very quickly. Certainly kids may be exposed to certain older brands (like the Beatles, older shows, etc). But remember this, if they didn't like it, it wouldn't sell. Whether kid discovers something from before their time by accident, through friends, from parents or other family members, etc., they will either reject it or embrace it. Since SW is still a huge retail success in many many areas, I'd say that the latter is much more the case. Kids, however they have come to know SW, have embraced it. They may not embrace every aspect of it (cough-Rebels-cough), but the brand itself is very well embraced by many many many young people. So "old person's brand or not" (and we know that 40 years old is ancient), it has still resonated across the board. I will agree that it is heavily male, but not completely.

 

No one pays $4b for the rights to a property so they can market towards a niche like 40-70 year old males.

Star Wars has great appeal for all ages, it'll do great.

 

Exactly. You also don't plan to build a Star Wars theme park to market to 40 year olds.

 

I hear the big money will roll in once Disney open their planned "Skywalker Lodge Retirement Villages" across the U.S.

 

The Luke Sky-Walker

this is the future of Star Wars merchandise licensing. Disney will have to roll with the demographics.

 

Jabbadabbado Even assuming that it really is a franchise that holds little appeal for anyone under 40, do you not see this changing as the films come out? You've talked about LFL using TFA to build brand awareness in China where later films will do better. Can you not see the same happening for key demographics domestically?