Sound the Rebel Alliance alarm. Lucasfilm released a “Star Wars” movie this past weekend—the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” origin prequel—and for the first time in franchise history, the movie wasn’t much of a global event. And that’s being charitable. ‘Solo,’ which cost upwards of $250 million thanks to a four-month reshoot, essentially crash landed.
Underwhelming at the box office, ‘Solo’ couldn’t make the jump into hyperspace—the film’s global opening weekend gross ($148 million), couldn’t even match just the domestic opening of the last ‘Star Wars’ spin-off movie ‘Rogue One’ ($155M). It’s three-day weekend stateside earnings ($84.7 million) were down -47% from ‘Rogue One’ and it’s four-day Memorial Day weekend total ($103 million) was lower than unremarkably received films like “X-Men: The Last Stand,” “Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull” and even “The Hangover Part II.”
Worse, ‘Solo’ had the worst opening weekend of a “Star Wars” film since ‘Attack Of The Clones,’ and 2005’s ‘Revenge Of The Sith‘ bested its debut by $24 million. Considering the insane numbers “Star Wars” movies put up usually, ‘Solo’s grosses were shockingly low.
The Internet is up in arms of course, with the sky-is-falling hot takes that all sound like some version of “Star Wars” is dead; fans are claiming that Disney has ruined “Star Wars” or that it’s Lucasfilm President’s Kathleen Kennedy‘s fault or that this is what the company gets for releasing a “Star Wars” movie like ‘The Last Jedi‘ that destroyed their childhood and further nonsense like that.
Regardless of the hysteria—and the cultural amnesia that somehow forgets that no “Star Wars” film under its new Disney ownership has grossed under a billion dollars so far— ‘Solo’s’ disappointment is cause for concern. You’re looking at a movie that’s likely going to gross less than half what ‘Rogue One’ did and obviously when the team is constantly hitting grand slams, management is going to ask why someone only hit an uneventful double.
LISTEN: ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’: Spoilers, Easter Eggs, Box Office, And More! [Podcast]
So, what went wrong exactly? This will be the multi-million-dollar question Lucasfilm, fans, pundits and even casual moviegoers will ponder for months. The internet will certainly want to pin it on one subjective thing depending who you are, what your bias is and or how much you either hate or love this new iteration of “Star Wars” under Disney. Yet, as always, there’s a confluence of dozens of factors at play and not just one element at fault.
Let’s disregard a few things first amongst the panic. 1) General mainstream audiences don’t give a shit about the behind-the-scenes drama and the fact that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired from the troubled production and that filmmaker Ron Howard was hired to finish the film (eventually reshooting about 70% of it all over again). It makes for a good story, but Johnny Q. Public in Iowa probably wasn’t refreshing THR for days on end.
And 2) Please laugh at anyone in the face that said concerted boycotts against “Star Wars” post-“The Last Jedi” hurt ‘Solo’ because last time anyone checked there was no one big campaign against the film that earned an ounce of traction (try and even find one).
Here are some factors that are at play, but the first one, even as I list it, I take some umbrage with.
1. “Star Wars” fatigue and oversaturation
Despite all the blaster noise coming at you, try and keep a level head. It’s difficult and unwarranted to say with a straight face that audiences are dead tired of “Star Wars” movies considering every “Star Wars” movie released since Disney bought Lucasfilm has (I repeat) made more than $1 billion dollars. The evidence just isn’t there right now, even with this disappointing aberration. The analogy I use is: you wouldn’t call a star student, who just wrote three A+ papers, a failure if they earned a C on their latest essay (and if you would, you’d make a cruel teacher or parent). You call the blemish an outlier and assume and hope that student could reach those heights again.
Forbes writer Scott Mendelson perfectly encapsulates my thoughts on the idea of “Star Wars” fatigue or oversaturating the market: audiences just didn’t think this was essential viewing for them.
If audiences looked at #Solo and said "Yeah, that looks like something I really want to see in theaters right away!," it would not have mattered that it was the second #StarWars movie in five months.
— Scott Mendelson (@ScottMendelson) May 27, 2018
And yes, while Marvel is a different beast with arguably more varying tones (yes, they’re all made from the same cookie cutter, but A “Doctor Strange” movie is very different from say “Spider-Man: Homecoming“), the studio puts out three movies a year and audiences don’t tire of them… because they love the product, continue to believe in it and continue to think each movie looks worthwhile (so far anyhow).
Devil’s advocate argument — was it too soon for a “Star Wars” movie just five months after the hotly-contested and yet still wildly-successful ‘The Last Jedi?’ Mark Hamill certainly seemed to suggest it was, and sure, he must speak on behalf of at least some “Star Wars” fans. And while there is a small (and loud) base of disgruntled “Star Wars” fans butthurt from ‘The Last Jedi’ (look, I’m not a huge fan of it either, but life goes on), they did not account for a -47% drop in the box office from the last ‘Star Wars’ spin-off, sorry. But it’s probably some kind of factor within the convergence of many.
READ MORE: ‘Solo: A Star Wars’ Screenwriters Discuss Why They Included The Shocking [Spoiler] Cameo
2. The Symbiotic Relationship Of Reviews, Rotten Tomatoes & Social Media Buzz
I’d argue audiences just want to see and pay for a good movie and when they hear one happens to be bad or mediocre, they tend to pass. Take the movie’s tracking for example. Early on, and around the time that junketeers saw the film to much enthusiastic, even over-the-top social media buzz, the film was tracking to around $155-160 million—definitely within the ‘Rogue One’ ballpark or even higher. That would have made ‘Solo’ a hit and no one would think twice about it.
But after lukewarm reviews came in and revealed a Rotten Tomatoes score lower than any “Star Wars” movies since the detested prequels, tracking plummeted. The correlative word of mouth (social media) and buzz dissipated precipitously between the time early word hit and more judicious reviews arrived, telling many audiences what they were already concerned about: ‘Solo’ didn’t tell the audience anything they didn’t already know about the character and perhaps wasn’t worth rushing out to see opening weekend.
Did the familiarity and “safeness” articulated in many reviews scare audiences off? Both ‘Rogue One’ and ‘The Last Jedi’ took major risks (the former including entirely new characters they killed off, the latter tearing down the past to make way for the future and killing Luke Skywalker in the process). ‘Solo’ played it extremely safe; even more so than the ‘New Hop’-remix of ‘The Force Awakens.’ The question was: did general audiences know that before ‘Solo’ came out or was the Rotten Tomatoes score enough?