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^Yeah, McGregor being so widely accepted as Obi-Wan is key. They should also be able to do it on a much lower budget, make it more of a personal, character-driven film, so that it can turn a good profit even with just $500 million WW.

That's a serious allegation that I hope you can back up with strong evidence and aren't just casually throwing out to deflect from all the vicious, bigoted verbal abuse that Kelly Marie Tran has been subjected to.

Just saw a great video on this by John Campea: I set the timestamp to 22:58 for the key part, but he starts addressing this issue 16 minutes in. To briefly summarize, he said to the reasonable majority of TLJ detractors, while you don't support or identify with this bigoted/cyberbullying faction, they are identifying themselves with you. They are attaching themselves like leeches to the majority, trying to hijack the movement and steal the credit for tanking Solo, when it's obvious that there were much bigger factors, including just people who had legitimate issues with TLJ and aren't bigoted at all. So Campea is asking those reasonable detractors to denounce the bigots and bullies. We'll see how many of these anti-TLJ blogs and video channels come to Kelly Marie Tran's defense and stop ignoring or downplaying the problem.

Maybe just wishful thinking but I'll say Kenobi still happens soon, just with a much smaller budget, and Fett doesn't happen at least until 2025, though he'll very likely show up as a supporting character before that. Doubt we'll ever see Qi'ra but Lando almost certainly, likely in his own spinoff, and I think it will happen before Fett.

She's carried her own major storyline for seven years on the most popular show in the world, and she carried a low-budget movie to over $200 million. I don't want to criticize Tessa Thompson at all. I've enjoyed her acting in anything I've seen her in, but since her fans keep bashing Clarke, what has Tessa Thompson ever carried that was remotely as successful?

I'm saying on top of Hook's other aspects, not just by the score. Even most people who don't like Hook would agree that its writing and directing is vastly superior to TLA's. But I'm not a fan of Hook either.

Wow, that shocks me. Robin Williams' performance and John Williams' score should've been enough to at least get it to 50%, but critics rarely even acknowledge music in their reviews.

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Actually, despite some Star Wars fans suddenly converting to hyper-nationalism and acting as if only box office from one country matters, Avatar remains "king of the castle" by a vast margin at the box office of Planet Earth. Unless you want to adjust for things like inflation and market expansion, in which case Titanic is king. Either way Cameron is King. While I think it's extremely likely that the Avatar sequels will decline a lot, your assertion that they will be "blown away" by SW sequels is at this point merely an assumption that lacks much evidence. Your gloating and chest-thumping over SW8's new release date is especially silly given that Fox had never even announced that date for Avatar 2, and the script for it still hasn't been completed. I said here weeks ago that it was extremely unlikely to meet that date. I see no reason to believe that the sequels will flee December and "screw off to wherever else it can find a release window." As much satisfaction as that would evidently give you, Fox may never even have to give a moment's thought to avoiding Star Wars. December 2018 is currently wide open, and for months that's been the most realistic release date for Avatar 2. While Cameron hopes to release Avatar 3 & 4 over the subsequent two years, there's good reason to doubt they'll be ready that quickly. James Horner expressed such skepticism in an interview last spring, citing his knowledge of how Cameron works and how difficult the sequels will be to make, and saying that while the technology is ready for Avatar 2, it's not ready for Avatar 3. Maybe it is now or will be soon, but I think Avatar 3 probably won't be ready by December 2019, when SW9 will likely be released.

I think what DamienRoc is saying applies even more to Avatar's general audience, as it was a lot broader and more casual than most sci-fi/fantasy blockbusters. We can, and many Avatar detractors frequently do, point to dozens of such movies that had/have way more active and dedicated fanbases than Avatar ever had, yet Avatar trounced them all at the box office. Avatar was always unpopular with the type of people who dominate discussion of movies on the internet, and they grew to dislike Avatar even more for showing how incredibly far they are from being the arbiters of public opinion that they fashion themselves to be. I do think Avatar 2 will drop a lot, even if it has great word of mouth, but so did The Empire Strikes Back. It won't prove what the detractors are hoping for.

There has been a ton of negativity directed at Avatar ever since the first teaser came out. Especially in internet comment sections. If they were actually representative of public opinion, Avatar would've flopped like they predicted, Serenity would've grossed more than Titanic and Ron Paul would've been elected President of the United States in a landslide. When Avatar's success proved the doomsayers wrong and showed its detractors to be a fringe minority, they resorted to arguing it was only because of the 3D (the same 3D that they'd mocked Cameron for believing in) and that Avatar would flop on blu-ray. Of course that didn't happen either. None of their predictions do, but they keep plugging along, trying to convince themselves that public opinion is secretly with them. That it matters this much to them is one reason why they have such difficulty understanding Avatar's audience, most of whom couldn't care less about whether this movie they casually enjoyed six years ago is winning in geek debates on the internet.

I'm just hoping to hear some time this year that the scripts are finally done. As I mentioned earlier, shortly before his death James Horner said Cameron had "four sequels script-wise" and was trying to cut that down to three. He said it about 15:45 into this interview. But warning, it's a very sad watch in retrospect.

They may be missing some but here are the Gone with the Wind releases according to the-numbers.com: December 15th, 1939 (Exclusive) by MGM (Atlanta Premiere) January 17th, 1941 (Wide) by MGM, released as Gone With the Wind March 31st, 1942 (Wide) by MGM, released as Gone With the Wind August 21st, 1947 (Wide) by MGM June 3rd, 1954 (Wide) by MGM March 10th, 1961 (Wide) by MGM October 14th, 1967 (Wide) by MGM September 18th, 1974 (Wide) by MGM, released as Gone With the Wind February 3rd, 1989 (Limited) by MGM June 26th, 1998 (Limited) by MGM Even if we include the first 3 releases all as the first release, that still pales to TFA's admissions even now, according to the EW article I cited on page 2 that reported 59.5 million admissions total across all 3 releases before the 4th release in 1947.

Raiders of the Lost Ark v. Bambi Star Wars IV: A New Hope v. Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers v. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back v. Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith The Lion King v. The Passion of the Christ Jurassic Park v. Animal House Back to the Future v. The Greatest Show on Earth Spider-Man 2 v. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Doctor Zhivago v. Jurassic World Gone with the Wind v. Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi v. Around the World in 80 Days Avatar v. The Robe The Avengers v. Goldfinger The Exorcist v. Beverly Hills Cop Ghostbusters v. Cleopatra The Ten Commandments v. Home Alone Titanic v. Thunderball Independence Day v. Spider-Man Batman (1989) v. Sleeping Beauty Blazing Saddles v. Shrek 2

I hope DeNiro didn't just take this role for $$$ and that it will be funny like his role in Meet the Parents. Would be nice to see him in a good comedy again.

Undoubtedly some records have been lost but just on what's been publicly available, we've seen random unpaid message board posters do far better research than paid journalists. Most of them just report Box Office Mojo's "adjusted" list without investigating it at all. Regarding Jaws, for example, we know it had several re-releases and it's not hard at all to find info about them, but Mojo refuses to even acknowledge them, even after being informed of a Jaws re-release trailer that can be seen on Youtube touting that Jaws' initial release was "seen by 67 million people."

Yes, it's extremely unlikely imo. I decided a year or two ago to just assume we won't see Avatar 2 before December 2018, with 2019 a distinct possibility. Cameron said in April 2014 that the scripts would be done in six weeks. They still aren't done. James Horner said in spring 2015 that Cameron was having difficulty condensing all his ideas into just 3 more Avatars.

I'm far from an expert on directing but none of Eastwood's movies have seemed visually impressive to me in any way. While his productivity especially at his age is remarkable, I'd bet that Cameron put more blood and sweat into Titanic and Avatar than Eastwood has in all his movies combined over the same 20 year period.

This is because studios have focused more each decade on producing spectacles that have to make a ton of money just to be profitable. In Gone with the Wind's day studios were much more focused on churning out very low budget movies that would quickly exit theaters. Spectacles like Gone with the Wind were incredibly rare. Now we're inundated with them, not to mention some video games that are massive blockbusters.

Cool. Yeah I remember now, you posted as DC2010 or something like that. It's actually gotten a lot more difficult to research this than in 2010, because Google has almost completely destroyed its news archives. Now the best sources I can find are Google Books, and of course its free previews are more restrictive than ever. How naive I was to think 10-15 years ago that information would be a lot more freely available now. Things have gotten so much worse.

Wow, I'd forgotten about this. More from Dave Poland: "Only 12 years ago, here was the NYT standard on this issue: "'Titanic'' has already taken in more at the box office than any other movie. But this method does not account for the effect of inflation. For example, the average price of a movie ticket in the United States in 1948 was 36 cents. Today, it is $4.59, nearly 13 times as much. Among movies for which complete historical data are available, here are the films with the largest domestic box-office grosses, adjusted for inflation. The list excludes some high-grossing older films, like ''Gone With the Wind'' and ''The Ten Commandments'' because historical data were not available. Variety estimates, using a different method, that ''Gone With the Wind'' has earned more at the box office than any other movie, taking in more than $1 billion since it was first released in 1939." So even Variety, the keeper of the books, was unable or unwilling to tally these things on pre-1989 movies. And NYT tipped its hat to that. But nowadays, seeing it on Mojo is enough for NYT... without digging an inch deeper." Here's the article Poland was quoting: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/23/business/box-office-top-gauge-for-films.html Shortly after that is when Exhibitor Relations concocted this fraudulent all-time adjusted list that BOM then parroted. It was all about trying to keep Titanic from being seen as a bigger success than Gone with the Wind.

Here's an old post at HSX with more info from old news articles on this topic. Only problem is it might be confusing rentals for box office gross but that's hard not to do when the media did it like crazy for more than half a century. One of the very few in the media who dared to question Box Office Mojo was Dave Poland of Movie City News. He actually cited the research that was being done by posters on the old BOM message board: Actual Research Brings Asterisk To GWTW Numbers I have pointed out repeatedly that the assumptions we make about old numbers can be very iffy. Box Office Mojo, in particular, is operating with a very narrow set of numbers from before its opening a few years ago, none of which it compiled on its own. Some guy from Australia did some research - what a concept! - and found some issues with Mojo's much repeated Adjusted Gross chart. He use the NY Times search and found news stories from each time Gone With The Wind was in release and found that the estimates of ticket sales were iffy. You can read that here Me being me, I am researching his research. And he's a little off base in some areas. But not all. Still, if you want to understand why adjusted gross games and ticket sales guessing is a fool's errand, read the thread. And I'll offer more when I have gotten closer to real numbers. You might also want to read this Time Magazine piece from 1940. While Mojo is estimating tickets sold at 23¢, the matinee price for the Avatar of 1939 was 75¢. And I have to say, I am getting more and more angry about Box Office Mojo infecting a lot of smart people with sometimes bad, unsubstantiated information.

According to the NY Times, Gone with the Wind had 52 million admissions total after its 2nd release. This was in an article dated March 17 1942 that used to be available on their site. You can google this quote "52,000,000 paid admissions" to see others referencing it. From EW: "According to Roland Flamini’s 1975 book Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands, the film sold 25 million tickets during its initial release in 1939-40. MGM immediately reissued Wind in 1941 and 1942, selling an additional 24 million and 10.5 million tickets, respectively." Don't even know if the above is close to true, but there it is. There's a discrepancy of 3 million admissions even between those two sources, which is actually a pretty small discrepancy given the poor quality of box office reporting before the 1980s. That's the #1 problem here in all this data collection effort. Even most of the numbers we do find are questionable and often contradictory. No old movies should even be on any all-time adjusted list until their releases are thoroughly documented, but the media has been too lazy to do it. It shouldn't be left to message board posters, especially since a lot of the data is blocked by insanely expensive pay walls. Anyway, I went to Google Books to check EW's source and found it claimed Gone with the Wind's 2nd release had 24 million admissions from 8100 theaters, the 3rd release had 10.5 million admissions. Counting all 3 releases "by july 1943 it had grossed $32 million domestically" (almost certainly they meant rentals here).

This was investigated by people on the old BOM forums and basically what was discovered is that, with a few exceptions like the original Star Wars, box office simply wasn't reliably tracked before the 1980s. We'd get scattershot reports of box office gross but the industry and reporters were focused on rentals (the box office that went to distributors after exhibitors took their cut) and those figures were far less reliable than the exact amounts we get now. Variety reported them only as estimates subject to change at any time. For example, they drastically downgraded My Fair Lady's rentals from $32 million to $12 million ten years after it was first released. Years ago BOM was referred to reliable reporting of many re-releases it has failed to document for older movies, most notably Gone with the Wind, which only made a tiny fraction of its gross in its initial release, and charged premium prices that percentage-wise dwarf anything in IMAX. BOM knows their adjusted list is fraudulent but they simply don't care, as our lazy media is happy to promote it anyway.

No, it was released in the doldrums of late August in 812 theaters, over 4 months after it had been released on dvd.