George Parr

Kind of more of the same to me. Pretty good, but not much beyond that. Some great moments, plenty of meh to okay. There was kind of a nice callback to Jedi: Fallen Order though. Never had a problem with any of the acting at any point in any episode. Most of that seem like the usual dumb "I don't like a character, thus the acting must suck", which makes no sense at all.

Overall I thought the episode was pretty good. Though not really a step up from the last one. Right now I would put part 2 ahead.

I think it works just fine, at least to a certain extend.

That's basically my opinion line for line as well, so I'll just quote it and leave it at that A few hiccups here and there, but overall a good start. Definately potential for more.

I'd say that is the exact opposite of how the situation really looks like. Europe loves fantasy. Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Star Wars, Pirates of the Carribbean, those were all big players in the recent past, far more so than anything else apart from James Bond, which is kind of the only other big brand that play a role. Marvel has been a big rise lately, but that is a fairly recent thing. Both it and DC had some successes in the past that went way beyond the norm (e.g. 2002 Spiderman), but were generally not that big of a deal outside of that. That has more to do with those being very americanized heroes though, and less so with the magical element. Overall, fantasy elements have worked the best when looking at Europe as a whole, outside of maybe animation. You may see local movies from other genres that are really big in some parts of Europe, but those tend to have a hard time being a big hit everywhere, often due to language barriers.

Wouldn't that be more of an issue with the movie industry and the interests of the general audience? Whether one likes a movie or not isn't relevant to whether its box office run is interesting. And while one might certainly have a period where even interesting box office stories cannot pull one in, because one doesn't care for the movie(s) or might even hate them, this in itself would not come from the box office being any more or less boring than in the past, but from the released movies not capturing your interest. In other words: if I didn't care for a single movie released over an entire year, but every weekend saw an interesting new facet in terms of box office runs, than the box office isn't the issue, my lack of interest in the released movies would be. That wouldn't mean that I am the problem, but neither would the box office be at fault. Lack of something I'm interested in, doesn't equal a lack of interesting stuff in general. I don't get to define what is or isn't an interesting box office, I only get to define what is an interesting box office for me. I didn't care nearly as much for the box office between something like 2008 and 2014 than I did before or afterwards, yet that period had plenty of very interesting box office runs. Now I'm back into a lull again, in part because there is no movie I'm really interested in, in part because the whole Corona-crisis has drastically reduced the available movies. Following the box office run of a movie one is interested in is likely going to be far more interesting than following random stuff. This should apply to most people. Though there is an obvious difference between those who merely take interest in something, and those who gush or bash stuff. The latter tend to treat it as if it was some sort of competition, their "team" must win. If it does, they act as if the success falls back on them, even though they couldn't have less to do with it. And if something else is doing better, then it is time to insult everything connected to that movie / franchise. It's rather absurd really. Just like some people who root for a movie to fail because they saw it and didn't like it, as if commercial failure would somehow make up for that. It's not like interest in a movie itself must drive how much a person is interested in what is going on. I don't care much one way or the other for Marvel. The Avengers or Spiderman doing big numbers only caused a minimal pique of interest for me. On the other hand, I wouldn't even think about watching a movie like Demon Slayer, yet I just had to follow its run in Japan week by week until it wasn't even in the top 10 anymore.

If you mean canon, yes they are. Denying it doesn't somehow make it true. I really don't know why anyone would even make such a comment to begin with. If you don't like something, ignore it. Don't pretend that something doesn't count just because you don't want it to. No one is forced to watch something he doesn't like. Nor is someone forced to constantly talk about something he doesn't like.

Now now, don't confuse a basher with actual facts

Yeah, they have relied a bit too heavily on nostalgia lately, especially with the characters they have brought in. Outside of the looks into the past, they didn't do much with Boba, or anyone for that matter. There certainly wasn't remotely as much development as there was in The Mandalorian. As for the character you are talking about:

That last bit seems to be a bit of a hyperbole, considering the movie only made as much the rest of the way as it did in its first four days. And no, that wasn't just from the reception being not that great. Its opening was insane. An R-rated movie that would have broken the opening weekend record if it had opened on Friday is flat out ridiculous. But this movie only appealed to a certain audience to begin with. Thats why the enormous hype could cause such an opening, and why the rest of the way was rather lackluster. A certain part of the moviegoing public was hyped beyond belief, but the rest didn't care much, and the reception didn't do anything to persuade them otherwise. If the movie had seen a great reception, it may have moved the franchise up there with the other top guns, instead it faded rather quickly. The (domestic) top-dog at that time was Spiderman, not Matrix, followed by a bunch of stuff that was somewhat similar in scale. Internationally, LOTR and Harry Potter were dominating. There is a difference between a giant opening with tons of hype, and the eventual outcome. A huge opening is great, but it isn't all there is. Spiderman was in another league, AOTC beat it, LOTR beat it and kept growing, even emerging Pirates of the Carribean bested it. Matrix Reloaded was huge, and had a chance to be more than that, but Matrix wasn't the biggest franchise in existence at that time.

I think it was fine. Better than some other parts, but nothing that screams "I can't wait for the next season".. Overall, my rating for the season is similar. Pretty messy, but some cool moments as well. I didn't have much of an interest in the show to begin with, so I wasn't particularly disappointed with the outcome. They really need to stop with this one-shot-kill action though. They should take a peek at the older movies, lots of shots fired, many of them didn't hit the target. Here it was more like Oprah, "you get hit, and you get hit, and you get hit, everyone gets hit!". When two guys fire 20 shots and drop 20 guys, it just doesn't do much. Add this to their general mistreatment of stormtroopers, and they really need to pick up their game in that regard, not just in this show. Action needs at least some stakes. When you can just drop all the henchmen in seconds, unless the plot suddenly requires you not to, there is just not the necessary amount of tension. It basically forces you to come up with additional strong bad guys to pick up the void. Again, pointing towards stormtroopers. In the old movies they might not have done much, but everyone was still running away from them. Now they get dropped in bunches, to the point that elite troopers have to be added to pose some sort of threat. Anyway, I wasn't bored, and it was kind of nice to get a new episode of Star Wars every Wednesday. Especially since everything we got over the last year was animation, and that just doesn't do much for me at all. Especially since the action in those type of shows tends to works even less for me than the bits of this episode. Now onto Kenobi and Andor. Out of all the shows they announced, those two were right at the top in terms of my anticipation.

It is really obvious when you compare season 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian.

What feels a bit odd to me, is the following:

I don't know, I much prefer the episode that came before. This one didn't really have anything I found to be really great. It was better than what came before episode 5, apart from maybe part 2, but overall it lacked focus. it kind of stuffed four different things into one episode. That's almost a TROS-like "we hint at 20 things and drop 12 of them before someone can even think about finding them interesting".

That's back down to the level of the first episode to me, if even that. Quite the step down from last week. What was up with the chase? There were a few interesting bits and pieces in there, but for the most part it was rather bland.

That sounds more like you are putting the cart in front of the horse to me. Things overtrend on social media, because social media happens to not be representative of the general audience. It has nothing to do with "trying to create an illusiuon of popularity" or certain people trying to make something look more popular than it is, and everything to do with the followers of the show being overrepresented on social media. It requires a somewhat decent social media presence to push something on social media. Something won't trend if you don't even have a noteworthy amount of people talking about it on social media, thus making it exactly the other way round from what you describe. You cannot create something out of thin air, nor can a negligible following somehow push something against the masses.

Meh, the tweet didn't seem all that useful to me. I mean, where do some of the things on the list even come from? He hates everyone? He is disrespectful? betrays everyone? holds grudges? kills everyone he doesn't like? has no morals? Did I watch different movies? Because literally none of that makes any kind of sense. Even if you include the EU, none of that really fits all that much. The movies show him a a calculating professional, who respects others who act tough (see his reaction to the bounty hunter / Leia pulling a thermal detonator on Jabba). That's it. The rest is just made up, and ridiculously presented in a way to act as if "we" all saw him that way. I mean, yeah, so far he isn't really all that much how he was portrayed in the movies, so one can make such a case. But not when the list is complete bogus (which isn't on you, it's not your list). One also shouldn't forget that this is the start of the show. He barely survived the sarlacc, and then was a prisoner of the Tuskens for who knows how long. That's definately something that can change your perspective on things. I don't really have a problem with him being like that, provided they show his path towards that new personality. Now, if they don't offer a good explanation in the story, or if his character doesn't show different traits as well, one could make a case that he is too much like The Mandalorian or "too soft" compared to his movie-role. But that is something one should judge after the season, not with just one episode in.

'Fine' is about how I would rate it as well. Some pretty cool stuff, nice ending, but otherwise nothing really special. And dear lord did I not like that one specific design. It felt completely out of place, even when you consider where it is coming from.

You do realize that the RT score is not a personal rating, yes? A movie cannot be worse than its RT percentage, because the RT percentage doesn't talk about how good of a movie it is. It only tells you how many of the reviewers like and disliked it. "I hated a movie so much, no one else could possbly like it" is obviously not a logical argument. A negative vote is a negative vote, it couldn't possibly make a positive vote disappear. How much someone likes or dislikes a movie has nothing to do with this score. Now if you looked at it's average rating, or imdb rating instead, the argument would make a bit more sense.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Marvel is a growing franchise in Germany, but it still has a somewhat limited audience at this point. Move Endgame from April/May to christmas, and all you might get is the opening being lower, stretching the same audience over a longer period. Endgame already reached people Marvel usually didn't get thanks to breaking records everywhere. I don't think that there were that many people left who had any interest in it. It's not like Spiderman is currently doing something it has never done before. The first Tobey Maguire Spiderman topped 5m admissions back in 2002, the two sequels came in at 3.2m each.

German weekend numbers include the Thursdays as well. From what I can gather, Wednesday was ~150k, Thursday 125k, and the entire weekend (TFSS) ~815k. So FSS would be about 690k.

I didn't say that any of them were inconsistent. I said that Bond was currently no.1 There are no Middle Earth movies coming up, so they can't really be considered the top one right now. There are no main Star Wars movies on the horizon, just like there are no Harry Potter movies approaching. Only spin-offs, and those are weaker. The last three Bond movies have hit close to 8m, 7m and ~6m. The last one probably would have been higher if not for Covid. Star Wars has missed 6m with its last two main movies. And even the last few main Harry Potter movies were more hovering around that mark instead of shooting past it like Bond did.

At this point I would say James Bond is the no.1. It's the only thing that can constantly do 5+ million per movie, with a chance for 6 or 7m admissions. The rest isn't looking so hot. Animation isn't as gigantic as it has been in the past. Star Wars is big with its main movies, but not so much with the rest. Fantastic Beasts is a decend sale, but as with Star Wars, it isn't really a match for the main saga. 4m admissions or less is not nearly as big as the HP movies were. Outside of those, there are no Middle Earth movies, POTC has dropped a ton from its peak, while Marvel has been on the rise without fully being there yet. If not for James Bond, your best bet for a huge hit are generally comedies or the odd animated movie.

"The movie can't be good because it can't be" is not a particular sound argument. What exact reasons could there be to come to such a conclusion? - Material released so far? Certainly not, because there hasn't been any. - The director isn't good? Yeah, no, that's definately not it. - The cast? Looks strong, so no argument there either. - Harrison Ford being old? He was also old in TFA and TROS, and there weren't any issues at all. Even if Indy IV had been a desaster - which it wasn't in any way, shape or form - there still is no real argument you could draw from that that Indy V must be bad as well. There aren't any signs that this movie will end up being bad, much less extremely harmful to the franchise. Which isn't to say that it couldn't end up being mediocre or bad.

That's basically my opinion as well, there wasn't anything that really wowed me. The lines that hint at the storyline don't do much for me. Not that the show was among those I cared most about in the first place. All that obviously won't stop me from seeing it as soon as every episode is available