HAN SOLO MEMORIAL (day weekend) THREAD | Solo Flops Domestically with 83M/101M weekend. Spectacularly Bombs Overseas with 65M weekend.

[Lestranger]

DP2 makes this list? Over 100m biggest drops

 

[Mekanos]

Put mediocre movies in the Memorial Day slot and you get mediocre results. It isn't about the holiday.

[Rebeccas]

1 minute ago, Hands of something said:

A friend of mine tried to explain it as if someone sat you down and had you watch a really weak episode of season 4 of a series they really liked.  All the backstory, the callbacks, inside jokes, etc are completely lost on you, and it gets increasingly awkward as it's clear you don't like it.

 

Something that sort of threw me for a loop: he had no idea who Yoda was.  I was like how can you not know who Yoda is!  He's a part of pop culture!  He was sort of generally aware he existed but he is relatively young and foreign born, so him appearing as a ghost out of literally nowhere, talking like a Muppet with broken English and throwing lightning bolts seemed deeply stupid to him.  And I couldn't really defend it.  It is sort of stupid.

 

Without the nostalgia element it's just a new scifi franchise that had a lot of initial hype that it didn't live up to.  A lot of foreign audiences are as excited to see Solo as Americans are to see a prequel about the Tars Tarkas from John Carter of Mars.

Is this movie really more inside jokey than like Deadpool though? 

[Valonqar]

7 minutes ago, SteveJaros said:

I've been trying to tell you "Solo" was going to be a flop-turkey for months now. Few listened. Now the crows are pecking at the corpse.

Star Wars fatigue big time. Disney was pushing their luck with yearly releases as it was, but 5 months? Insane. 

[WrathOfHan]

33M (2.34x previews)
20.8M (-37%)

19.8M (-5%)

16.8M (-15%)

73.6M 3 Day, 90.4M 4 Day

 

Deadpool for comparison:

 

12.5M (+84%)

20M (+60%)

19M (-5%)

51.5M 3 Day, 59% drop

 

If Deadpool goes up a little bit later and manages to have a regular increase tomorrow, it may be ahead of Solo for the rest of the weekend  

[a2k]

3 minutes ago, TMP said:

DP 2 can still go over $300m DOM?

no. if the fss is -60%, it gives -50% 4-day (62-63) and ~228 by mem day. i don't see it failing to add 72 more after that. close to 310 imo if not more.

[MovieMan89]

Looks like my 300 summer game prediction for DP2 may be spot on. Meanwhile, my “lowball” 290m Solo predict is gonna end up like 100 too high.

[Jay Beezy]

7 minutes ago, grey ghost said:

Disney learned the hard way that you can't rubber stamp any SW movie and expect a billion.

 

There needs to be hype in order them to be B.O. monsters.

This. The only SW movies that truly matter are the episodic ones. Rogue One is the exception.

[Rebeccas]

how long until LF begs Feige to help 

[Legion Again]

18 minutes ago, Mekanos said:

Watch Marvel pull a hat trick and Ant-Man 2 does Ragnarok numbers or something ridiculous.

I truly believe it has a decent chance to pass Ragnarok numbers DOM and OS. Ragnarok really did have some brutal competition, whereas AM&tW has those nice open late summer days. And AM&tW could do 50M+ better in China if things go well.

[Mekanos]

1 minute ago, Rebeccas said:

how long until LF begs Feige to help 

“Motherf...”

[Chewy]

2 minutes ago, Rebeccas said:

how long until LF begs Feige to help 

 

Honestly Star Wars seems like an unsolvable problem, impossible to balance the expectations of fans with the wants of the larger audience. Ppl might want to avoid lol

[nevermore]

2 minutes ago, Rebeccas said:

how long until LF begs Feige to help 

Mr Feige... I don't feel so good

[The Panda]

33m is okay for those previews but still it’s pretty yikes

[grim22]

 

[Biggestgeekever]

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/box-office-solo-a-star-wars-story-thursday-previews-1114854

 

Quote

Disney and Lucasfilms' Solo: A Star Wars Story is struggling in its debut at the Memorial Day box office, where it could come in well behind expectations with $105 million-$110 million for the four-day holiday weekend unless traffic picks up in earnest on Saturday thanks in part to families. The projected three-day weekend tally is $80 million-$90 million.

 

The Han Solo origin story is pacing well behind fellow standalone movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which took in $29 million in Thursday-evening previews in mid-December of 2016 on its way to a $71 million Friday and a three-day debut of $155 million. Solo grossed $14.1 million in Thursday previews for a projected $35 million Friday. (Solo does have bragging rights to landing the best preview gross for a Memorial Day release.) 

 

$35M is more in line with weekend figures DL gave, but if the high end is $90M for the 3-day, it's not hitting $110M for the 4-day.

[TheManFromBeyond]

So even as someone who's been a supporter of this, even I'll say that those numbers are not good. This film will NEED word of mouth to survive, and since there's not much releasing in the next two weeks, it could be an advantage for it. But yeeesh. I do think this film will still break even, maybe even a small profit, but that's not very good so far.

Now, as for what I think this means for LucasFilm and Star Wars going forward, there's a few different things to take into account. I thought about how Marvel did in their early years, and there are some surprising similarities, such as BTS trouble:

Marvel had issues with Edgar Wright, Jon Favreau, Alan Taylor and even Joss Whedon on their films, and it wasn't until Phase 3 that their BTS issues seemed to cool down. 

 

With LucasFilm, so far they've had Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Josh Trank and Colin Trevorrow leave before or during production (Gareth Edwards was in a weird position in terms of his title), and similar to Marvel, that has been in their early days.

 

One thing that LucasFilm didn't do that Marvel did though was have a film underperform right after a hit. Remember The Incredible Hulk and how it didn't even double its budget worldwide despite coming out only a month after Iron Man? That's why you haven't seen another Hulk standalone film. Solo was 5 months after Last Jedi, but giving some time between films is better than no time.

 

So here's what I think will happen: Disney keeps SW in December, or at the very least not in May if they release anytime else (AND ESPECIALLY not on Memorial Day weekend). They'll go back to being out a year inbetween as well, and Episode IX has an advantage by coming out more than a year and a half after Solo, so by the time it starts its marketing, people will likely be more excited for SW again than they were for Solo. Some folks say that SW isn't special anymore, and while I think it stopped being special a long time ago, it should still feel like an event. Some franchises get away with it (again, Marvel is a good example), but SW NEEDS that hype.

 

Oh, and I don't think Kathleen Kennedy is going anywhere for the time being. If Kevin Feige could get away with all the drama that happened on in Marvel's early years despite those being his first major producing credits, I don't see why Kathleen shouldn't, especially given Force Awakens, Rogue One and Last Jedi's BO numbers and her much longer and well known track record. If Episode IX doesn't pass Last Jedi, then I could see her getting the boot. But until that happens, I think she's good for the time being.

 

Anyway, sorry for all the words, just had a lot to say.

[The Panda]

I’m not even sure about AM&W over 200m, let alone 300m lol.  

 

And I was starting to doubt the trailer views trend that I had been more adamant for but I should have trusted the data.  Trailer views though I think demonstrate global interest more than DOM but still

[Hands of something]

3 minutes ago, Rebeccas said:

Is this movie really more inside jokey than like Deadpool though? 

Not so much inside jokes but TLJ relied a lot on your knowledge and affection for the previous films for its emotional beats and story structure. 

 

What is the force?  What are Jedi?  Is it a good or bad thing there are no Jedi left?  Were they corrupt somehow?  Are the good guys rebels or the resistance?  What's the difference?  Why is that random hologram R2D2 played affecting Luke so much?  Who even is that?  Why is Bigfoot just sort of hanging around with Rey, what's his deal?  Why does anyone even need Luke, all he does is provide a brief distraction and die, is that going to do anything when the enemy has all these crazy huge ships?  Can people just hyperspace to and from the good guy ship to go on side quests and no one notices?  Why don't the bad guys just do that too?  Were Luke and Leia lovers before?  Why did they break up and why wasn't he helping her before the end?

 

These were some of the questions I was trying to answer.  All the neat callbacks to lines from other movies, the affection we have for the characters, if you strip those away TLJ is pretty rough for newcomers.  I don't blame them for being disappointed by it.

[Barnack]

17 minutes ago, grey ghost said:

Disney learned the hard way that you can't rubber stamp any SW movie and expect a billion.

 

There needs to be hype in order them to be B.O. monsters.

The way they handled reshoot situation and how much they spent on the spin off did show imo that they were very well aware of the risk or at least the giant opportunity cost between good Star Wars movies and bad one, they fully knew how much was in stake I think.

 

What is suggested they should have done if they already knew what they supposedly just learn, they should have fired the writer/director again after seeing the trailer's this Solo movie gave them, re-cast announce a Christmas release ? Just not release the movie ?

 

It was a Han Solo/Chewee/Lando space adventure movie started by Lucas and legendary writer Kasdan with a perfect director match in Lord&Miller that had a near perfect track record.

 

I really do not think it is fair to assume that in 2015 they should have known it would not work, I certainly had no clue it was in fact (before the director change) my most anticipated and one I thought would do extremely well and perfect for the summer. There is just a lot of bad/good luck that goes in that process.