Star Wars Discussion

it is. there's probably another symbol that matches the A wing better, as well. maybe the α (alpha)

Well in Star Wars news.

Galaxy's edge, the 'Star Wars' theme park at Disneyland opened recently and is now being described as a ghost town. Even as early as last week, when the park fully opened, people were commenting on the relative small number of people around and the short wait times for the rides. (Well, ride as I think Galaxy's edge only has one at the moment). Reviews are lukewarm at best, with staff being accused of being rude and everything being overpriced even by Disney's standards.
Case in point are the lightsabres. The park has an attraction that allows people to design and build their own lightsabre. Some of the staff there have been accused of being rude to customers by some customers. But the Sabres themselves have been consistently described as poor quality that stop working by the time you leave the park.
The cost for these Sabres is $200-250 each. To put that in context a basic toy sabre will set you back some $20, a base line reasonable quality reproduction some $60 and a top of the line reproduction around $300.

What exactly is going on here is unclear, as it isn't just Galaxy's edge that is showing basically empty streets but Disneyland overall. The best guess is that Disneyland's attendees are mainly comprised of annual pass holders rather than tourists. Pass holders are being blocked out from June thru August at the moment, which might explain most of the low attendance numbers. Disney must certainly be hoping this is the case. If not they could be heading for disaster.

My own speculation would be that the lagging interest in Star Wars might, for sound bite purposes, be described as a result of giving it the disney treatment. by which I mean significantly changing the story from the original.

but overall, I am wondering if it is a result of Disney's apparent strategy of controlling attendance by raising prices.

I would say its less 'Disney' treatment and more JJ Abrams/Bad Robot's treatment. They are also involved with Star Trek which has seen a similar crash. JJ is showing himself to be a virus, which inserts itself into healthy franchises, sucks out everything good about it then moves on to find a new host while leaving behind a hollow dead shell.

Disney has started a process of fingerprinting and face-scanning kids at their parks for...reasons. I don't have kids myself, but if I did my immediate reaction would be to turn around and walk away. I certainly would not be happy at the idea of a company fingerprinting my kids for any reason what-so-ever. I suspect that might have a part to play in low attendance as well.

True.

However both Star Wars and Star Trek have shown the exact same pattern;

Change the look of the franchise for no other reason than Bad Robot can make money off the new designs.

Release an initial film that, on first glance, seems to be in keeping with the tone of the franchise. But on closer inspection is found lacking.

Release a second film that is utterly panned by actual customers.

Respond to any negative comments by accusing the audience of being sexist and racist irregardless of what that the comments are actually about.

Spend large sums of money on continuing to produce additional films/series no one asked for or wanted that cost the studio money*

Continue to pretend this is the audiences fault.

Franchise becomes effectively defunct.

(* For Star Wars this was some $200 million lost just on Solo plus probably something close to a Billion in the lack of toy sales.

For Star Trek the base estimate was that STD was costing CBS $2 million per month without adding on the running costs of All Access. However some sources are claiming that season two, due to basically having to refilming half the season, cost some $40 million PER EPISODE. That would translate into about a third of CBS Corporations Yearly profits.)

It is being rumored that Ryan 'Sad Troll' Johnson's trilogy has been cancelled.

The rumor says that this news won't be official until December, or at least they weren't planning on admitting it until then. As to why Johnson insists he is still working on it that is, according to the rumor, because for several reasons they haven't bothered to tell him yet. (Which makes sense as he'd just start whining on Twitter)

The thing that makes this rumor possible, other than there being no reason for anyone to want to employ a man-child who spends all day on Twitter looking for people to troll, is the timing.

I have long speculated that the first indication that Kennedy is 'moving on' will be Johnson getting fired, as he is known to be her favorite pet. I went on to note that Kennedy isn't going to leave, or be fired, until after Episode IX comes out since no one will want to take her job with that hovering over their head. If Disney is, or was, intending to announce Johnson's trilogy being cancelled in December that would most likely mean Kennedy is due to leave early in 2020.

The Lightsabre design and the way it is opened there was lifted from the Rebels series, where Jedi Temple guards have an identical design and open it the same way.

So according to articles Episode IX is undergoing reshoots, because that would be perfectly normal less than 3 months before release. Full on reshoots seem unlikely, due to a mixture of the difficulty in bringing people back this late as well as the time needed to reedit and redo any effects shots.

The update is that there are indeed reshoots but these are not live action reshoots but redoing, or possibly making new, effects shots. This update indicates that Lucasfilm has basically tripled the normal number of people who would be working on such a project.

None of this bodes well for the film, which was rumored to have filmed multiple variations during the (standard) live action reshoots so they could decide what ending to use. Then again JJ Abrams is in what for him is unknown territory; Having to actually finish something he started.

Original story here;

The 'record breaking pre-sales' story comes from a company that is majority owned by...errm...Disney and who's board and investors includes one JJ Abrams.

The rumor about reshoots has not only continued, but got worse with several sources claiming that up to 75% of the film is being reshot with multiple endings none of which has tested well. What lends some validity to this is that it was Doomcock who originally reported on these rumors, but when he did so he only gave a figure of 70% as he couldn't believe a film would be undergoing more reshoots than that some two months before release. However he was contacted after a live chat by someone who was/is friends with someone working on the film who gave a figure of 75% - which was the figure Doomcock had actually been told.

The situation at Disney overall is not exactly good. The company is in deep debt, the theme parks are under-performing according to independent tour companies, a crew member on one of the cruise ships is being prosecuted for child abuse on one of their ships and the new transport system at one of the parks had a crash a week after it opened that resulted in passengers being trapped in the air for three hours in hot humid weather without water or air conditioning. In the latter case Disney didn't do themselves any favours by insisting this was a 'mechanical fault' not a crash, even though there are multiple pictures of two of the carriages embedded together with broken windows. Worse is that they not only accused anyone who called it a crash as reporting 'fake news' but were actively deleting posts people who were trapped were making at the time.

So Disney's year started with them having to basically admit that Star Wars was actually losing them money, and may end with a box office bomb. If they really are reshooting some 70% of the film that would mean the production budget must be in the $300 million range if not more. That in turn would mean that Episode IX would need to gross some $1.5 Billion at the box office just to cover the production costs. Or put another way even if it does Last Jedi numbers it is still going to lose some $200 million.
It is, at this point, even looking as though Disney might welcome such a loss as the trend seems to be for the film to struggle to do that well. One of the reasons for thinking this is the change in tone from the 'access media'. Where at the beginning of the year they were mindlessly following the 'everything is wonderful' line now they are admitting to Last Jedi not being all that good, the fan (customer) base being divided and a general negative to apathetic view of the entire franchise. This could indicate that they are now viewing Disney as less as a big bad shark they should snuggle up to. And more as an elderly shark who's false teeth just fell out.