Soylo: A Soy Wars Soyry Fails Even to Meet the Deeply Discounted Hope of $105-$115 Million; Makes Only $103 Million in Four Day Opening

For the three days of the weekend (most movies, of course, only have a three day weekend for their opening weekend haul), Soylo made less than $85 million. $84.7 million, to be more precise.

I think I made this comparison at about the same time Grace Randolph (a YouTube reviewer) did: Star Wars is following the DC comic book movies' game-plan, to their great detriment. The first few DC movies did in fact make money, but fans and critics alike were sour on them. But DC made no big changes, because even though they were making much less money than they had expected (for example, they thought Batman v. Superman would easily make over a billion; instead, it only made over $600 million), they were still making money, and they therefore could do what people really enjoy doing: confronting the truth about their own situation.

They kept saying "Well, maybe fans and critics hated Suicide Squad, but it still made money," without realizing that these movies kept making money because fans kept hoping/praying that DC would finally start making some good movies -- but that fans would eventually give up on those hopes and Nope Out of seeing them.

Which ultimately happened with Justice League.

(Yes, Wonder Woman was an upside surprise, but by that point, I think movie-goers were putting Wonder Woman into the exception-that-proves-the-rule category, rather than a sign that the DC ship had been righted.)

I think Randolph says that The Last Jedi was Soy Wars' Suicide Squad -- the movie that put a bullet in the head of fan goodwill -- and that the movie that finally lets the studio know that they have a "clusterf***" on their hands.

So far, SJW Disney's excuses are only about "Star Wars fatigue" -- too many movies in too short a period of time. The Hollywood Reporter calls this a "moment of reckoning" that will force Disney to rethink its attempt to pump out multiple Star Wars movies per year.

But is it more than that?

I've mentioned this before, but this fan revolt -- first against Marvel comics, and then, more dramatically, against Star Wars, in the form of a "Soycott" -- is an important moment in the Culture Wars.

It's one thing to complain about these things. It's another thing entirely to make the media hear these complaints.

And I think Disney has heard them now. Though I doubt they'll actually listen. Disney head Bob Iger is positioning himself for a presidential run, and I think he's willing to let Disney lose some money (and let his own bonuses fall a bit) to keep the left happy.

Disney, like the NFL, thought it could keep pushing out highly politicized crap and the public would just keep eating up their slop.

They thought their product was so unbelievably beloved they could never alienate viewers.

They're wrong.

And I think that's a very important shot-across-the-bow to the Democrat Media Entertainment Complex.

A long while ago, I talked with Drew on the podcast about Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I hated it. I thought it was a very stupid remake of the first Star Wars movie, except with very uninteresting, uncharismatic characters.

Play the Mr. Plinkett game here: Try to explain the characters of Rey and Finn without talking about their jobs, their role in the movie, or their costume or looks.

I also thought the movie was a demonstration that only six things are permitted to happen in a Star Wars movie:

1. I chase you

2. You chase me

3. We fight with laser-swords

4. We fight with blasters

5. We fight with spaceships

6. We talk about "destiny" and the "will of the force"

Every Star Wars movie is just those six things in slightly different orders. I would say "and in slightly different environments," but at this point, they're re-using all the old environments. How many desert planets are we going to visit?

Oh, and now they're trying to disguise that these are the same basic places we've seen before. A lot of Solo takes place on sand --oh, but it's not a desert, it's a beach near an ocean. The Last Jedi's fight against the Walkers takes place not in snow, but on a salt planet, where the salt looks... well, a lot like snow.

Rogue One offered Disney the opportunity to do a different kind of movie -- a heist/infiltration/spy movie. Instead, they just had people do what they always do in Star Wars: Go to Planet A to pick up Message X which then leads to Planet B where you get Map Y which then leads to Planet C where you get MacGuffin Z.

No spying, no infiltration, no heisting -- just more blaster fights and chases and space-ship fights.

For an infinite universe, the Star Wars universe feels pretty damn limited.

Anyway, I think people at the time thought I was just talking down Disney because I've been pushing the idea of a boycott against Disney for years.

Well, I was doing that, partly. But I was also being honest. And I take some satisfaction that, as the years have passed, my pan of the film has become most people's take on it, even though they liked it at the time.

They've come to realize that a lot of that was just getting caught up in the excitement that Star Wars was (allegedly) back. But the actual movie was a hacky pastiche of earlier films. Except with terrible, terrible characters.

A lot of Soylo's failure is probably not even political: It's just movie goers, both fans and Filthy Casuals, deciding they just don't care very much about the latest recombination of the Six Things You Can Do In the Entire Star Wars Universe.

But the Soycott doesn't help.

By the way, the Soy Wars Shill Media has a #HotTake to explain Soylo's failure: It must just be that Straight (?) White Male Leads in Soy Wars movies are box office poison.

No, seriously.

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:16 PM

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