As 'The Last Jedi' Nears $600M, Can 'Star Wars' Recover?

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With another over/under $34 million worldwide on Wednesday, Star Wars: The Last Jedi has now earned around $570m around the world, including an approximate $280m in North America. Barring a fluke, the film should end today with just under $300m domestic and just over $600m worldwide. How on Earth can the Star Wars franchise possibly recover from this monstrosity?

Rian Johnson, who has been given a stand-alone Star Wars trilogy to oversee once the current one wraps up, crafted a film that has earned overwhelmingly positive reviews. Including a 93% “fresh” and 8.1/10 critic ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. It also has an 86% score on Metacritic and a 7.9/10 user rating on IMDB.com. Oh, and the film received an A from Cinemascore and a 90 from comScore. My god, what will Lucasfilm do now?

But wait, there is more terrible news. It may have to wait until Friday to pass $300 million domestic and/or the global gross of Justice League ($637m+). At a glance, the film may end the second weekend with only over/under $400 million domestic and over/under $800m worldwide heading into Christmas Day. With the next full week of holiday business offering a slew of newbie competitors, the $250m+ sci-fi actioner may have to wait until the end of the year to cross $1 billion global.

My god, say it with me now… can this franchise be saved?

I’m sure that the folks who flooded the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic user polls with negative reviews were real people and not robots or spam programs. But there is a rather high number of folks who apparently created an account specifically to offer a poor review of the newest Star Wars movie and then deleted the account. James Emanuel Shapiro did the hard work over at Birth.Death.Movies detailing that, of 100 random negative user reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of them either had no account or were first-time users. Of 100 random negative Metacritic user reviews, 72% of them were new users.

Maybe they review-bombed as some kind of anti-SJW conspiracy (take a look at the downvotes on YouTube for the Ocean’s 8 trailer) or skewed revenge from DC fans over Justice League. Or maybe the segment of online fans who didn’t like the movie flooded the opt-in polling and thus created the impression of poor word-of-mouth. But every other measurement thus far (the reviews, the initial box office, the audience polling from folks who absolutely saw the movie, etc.) would indicate that folks loved or at least somewhat enjoyed The Last Jedi.

And yet, despite this perfect storm of pretty good press and rock-solid box office, the overriding narrative right now is “What went wrong?” or “How Star Wars can be fixed!” That we are discussing the controversy, even whether the controversy is genuine, means we are letting these folks dictate the terms of the conversation. This is little different than having a singular climate change scientist or singular pro-gun purchase background checks politician debating a singular opponent on the other side and then acting as if both sides have equally strong levels of support.

Without discounting audience members (and critics and writers) who genuinely didn’t like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the user polling is a deviation from the narrative, not the backbone of the post-release narrative. Most folks thus far thought The Last Jedi was at least “fine,” just as they thought (for example) Spectre, Iron Man 3 or Star Trek into Darkness were “fine.” At worst, Star Wars is in a place similar to the James Bond franchise, whereby Spectre was hated by a number of folks and fans (raises hand) but still snagged $880 million worldwide and left the 007 series in a relatively healthy place.

As always, the problems with the user polling from sites like Rotten Tomatoes or the up-vote/down-vote systems employed by YouTube are not the applications themselves, but how the media uncritically and unquestioningly takes those results as proverbial gospel or part of a wider truth without considering variables that might have skewed the results. Whether individually or en masse, the folks who hated Star Wars: The Last Jedi flooded the most visible opt-in polling site and single-handedly changed the conversation about a movie that otherwise was doing quite well. That’s not a huge deal, but it’s something to consider as so-called critical opinion becomes more democratized.

The folks who pushed down the Star Wars: The Last Jedi scores didn’t necessarily game the system, but they did trick you and me by convincing us to look at the one shiny object that was different from all the other shiny objects. It was an effort to convince us that the exception was the rule. But The Last Jedi is, by every other measurement thus far, doing quite well and keeping its franchise artistically and financially healthy. That doesn't mean you're wrong for disliking it (I panned The Force Awakens), but that does mean that Disney and Lucasfilm have little reason not to be celebrating at the moment.

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