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  1. #721
    Quote Originally Posted by PACOX View Post
    SW fans bullied Jake Lloyd so hard he still struggles with it. Dude was kid and social media didn't even exist.
    Hey, nobody said social media invented bullying or crazy fans but it sure is easier for wild takes to find an audience when there's platforms that help them spread.

    Quote Originally Posted by Finlandia WOAT View Post
    Not that I like the storytelling direction of Disney Star Wars, but I don't think this is true. Comparing it to the prequels at the box office, total gross for movies released that calender year (so TLJ is in 2018 even though it was released in the penultimate week, for example)
    Relative rankings say nothing about whether something over- or underperformed. That's entirely about studio expectations. Something could make 1b US$ but if they expected it to make 2b, it still underperformed even if it beat every other movie in that year by a mile.

    There's a BIG difference between "this didn't make as much money as we expected" and "this made more money than something else".
    Last edited by Biomega; 2022-06-08 at 02:50 AM.

  2. #722
    Merely a Setback PACOX's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jotaux View Post
    Why are people hating on Billie Lourd? I don't really know who she is. I understand people don't like Kelly Marie Tran's character, I don't get why they hate her.
    Billie Lourd is Carrier Fisher's daughter and probably had strong reactions to criticism about fan remarks towards her and the rest of the sequel trilogy actors.

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  3. #723
    Quote Originally Posted by Biomega View Post
    Hey, nobody said social media invented bullying or crazy fans but it sure is easier for wild takes to find an audience when there's platforms that help them spread.


    Relative rankings say nothing about whether something over- or underperformed. That's entirely about studio expectations. Something could make 1b US$ but if they expected it to make 2b, it still underperformed even if it beat every other movie in that year by a mile.

    There's a BIG difference between "this didn't make as much money as we expected" and "this made more money than something else".
    But he didn't say the PT didn't meet studio expectations, he said it underperformed relative to "Star Wars". Relative box office performance is the easiest metric to determine if that's true or not.

  4. #724
    Quote Originally Posted by Finlandia WOAT View Post
    But he didn't say the PT didn't meet studio expectations, he said it underperformed relative to "Star Wars". Relative box office performance is the easiest metric to determine if that's true or not.
    While that COULD be what they meant, the wild differences in inflation, investment, actual returns. etc. make such a direct head-to-head comparison by box office alone pretty wild.

    But what's more likely is something else entirely: you're reading "it underperformed relative to SW" as "it made less money than SW"; when in all likelihood it's "SW performed to or above expectations, while this performed below expectations" - i.e. one underperformed, the other did not.

    That's really what most studios are looking at anyway. They have a particular idea about how well a project is going to do, and all they really care about is whether or not those expectations are met (and by how much). Broadly speaking, successful projects are those that meet or exceed the expectations; unsuccessful ones are those that do not. Absolute box office numbers - ESPECIALLY across years if not decades - are mostly a novelty metric for Wikipedia lists, not an actual business calculation. They're PR tools, while the actual success/failure numbers are much more complicated.
    Last edited by Biomega; 2022-06-08 at 03:03 AM.

  5. #725
    Quote Originally Posted by Jotaux View Post
    Why are people hating on Billie Lourd? I don't really know who she is. I understand people don't like Kelly Marie Tran's character, I don't get why they hate her.
    Because people have a hard time differentiating between and actor and their character and fact the actors do not write the show. The actress who plays Reeva does what she can with the script and direction given.

  6. #726
    Quote Originally Posted by Theangryone View Post
    Because people have a hard time differentiating between and actor and their character and fact the actors do not write the show. The actress who plays Reeva does what she can with the script and direction given.
    That's true, but it's not like actors are inherently exculpated by script and direction - they definitely also need to do their part, and can and should be criticized if they don't.

    Though admittedly it can be very hard to tell what is the actor's fault and what is the script's/director's. The latter especially is often very opaque to audiences, because if a director goes "nonono you gotta do it THIS WAY!" and the actor is forced to comply that's rarely something we can identify on the screen.

  7. #727
    You know if I was in charge of a show like Kenobi, and I knew it wasn't very good and the fans weren't going to like it, I would definitely try to find something that I could deflect attention to rather than have to answer for the show that I made.

    Hard to not think Hollywood producers wouldn't have figured out by now that they can make anon accounts and send comments to whomever they want. If you knew an actor or a show were not going to be particularly well liked for their performance, it would certainly be an easy out to change the narrative to the "poor behavior of online 'fan' accounts", yet none of them have faces or names so we have no idea if the people posting are 'fans' or fake.


    Admittedly..... it would be pretty easy to do if you wanted to change the topic rather than have to answer for your poor work. Hopefully Blizzard doesn't catch on to that tactic.

  8. #728
    Quote Originally Posted by PACOX View Post
    SW fans bullied Jake Lloyd so hard he still struggles with it. Dude was kid and social media didn't even exist.
    Yeah harassment is bad. Everyone wishes it didn't happen. But it is in no way unique to one IP or fan base, it is just statistics. Again, only 1% of people being shitheads is an enormous amount of shitheads when you are talking about a fan base of million of people!

    Do people really not get how this stuff is an incredibly easy and effective shield for giant corporations to deflect criticism for incompetence? Moses Ingram or [insert actor] is not the bad guy, but Disney is also not the good guy.
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  9. #729
    Quote Originally Posted by Gumble View Post
    You know if I was in charge of a show like Kenobi, and I knew it wasn't very good and the fans weren't going to like it, I would definitely try to find something that I could deflect attention to rather than have to answer for the show that I made.

    Hard to not think Hollywood producers wouldn't have figured out by now that they can make anon accounts and send comments to whomever they want. If you knew an actor or a show were not going to be particularly well liked for their performance, it would certainly be an easy out to change the narrative to the "poor behavior of online 'fan' accounts", yet none of them have faces or names so we have no idea if the people posting are 'fans' or fake.


    Admittedly..... it would be pretty easy to do if you wanted to change the topic rather than have to answer for your poor work. Hopefully Blizzard doesn't catch on to that tactic.
    Little birdies on the inside of the biz already confirm that they do this. There's a reason there's stories talking about how "If you don't like it, you're racist/sexist/etc." being released well before the show is even publicly available. While there are legit idiots who will use social media to say dumb things towards people involved in the projects, the production companies will also generate negative comments so that they can point towards them as affirmation.

    Now why wouldn't they go the positive route as you suggest? Because that's who they are... they aren't generally good people. Sure, there's good eggs in the business, but it's saturated with people who think their audiences are peons beneath them. They believe the audience should be grateful towards them, that they are above the audiences' reproach. They think their shows and scripts are amazing and beyond scrutiny of the viewers, and anything negative towards them is obviously just Right-wing hate trolls or whatever is trendy to blame. The people creating the content are the problem, but they'll never see that due to their nature and personalities, so anything negative cannot be about them... but everyone else. The name of the game is deflection, not letting the work speak for itself.

    Now, there are some companies that will try to generate a positive narrative, but they're generally so fake that even a normie can see through them. Take the Rings of Power show: Amazon paid a bunch of influencers to fly out and see a heavily edited version of their show (basically just clips of certain scenes) and an Q&A from the showrunners, and the media release of the panels of influences was so uniform in message and tailored for each region that the only reasonable assumption is that they were given talking points. Instead of trying to buy off people, a company that has faith in their product would release their trailers and let the show speak for itself. Heck, just publicly release what was show to those influencers and let the public decide. However, there's already hit pieces for the 'haters' out for the Rings of Power, and the show is nowhere near release.

    In general, the people in charge of shows like Kenobi, Halo, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, etc. are very spiteful, selfish, and angry people, and they'll point their fingers at everyone else but themselves when there's rightful backlash for their terrible shows. They have zero faith in their shows, and their actions and works prior, during, and after the release of their content exposes this.
    Last edited by exochaft; 2022-06-08 at 03:39 AM.
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  10. #730
    Quote Originally Posted by Biomega View Post
    While that COULD be what they meant, .
    You're right: he didn't explain what he meant, which is why I had to guess, then come up with a manner to see if that guess was true or not..

    I don't know why you're insisting for the need to be generous in interpreting the post of a guy who thinks Kathleen Kennedy hates Star Wars because her friends wouldn't let her play as Luke when she was 8 or whatever.

  11. #731
    Quote Originally Posted by Finlandia WOAT View Post
    I don't know why you're insisting for the need to be generous in interpreting the post of a guy who thinks Kathleen Kennedy hates Star Wars because her friends wouldn't let her play as Luke when she was 8 or whatever.
    I don't argue against people, I argue against arguments. And "overperform" is generally used with respect to expectations, not relative performance. That's why you'd say "X performed better than Y" in direct, descriptive comparison rather than "X underperformed relative to Y" which would be more commonly used if you EXPECTED X to do better.

    And that's a relative point here, because it's been setting the direction for the Star Wars franchise over the past few years. They paid a lot of money for the franchise, and expected to get money back for that investment - those expectations were not fulfilled in several instances, and prompted changes in creative direction etc. And that's because of EXPECTATIONS, not because they looked at the box office charts and went "well gosh darnit the old movies somehow ranked higher" or whatever. That's an incredibly naive portrayal of a much more complicated process.

  12. #732
    Quote Originally Posted by Biomega View Post
    I don't argue against people, I argue against arguments. .
    I'm not sure why'd you limit yourself like that. People have biases and agendas that go beyond the strict literal meaning of their words.



    Quote Originally Posted by Biomega View Post
    I don't argue against people, I argue against arguments. And "overperform" is generally used with respect to expectations
    No one said "overperform". The poster said:

    Wrong, She's changing star wars into something that it's not, and she wants it to be, most people actually don't like. this is why Episode 7-9 under performed for what you would expect of Star wars, and a brand that should have been gold is now coming in 4th5th, place consistently
    So here we have a direct comparison between Episodes 7-9 and "what you would expect of Star Wars", which is defined as a "brand that should have been gold is now coming in 4th5th place consistently".

    I wonder what that refers to, if not to the success compared to its peers.

    But more importantly: you're not wrong. Relative box doesn't tell nearly the whole story, and studio expectations is an important variable (albeit one not at all present in the discussion until you brought it up). I'm just using relative box office as a quick and easy way to test the hypothesis I presume is what was presented by a poster, and found that it didn't hold up. That's it.

    To be clear, I don't like the direction Disney SW's is going.... but I don't think it's because Kathleen Kennedy secretly hates Star Wars, and to imply the ST weren't massively successful-particularly TFA- is a strange take.

  13. #733
    Merely a Setback PACOX's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tyris Flare View Post
    Yeah harassment is bad. Everyone wishes it didn't happen. But it is in no way unique to one IP or fan base, it is just statistics. Again, only 1% of people being shitheads is an enormous amount of shitheads when you are talking about a fan base of million of people!

    Do people really not get how this stuff is an incredibly easy and effective shield for giant corporations to deflect criticism for incompetence? Moses Ingram or [insert actor] is not the bad guy, but Disney is also not the good guy.
    No one saying that toxicity only exist among SW.

    Its kind of telling that the SW fandom in particular has been know for toxic behavior before Disney even acquired the IP.

    Why should anyone even entertain that Disney is just attempting to farm a little bit of negativity when the negativity has been there for a long time? Let's say Disney was magnifying small issues? So? Since when is calling people out for saying racists and sexists remarks a bad thing? The most that has been said is if you engage in such behavior then your not welcomed by the rest of the community.
    Last edited by PACOX; 2022-06-08 at 04:26 AM.

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  14. #734
    Quote Originally Posted by Finlandia WOAT View Post
    Not that I like the storytelling direction of Disney Star Wars, but I don't think this is true. Comparing it to the prequels at the box office, total gross for movies released that calender year (so TLJ is in 2018 even though it was released in the penultimate week, for example):

    TPM: 1st
    TFA: 1st

    AotC: 5th
    TLJ: 3rd

    RotS: 1st
    RoS: 1st

    https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2...rt=grossToDate
    Dont forget to crosscheck those with the amount of theaters released in... then youll see how the originals made more money per theater than the newer ones.
    Its like 1500 theaters vs 4500 theaters.

    So through sheer numbers the sequels made more money but from value standpoint per theater they made less.

    Im sure theres alot more math that can be done with this but looking at mere rankings is rather misleading... it often depends on the competition and brand, the originals had almost no history to them yet but the newer ones are surfing on the success of the past.

  15. #735
    Quote Originally Posted by Otaka View Post
    Dont forget to crosscheck those with the amount of theaters released in... then youll see how the originals made more money per theater than the newer ones.
    Its like 1500 theaters vs 4500 theaters.

    So through sheer numbers the sequels made more money but from value standpoint per theater they made less.
    That's only one of MANY factors that make these head-to-head comparisons little more than entertainment. They don't factor in production cost, marketing budget, profit share agreements, inflation, etc. etc. etc. And in more recent times, something like simultaneous streaming releases and so on.

    "Success" is a very complicated thing when it comes to movies, and direct box office comparison over the span of years or decades is an incredibly imprecise metric to measure it. There are films that took hundreds of millions more dollars at the box office, yet resulted in a massive loss compared to other films. And that's not even accounting for the notorious "Hollywood accounting" that is often employed to artificially lower a film's profit to zero or less in order to circumvent paying-profit sharing agreements

    But in any case, the point was simply that the newer SW movies did not generate as much money as the studio thought they would. How that stacks up to the original trilogy or what the absolute numbers are basically doesn't really matter for that; the studio's expectations weren't met, and that's what determines their creative direction and project planning. Whether Solo made $100m or $300m or $500m is beside the point - that's a matter for the accountants and internal number crunchers, and not something we have access to. The only thing that matters to us is that it made less than they thought it would, and that's why they reorganized all their subsequent projects. (Though of course Solo is not the sole culprit, it's just a particularly prominent example)

    Now, where things get more interesting is in the post-mortem. Okay, stuff underperformed; but WHY? That's much more difficult to figure out than the performance numbers (i.e. the "how much"). And it probably doesn't have an easy answer, at least not one that's useful - "they were bad" doesn't exactly help anyone

  16. #736
    Merely a Setback PACOX's Avatar
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    Let's play, whose that Pokémon Jedi!

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    Last edited by PACOX; 2022-06-08 at 07:51 AM.

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  17. #737
    Quote Originally Posted by Tyris Flare View Post
    Do people really not get how this stuff is an incredibly easy and effective shield for giant corporations to deflect criticism for incompetence? Moses Ingram or [insert actor] is not the bad guy, but Disney is also not the good guy.
    Yes. Disney does what's in its nature; it's a massive cultural landlord driven to conserve as much regular profit from its collection of IP as possible, like the dragon Smaug lazing about on top of his treasure horde moving only to incinerate anyone looking to pilfer a coin. It can't be anything else.

    All the people acting like gross morons toward actors because they're not getting their demanded allotment of slop have at least the resemblance of a human being, and don't have to act like that. They can simply say "I don't care for this, I'm gonna do something else with my time" like a normal person.

  18. #738
    Quote Originally Posted by Slybak View Post
    They can simply say "I don't care for this, I'm gonna do something else with my time" like a normal person.
    I mean, you're not wrong exactly but it's more complicated than that.

    They're deliberately creating fandoms - that's why franchise universes are even used as a business model in the first place. They WANT people to get emotionally invested in their product and form strong, often long-lasting bonds with the IP. The ideal fan will remain loyal for years, if not decades even in SW's case.

    But here's the flipside: if you've been invested in a world for years or even decades and suddenly things change in ways dramatic enough to impact your ongoing enjoyment, it's not that easy to just go "welp, guess this ain't for me, sayonara and goodbye!". These are characters, settings, and stories you've enjoyed for a long time. They may have been a formative part of your childhood or adolescence. And now you have to watch everything become something you barely recognize anymore (obviously this is hyperbole for dramatic effect, but you get the picture). Just packing up and leaving is a pretty big deal.

    Now, of course no fan has an implicit "right" to the IP. Nor are they the sole and exclusive proprietor of what direction the creative elements of the franchise can or should move towards. And change can be good, too, even if it settles in reluctantly and against opposition. But either way: telling a years-long fan to just go somewhere else if they don't like it is a bit callous, and doesn't properly respect the fact that there's a lot of baggage here.

    As always, the answer is probably horizontal segmentation - make many products, and cater them to different groups. SW is trying that, but it's tough in a franchise that has a very dedicated, very attached following. Even products not primarily intended for some people may have those people going "BUT WHY ISN'T THIS FOR MEEEEE???!" which is a bit of a bizarre twist on established marketing wisdom.

  19. #739
    Quote Originally Posted by Biomega View Post
    I mean, you're not wrong exactly but it's more complicated than that.
    It really isn't.

    The problem of Disney is a problem endemic to capitalism. Disney can't be anything else than what it is, because the economic relations that produces and sustains it will not produce anything else. The problem of these "toxic fandoms" is that they're members have allowed many of the features of that same endemic problem to turn them into lunatics. They didn't have to do that. They don't survive off of shareholders who will invest in someone else unless they fully embrace sociopathy. They will not cease to exist if they stop watching "new" Star Wars. There's no incentive to act like this other than feeling more welcome within a voluntary association of other sociopaths.

  20. #740
    Quote Originally Posted by Slybak View Post
    The problem of these "toxic fandoms" is that they're members have allowed many of the features of that same endemic problem to turn them into lunatics. They didn't have to do that.
    No, that's totally true. It's a side effect on playing on people's emotional investment - the broad middle will just be fans, but in the process of attracting those people you also create problems at the edges of the bell curve, including fanaticism and toxicity. It's a complicated cultural AND economic phenomenon that plays out differently in different frameworks; but is also exploited to a different degree depending on the fandom in question (idol fandom in Japan is one of the most extreme cases, for examples).

    And you're right, it's a corollary of market dynamics. They accept this willingly, because it's a marketing tool; some "collateral damage", if you will, is simply a part of that equation.

    But that doesn't change the fact that "lol just quit watching then and walk away" isn't a super helpful stance to take. I agree that ultimately the only language that gets across is money, and responsible consumers should consume responsibly to make sure that message is heard. Yet at the same time, it simply isn't that easy - it's a bit like saying the solution to global conflict is being nice to each other. 100% true and probably 100% effective too, but there's just, uh, SO MANY DETAILS IN BETWEEN that it's not actually really all that helpful as a suggestion.

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