A Day Long Remembered

A Day Long Remembered
L337

The opening weekend figures for Soylo are in.

Before we get started, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

“I’ve been predicting that the upcoming Han Solo debacle movie will begin the Star Wars franchise’s collapse.”
-Brian Niemeier, 11/7/17

“First, Star Wars fans are not perfectly content. In fact, there’s a major revolt brewing in reaction to TFA, Rogue One, TLJ, and the upcoming Han Solo movie.”
-Brian Niemeier, 10/19/17

“At the store yesterday, a buddy and I were indulging in lavish speculation about how Disney will screw up the Han Solo movie.”
-Brian Niemeier 7/21/17

With the preliminaries out of the way:

Solo Sputters

In the largest disturbance yet in Disney’s otherwise lucrative reign over “Star Wars,” the Han Solo spinoff “Solo: A Star Wars Story” opened well below expectations with a franchise-low $83.3 million in ticket sales over the three-day weekend in North American theaters.

Disney estimated Sunday that “Solo” will gross $101 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, a figure below even the opening weekends of the much-derided “Star Wars” prequels. Last week, forecasts ran as high as $150 million for the four-day haul of “Solo.”

Overseas ticket sales were even worse. “Solo,” starring Alden Ehrenreich in the role made iconic by Harrison Ford, grossed $65 million internationally in its opening weekend, including a paltry $10.1 million in China.

The Disney shills in the media are blaming Solo’s failure on “Star Wars fatigue” caused by releasing Solo jut five months after The Last Jedi. Others have pointed out that audience fatigue is just a cynical dodge. Infinity War, the new box office king, was released only five weeks after Black Panther.

No, my friends. You made Soylo a spectacular flop because you remembered insults like this:

Whitest Room

And this:

Rogue One Safety Pin

And this:

You did not give money to people who hate you. The victory and the glory are yours. You have shown Disney that even a Star Wars movie can bomb if they fail to please their core audience. This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kathleen Kennedy’s career. Soon we will see the end of Mouse Wars.

Behold the completeness of your triumph. Our enemies are reduced to this:

Leia: A Star Wars Story

I hope that:

  1. Disney takes Scalzi up on his idea.
  2. They hire him to write the screenplay.
  3. Instead of hiring an expensive new actress, Disney casts their Carrie Fisher CGI cyborg in the title role.

Reminder: Since you won’t be seeing Soylo today, I recommend my captivating Soul Cycle series of space opera novels for your holiday entertainment needs. All four mind-bending eBooks are now on sale for under 6 bucks!

The Soul Cycle - Brian Niemeier

22 Comments

  1. Joseph Moore

    I'm seeing this as part of a test being conducted. All that training in compliance doesn't mean anything unless it works, and, as Orwell points out, you can't test if people are complying unless you tell them to believe something they know is a lie.

    Maybe Trump's election or the ubiquity of internet options accelerated the schedule. I would have expected this after guns had been seized, which efforts are accelerating but proving gratifyingly difficult. While schools, entertainment and the press were brought to heel decades ago, that's not enough: it's like a story Solzhenitsyn tells about waiting to see who would be the first to stop applauding a party speech. That's how you find out who you need to worry about.

    So flags get run up flag poles. All sorts of people loved Star Wars for all the wrong reasons, so we double down on the kid stuff – spectacle, explosions, chases – while excising the wrongthink and replacing it with stuff on the right side of History.

    I mean, they got all the smart people to fawn over the crap in modern art museums after all. Music has been reduced to pablum and profanity set to a beat, and people eat it up. So we should be able to correct Star Wars, and have the crowd follow, and identify the trouble makes who stop clapping first and mark them for culling.

    That it's finally not working is gratifying.

    • Durandel

      And speed the process along by mocking it into the trash bin while promoting and pointing people towards more worthy works, like the Soul Cycle series or Galaxy's Edge series.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Keen observation. Disney's intent from the time they bought Star Wars was to turn it into a "Workers of the World Unite" sticker. Anyone who refused to display one in his window would be duly marked down as a troublemaker.

      The best part, from the SJW commissars' point of view, was that they wouldn't even have to sniff out the reactionaries themselves. The dissenters' neighbors would eagerly turn them in.

      Which explains why most of the pushback these posts have received hasn't come from SJWs, but from Star Wars-addicted paypigs who are nominally moderate or even Conservatives.

    • JD Cowan

      It really makes you wonder about "smart" people who fell into things like modern art when normal consumers outright rejected it from the word go and still continue to.

      For all the talk of the "stupid, unwashed masses" they sure don't take as easily to propaganda as the galaxy brain folks do.

    • Anonymous

      It's always easier to con someone when you flatter their intellect.

      You ever read any of the EC Segar Popeye comics? The original dynamic really decayed over the years… Popeye's basically the only guy in the whole bunch without delusions of grandeur… I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam.

      It'd be a great mindset to resurrect, tbqh.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Trump shares an anecdote in The Art of the Deal where he's visiting a well-respected painter's studio. The guy asks if Trump wants to see him make $25,000 before lunch. The GE says "sure".

      There's a big canvas lying on the floor. The artist takes several cans of paint in different colors and splashes them one by one on the canvas. When he's done he says, "There. I just made 25 grand. Let's go eat."

      The artist's point, with which the GE agreed, is that modern art is a con.

  2. Durandel

    I really hope the SJWs double down and take Scalzi's advice or do something similar, such as a film on how the male Jedi suppressed an all female force user school because said school sought "teh balance" and the patriarc- err male run Jedi temple janissaries condemned them as witches and burned them at the light-stake. Had the male Jedis been enlightened, they would have joined with the Force Witches and brought an Islamo-Communist peace to the galaxy.

    • Brian Niemeier

      "Jedi temple janissaries condemned them as witches and burned them at the light-stake."

      I'd pay real money to see that on film.

  3. Durandel

    This comment has been removed by the author.

  4. Eli

    Scalzi has to be one of the most insufferable people in all of scifi. The fact that that is the lesson he learned, "oh people don't like male leads it has nothing to do with backlash at how terrible TLJ was." Or the fact that people don't want to see a non Harrison Ford Solo movie. I certainly don't think Star Wars fatigue is the problem. If the movie was good and not converged I'd watch it. I don't think Disney and it's sheep I mean fans realize how many people are upset with the direction the franchise is going and opt to sit out now.

    Though now we are getting Episode IX, a Lando movie, an Obi-Wan movie (they'll REALLY screw him over) and a Boba Fett film. Oh, also the Game of Thrones producers are getting a trilogy and Rian is getting his own Trilogy. How many of those will be good? How many will double down on the sjw bs? I remember looking back on the sell of Lucasfilm in 2012 with glee. We are getting a new trilogy. I wasn't as keen politically then as I am now. I didn't even know the term sjw back then. Now I know and the term is owned by those like Scalzi, Kennedy, Johnson.

    I tend to rant heavily when Star Wars is brought up apparently. It ticks me off to see a once great franchise turned to converged rubble. I was a fan. I was a huge fan. No more.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Scalzi is just parroting the party line. No one, including him, believes it.

      Like Joseph Moore said above, these converged properties have been repurposed as SJW cult loyalty tests. What better way to prove someone's loyalty than by making him publicly agree with a statement that's patently absurd?

      Scalzi doesn't really think Solo failed because of its male lead. He's really saying "I am a member of the Party in good standing. Please do not exile me to Siberia."

      "I was a fan. I was a huge fan. No more."

      Good. Now release your anger.

  5. MegaBusterShepard

    Disney utterly refused to respect the fans and thus they reap what they sow.

    "The Fire Rises!!"

    • Brian Niemeier

      Yes. And it's burning down Episode IX.

  6. Darwinian Arminian

    "LEIA: A Star Wars Story, December 2020"

    If she spent the entire movie dressed like that, I'd be more than happy to buy a ticket.

    But somehow I suspect that something everyone seemed to love in 1983 would get yanked by today's studio heads as "objectification."

    • Brian Niemeier

      Scalzi is so psychosexually stunted, even his virtue signaling is problematic.

  7. xavier

    Brian

    So will culty Cathy finally be ousted by a coup from the bean counters? Will the current trilogy be ditched then retconned?
    From what i'm reading the bean counters will've had enough and demand heads go in order to save the furniture.
    xavier

  8. LGrin

    This is funny. No one saw the demise of Marvel based on Ant-Man’s opening sales.

    Get over yourselves, Solo was a decent movie and you and yours are no longer the target audience.

    • Brian Niemeier

      "…you and yours are no longer the target audience."

      We know. That's why we didn't see it. Turns out Star Wars' new target audience of uptalking soyboys and blue-haired cat ladies isn't large enough to keep the franchise out of the red.

    • JD Cowan

      "you and yours are no longer the target audience."

      Exactly. Normal people are no longer the target audience. No wonder it's dying!

    • Eli

      And here I thought Star Wars was for everyone. Apparently it's now only for feminists, nihilists and other misanthropes. I'd go so far and say that the new target audience is one that hated star wars before Disney bought the franchise. I'm old enough to remember when Star Wars was for everyone without having to bend at the knee to sjw causes and politics. Nevermind the dismantling of classic and heroic characters. If you are the new target audience, you can keep it. We'll replace it with something better.

  9. Man of the Atom

    "LGrinMay 29, 2018 at 9:01 AM
    This is funny. No one saw the demise of Marvel based on Ant-Man’s opening sales."
    Some people are unobservant. The moderate successes of Ant-Man, the mediocrity of GG II vs GG I, and "meh" state of about half of the Marvel Universe films should have told everyone that the Superhero Genre was soon to fade.

    Infinity War was Peak Marvel. The audience will stay for the conclusion, then start hitting the bricks, as will most of the cast members who are the big draws–gettin' old is harsh! The Normal audience sees the SJW convergence — She-Thor, Captain She-Marvel, Iron She, and Madame Mary-Sue She Boy are on the Way! Normals are tired of this crap.

    Let the Soy Boys weep.

    "Get over yourselves, Solo was a decent movie and you and yours are no longer the target audience."
    Hardly decent, but if it had anything of value it was due to massive re-writes, re-shoots, and editing so as not to spook the Normals who have money to spend.

    The Freaks love this junk, but they don't pay the bills. Marvel Comics and DC are discovering this now, but the doubling down continues.

    Enjoy the Freakshow while it lasts — the Normals are leaving the building.

    • Brian Niemeier

      "Let the Soy Boys weep."

      Tears of soy

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