Episode 7 echoes previous Star Wars movies, as per tradition. - Fans: This is too much like Star Wars!
Me: Thanks for disregarding the prequels, and I had a lot of fun. But your worldbuilding is garbage, the first order and Rey are grossly overpowered, and please knock it off with the death stars. BTW, this flick is doing
unbelievably well, so it might a good idea to ignore a lot of what the fans say (complaints) but pay close attention to what they do (buy bucketloads of tickets). That still counts as "listening to the fans" by the way.
Episode 8 subverts expectations - fans: This doesn't feel enough like Star Wars and seems to alienate the fans!
Me: See previous TLJ comments.
Episode 9 caters to the fans as hard as it possibly can - Fans: SIGH. No!
Me: It's too late to (re)start a fan-pleasing, trilogy-size story now, in the third movie. I definitely don't trust you anymore. When you all-but-purged TLJ from the marketing except to bad-mouth it, it looked like a trap (which I couldn't confirm with Ackbar because you'd already killed him). But you followed through and I don't know what to make of the finished product . . . how can you possibly critique something like Carrie Fisher's performance, for example? It's a sometimes fun mess trying to "conclude" two disjoint predecessors.
And each one takes in over a billion at the box office (ROS will probably go over a billion this week).
So many articles out there about how disappointing the box office is, as if it should be making 5 billion by now or something.
Seems people have expectations that have no basis in history. If you look at the box office trends of all 3 trilogies this latest one is following the same trend as the first 2, 1st movie does the most, second and third movies each draw about half as much.
The third movie usually gets a decent bump (perhaps from people just wanting to know how it all ends), not a lower gross than the second movie like ROS will have. That looks like a significant number of folks showing up for the first and second movies, yet having their interest killed off somehow.
The trilogies might be tough to compare since each was released in a very different time and market from the others, but one measure of how well audiences respond to an individual movie is its "legs," the ratio of the final total to the opening weekend. Bad legs can be an indicator of missed opportunity and wasted potential, because it shows people initially gave the film a chance, but then it probably suffered from bad word of mouth and/or lack of repeated viewings (very important for Star Wars).
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed3848340484/Rogue One had the worst (Star Wars) legs at 3.4x until TLJ's 2.8x, which alarmingly seems to be the new normal (i.e. what I mean by "lasting brand damage"). Solo managed 2.5x and ROS will match TLJ when it reaches 500M domestically.