Solo: A Box Office Rant

Check out my Reaction to the movie here if you don't care at all about box office numbers.

The cool thing to do after Solo's disappointing opening weekend is to write a think piece about it. I wasn't planning on saying much about it, because places like BoxOfficeMojo already did a fine job. I've seen other stories with a lot of doom and gloom, suggesting that Disney has tarnished the Star Wars brand. I don't subscribe to much of that. My opinion, in short, is that this was a heat check. Disney got a little cocky. That's all. They tested the limits of Star Wars' popularity and got bit.

I also think this was pretty inevitable. No matter what, the fourth of Disney's Star Wars films was likely to disappoint.

The Force Awakens: First new Star Wars movie in a decade. First movie under the Disney banner and without George Lucas. Result: Highest grossing movie of 2015.

Rogue One: First non-saga Star Wars movie. General curiosity about what that will mean. Helped by the strong reception to The Force Awakens. Also, some people probably thought it was the sequel to The Force Awakens. Result: Highest grossing movie of 2016.

The Last Jedi: The sequel to the well-received The Force Awakens. All Star Wars saga movies are even movies. Helped by the strong reception to The Force Awakens and Rogue One. Result: Highest grossing movie of 2017.

Solo: The first Star Wars release after the divisive The Last Jedi. No clear story hook. Less curiosity about what the Star Wars Stories are. Not tied to any ongoing story or established characters played by the normal actor. Result: Definitely not the highest grossing movie of 2018.

While Star Wars and Marvel are very different properties (currently), some of the same rules do apply to both. Not every Marvel movie is a massive hit. Some are just barely successful or break even. The Marvel brand means maybe $150 million guaranteed. What it makes beyond that is a result of the casting, the marketing, and the popularity of the character. Maybe the Star Wars brand is worth $200 million. Accept that and plan accordingly. There's nothing about Solo that suggests it should make more than the Star Wars minimum. Alden Ehrenreich isn't established as an actor. Donald Glover is still a niche brand at the end of the day. Musical success rarely means much for box office success. His biggest claims to fame otherwise are winning an Emmy for a moderately rated basic cable series, a supporting role in a low-rated sitcom with a cult following, and being the 13th name on the call sheet for a hit 2015 movie. His Lando may lead to bigger things, but it's not going to sell the film. The same can be said about Emilia Clarke who is still in the shadow of Game of Thrones.

The marketing of the movie didn't help matters.The poster reminds me more of The Nice Guys than a Star Wars movie and there's no clear story in any of the adds or TV spots. The main appeal is "Hey look. That character is young now". That works better for, say, Anakin Skywalker in the prequels because he goes through a dramatic change. The only question in Solo is how this sly 20-something guy turns into a sly 40-something guy. So tell me, what in here suggests more than base level Star Wars box office returns?

Disney needs to give up on Memorial Day weekend. Let's take a look back at their last few years of Memorial Day releases:

2018 - Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Budget: $250 million-ish. Opening weekend (4-day): $103 million.
2017 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Budget - $230 million. Opening weekend (4-day): $78 million.
2016 - Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Budget: $170 million. Opening weekend (4-day): $33 million.
2015 - Tomorrowland.
Budget: $190 million. Opening weekend (4-day): $42 million.

Looking at that, Solo looks like a resounding success. And when you consider that Maleficent opening with $69 million in 2014 the weekend after Memorial Day against a $180 million budget was considered a major success, perhaps Solo breaking $100 million isn't so bad. Disney has a history of under-performing with big budget movies that weekend. Solo was expected to make a run at the $140 million Memorial Day record. It had the widest May release ever (4381 theaters). Well, Despicable Me 3 holds the record for widest release ever, so I think that's more the fault of an over-ambitious studio.

Adding to my "heat check" theory. Solo had considerable competition in the box office. The weekends before the last three Star Wars movies were released, the total weekend box office grosses were $77 million (2015), $83 million (2016), and $83 million (2017). Meanwhile, the weekend before Solo was released made $209 million. Solo had to go up against the second weekend of Deadpool 2 and the fifth weekend of Infinity War, both of which were direct competitors. Disney tried to help by pushing up the Infinity War release a week, but there's a reason why the biggest releases normally come from the beginning of the summer season or before Christmas: there's less competition.

There's a number of other things to consider too. I don't buy into this as evidence that Disney has saturated the Star Wars brand. I think one movie a year if perfectly sustainable. 5 months between releases is pushing it though. Maybe at least wait from December to July. It took Marvel almost a decade to get audiences used to three month gaps between films. And let me reiterate, Marvel and Star Wars are very different brands. The marketing got confused about what people loved about Han Solo. They don't love the character. They love Harrison Ford as the character. Han Solo isn't James Bond. Recasting is a bug, not a feature. And, don't think the turmoil with the director shakeup didn't hurt it. Rogue One actually had a similar problem, but they kept that quiet a lot better.

Finally, the international box office returns. That's where the movie took the biggest hit. Only $65 million despite being release in nearly every international market. That's bad no matter how you look at it.

...However, here's a table of the 10 largest franchises since 2000. I've included the average % the films have made domestically and internationally: 

Perhaps more reflective of the current situation is looking at the same list but only include movie from 2010 to the present (which better reflects how the box office has been post-Avatar).

The point of this is that Star Wars has always been a bigger hit proportionally in the U.S. than most other franchises. (Btw, I didn't include Solo's number's or else Star Wars would be the bottom of the list) Or, how about this. Of the top 100 grossing films since 2000, the average share from the international box office is 64.34%. Since 2010, that jumps to 66.26%. What I'm trying to say is that the numbers internationally only look so bad because the raw numbers are so massive. I don't know why Disney (and Fox before it) have had so much trouble getting international audiences to buy into Star Wars, but this isn't a problem that started with Solo.

OK. I think this is now longer than my Movie Reaction for Solo and on a topic with a much smaller audience. I'll stop now. I hope this was informative.