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.

Movie Reaction: Solo: A Star Wars Story

Formula: The Italian Job / Rogue One: A Star Was Story

We are four movies into the Disney Star Wars era and it's pretty clear now how this is going to work. The saga movies (the Episodes), are the big movies. They are the ones the fans will complain about being too similar to what they've done before then get angry when someone tries to do anything different (See: Jedi, The Last). When people think "Star Wars", they are thinking of the saga movies. The stories (RogueOne, Solo), are a bit more experimental. They are the Silmarillion and the Saga movies are the Lord of the Rings if you need a different nerd comparison. They are fundamentally smaller movies that function as entertaining footnotes for the larger Star Wars series. General audiences and Disney need to adapt to this and everyone will be a lot happier.

I'm pretty split about Solo. On one hand, it's a Star Wars movie and I have a soft spot for anything Star Wars. The film assembled an excellent cast and got good performances out of nearly all of them. The action set pieces are well put together, inventive, and intricate. On the other hand, it has some tonal issues that I'm sure tie back to behind the scenes drama and the storytelling is filled with pet peeves of mine.

As you can assume from the title, Solo is a Han Solo origin story. It begins with Han (Alden Ehrenreich) on a run-down shipbuilding planet called Corellia. He and his girlfriend, Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), work indebted to a local crime boss and dream of getting off that planet. When an escape attempt leaves Han and Qi'ra separated, Han enlists in the Imperial army hoping to become an Imperial pilot (really, he just wants to be a pilot. He's pretty indifferent about the Empire). That doesn't go so well, because, you know, Han doesn't follow orders very well. He deserts the Imperial army to join a gang of thieves led by Thomas Beckett (Woody Harrelson). It's a pretty plot-heavy movie, so I'll stop there. I'm pretty sure no one is deciding whether or not to see this based on the story, anyway.

I was very pleased with how they populated this movie. Donald Glover's Lando Calrissian is a pitch perfect Billy Dee Williams impression. He has some fun exaggerating the character, but he doesn't go too wild with it. I've heard a lot of people say that the movie needed more Lando. I do agree that more Donald Glover makes everything better, but I'm actually fine with the amount we get. Lando is such a big character, that he'd take over the movie if there was more of him. Emilia Clarke is great in Game of Thrones, but it was Terminator Genysis that convinced me she's an action movie star. She fits right in as Han's morally compromised old flame. Woody Harrelson has aged nicely into mentor roles. He's not a role model, but he is the person Han needs to become the man we meet in A New Hope (Han shot first!). Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a delightful minor role voicing Lando's droid co-pilot, L3. She's an outspoken "droids' rights" advocate. It's a brash performance. I imagine audience response to her will be divisive. I liked the character because they don't use her too much. Any more of her would've been annoying. Chewbacca shows up. The best thing I can say about that is that I didn't realize Peter Mayhew wasn't playing him. Joonas Suotamo (also Chewie in The Last Jedi) gets the physicality of that performances right.

You've probably noticed that I've avoided talking about Alden Ehrenriech as Han. Well, he is fine in the roe. He is not doing a Harrison Ford impression. Thank god. That is a fool's errand. His performance is recognizably Han though. As I mentioned, this is a very plot-heavy movie with a lot of characters to introduce. Ehrenreich ends up the odd man out. Han is the lead character in that he's in almost every scene, but the focus is normally on the other characters or what's happening in the scene. Hopefully, if they do make a sequel, more time will be spent figuring out what Ehrenriech can bring to the role. I loved him in Hail, Caesar! I'm sure he has more to offer as Han than what we see in Solo.

With any origin story, the audience is going in with a set of questions they are hoping to have answered. Solo tries to answer all of them. That's a feature and a bug. Ron Howard and the Kasdans would've been crucified if they skipped things like the Kessel Run or how Han and Chewie met. The explanations they come up with all work individually. They do an admirable job fitting them all into the movie. The problem I ran into is that this checklist of questions to answer drove the story too much. Han Forrest Gumps his way through his own life. Another thing that bothered me is that Han Solo has a lifetime of stories when we meet him in A New Hope. It's frustrating to see all those stories covered in the few weeks or months that this movie takes place in. Given that Disney has plans for a sequel, you'd think they'd split some of it up. As is, if they make Solo 2 (or, as I'm calling it, Duo), they'll have to build this great adventure out of things that Han never mentions again.

OK, it's time for the elephant in the room. Midway through production, Disney replaced directors Phillip Lord and Chis Miller with Ron Howard. I adore Lord & Miller's other movies (The Lego Movie, 21 & 22 Jump Street). They are masters at making bad ideas into good ideas. Ron Howard's movies are quite good as well, although his greatest skill has always been making studio-friendly movies with a fairly invisible touch. I've had some time to think about this, and here's my take: I'm glad Ron Howard took over. In fact, I wish he would've had the movie from the start. Star Wars isn't ready for a Lord & Miller take on the series. They work best when they can point out the inherent ridiculousness of the story. Their Solo would look more like Thor Ragnarok. I enjoyed Ragnarok a lot, but it only worked because it was the third Thor movie. The character and world were established. The story in Solo isn't ready for that kind of anarchy. Watching Solo was a little bizarre, because the parts that felt like Lord & Miller jokes or scenes died both times I saw it. It's like Ron Howard and the editors didn't know how to get those moments to work. I feel like those would've been a lot smoother had Howard been able to craft those from the beginning. Granted, I'll never really know what parts of the movie came from Howard and which came from Lord & Miller. All I can say is that the tone of the movie didn't really work. I assume that's due to the direction change.

If Solo wasn't a Star Wars Story - if it was some generic Sci Fi action movie, I can't say I'd love it that much. It fails my One Big Leap test by shrinking the universe too much. The plot drives too much of it and the lead character is somewhat anonymous. Solo is a Star Wars Story though. With that comes an infrastructure that I love. The music, the effects, the production design, and the costumes are all on point. The world is filled with interesting characters and the casting is impeccable. I happily saw the movie twice this weekend (something I almost never do except for Star Wars movies).

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

After the Credits

I went on a longrant about Solo's opening weekend at the box office. It went a little long, so I made it its own post. (which I'll be posting soon)

Some other spoilery thoughts:

*I am not a fan of how much the movie shrank the Star Wars universe. Darth Maul just happens to be Qi'ra's boss. Han essentially bankrolls the Rebellion that he'll be joining a decade or two later. Han's first job as a thief, presumably the first thing he does since signing up for the Imperial army on the day they were separated, leads him to Qi'ra by complete coincidence. I forgive a lot of this with Jedi or characters strong in the Force. The Force is a convenient excuse for contrivance in these movies, but it doesn't make as much sense for a Force agnostic character like Han Solo. It's just lazy writing.

*The punchlines in this were very weird. Han getting the last name "Solo". That was clearly meant to be a wink at the audience joke (i.e. the writer/director saying "we're in on the joke. We know it's dumb. That's why it's funny"), but it plays awfully. It got more groans than laughs. The joke about Han holding a rock and pretending it's a bomb died both times I saw it. It needed one more beat to work. There's the scene when Qi'ra takes down the guy on Kessel during their "negotiations". They don't actually show what she did. They just have L3 comment on it in awe. I'd be shocked if that wasn't a Lord & Miller joke, or at least one written with them in mind. It's too meta not to be. That didn't get much of a reaction either when I saw it. That's what I mean when I say the tone was off. There's a good laugh to be found in all of these things but they weren't played right. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of jokes did work. I loved Lando riding off with the Millennium Falcon. That was great as was L3's excitement during her Norma Rae moment. It's mostly the one-liners that fell flat.

*The Kessel Run is the one absolute requirement in the movie and they did it justice. They tied it into how the Falcon got so banged up by A New Hope really nicely. I've always assumed that Han's brag about making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs didn't have to be a gaff. I'm sure it was a goof at the time, because Han clearly said that in A New Hope to brag about its speed, not his piloting. In Solo, they justify why he would be so proud of that accomplishment. That said, it sure would've had more of an impact if it wasn't the first time piloting the ship. I love how instantly it's clear that this Kessel Run is going to be Han's pick-up line at every bar for the rest of his life.

*I've caught onto Lucasfilm's strategy in these non-saga movies: If everyone dies, then there's less to explain later. Everyone in Rogue One dies. In Solo, Qi'ra is the only character we didn't know beforehand to survive. Even leaving that loose end is going to be a problem. I really like Qi'ra. They can't make her too much more important to Han, because there's no sign of a Qi'ra in his past in A New Hope.

Delayed Reaction: Crash Pad

The Pitch: Domhnall Gleeson as the lead in a pure comedy.

A cuckold moves in the the emotionally immature man his wife cheated on him with.

I think I might be ready to call Domhnall Gleeson my favorite actor. That's not to say I think he's the best actor or that I think he should lead every movie I see. I don't have a clear definition for "favorite actor". For about a decade, that title belonged to Heath Ledger. In his short career (only 23 credits on IMDB), he had an incredible hit rate. His three year run of 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot, and A Knight's Tale put him on my radar. Work in Monster's Ball and Brokeback Mountain gave him prestige appeal. I didn't even need his iconic Joker in The Dark Knight to esteem him so highly. An argument could be made that his Brokeback Mountain costar, Jake Gyllenhaal is my current favorite actor. He really blew me away in Nightcrawler. That's the only movie of his that I've loved. More often, he's the best thing about movies that I'm more mixed about. I'll see movies just because he's in them. That's certainly part of the criteria for determining a favorite actor.

I think it's Domhnall Gleeson though. He's the sole lead of one of my 5 favorite movies ever (About Time). He's got Ex Machina as a lead too. He's part of the Star Wars franchise. That's a big plus. He works a lot and in very different types of movies: quirky indie movies (Frank), period romance movies (Brooklyn), war movies (Unbroken), brutal man vs. nature movies (The Revenant), auteur pet-projects (mother!), dumb comedies (A Futile and Stupid Gesture), family friendly comedies (Peter Rabbit), Hollywood character studies (American Made). And, this is all since 2013. I wasn't even aware of him when he showed up in movies like Never Let Me Go, True Grit, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Parts 1 and 2, Dredd, and Anna Karenina. He's even managed to show up in my TV viewing with roles in Black Mirror and Catastrophe. The crazy thing is how often he shows up in movies that I was going to see anyway. In that large list I just offered, I didn't watch any of these things solely because he was in them. Crash Pad is actually the first thing I've watched only because I saw his name in it.

And Crash Pad isn't a great movie. It's one of those comedies with more funny ideas than jokes. Something like Stensland's (Gleeson's) obsession with Dawson's Creek never made me laugh out loud, but it is a funny recurring gag. Gleeseon is having a great time being a slovenly mess. I don't think the character works, because I'm never sure how much the film is on his side. I like Gleeson and I like Thomas Hayden Church playing his Thomas Hayden Church character. I could've used a little more of Christina Applegate and Nina Dobrev's side of things as well*. This movie reminds me of about a dozen movies I've seen before and can't think of the name of. It oddly reminds me of What If?. Both of them are small movies, I believe both are set in Canada, and feel more comfortable as 1997 releases than 2017 releases. That's not a knock on them, really. I really liked What If? and I enjoyed Crash Pad more than I should've. The beats of the movies though feel kind of dated, like the script had been sitting on the shelf for a decade and a half before being produced.

*Side note: How has Nina Dobrev not gotten a bigger shot at movies? She's talented and she's pretty. Many actresses have done more with less. Is she just bad at picking roles or has she been runner-up a lot? Is she having trouble washing off the CW and Degrassi stink? She's like Alison Brie. I don't get how there hasn't been more room for her in this business.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Gates of Heaven

The Pitch: A documentary so good that it made Werner Herzog eat his shoe.

A documentary about people who run pet cemeteries.

As part of my now year-long documentary kick (I think it's time to stop treating this like it's a phase that will pass), I've been trying to catch up on some of the classics of the form, many of which come from Errol Morris. I already watched The Thin Blue Line, which is his most famous doc, but Gate of Heaven is arguably more infamous.

That infamy is almost all because of Werner Herzog. As the story goes, when Herzog heard that Morris was making a documentary about people who run pet cemeteries, he said he'd eat his shoe if Morris could generate enough interest to get a theatrical release for it. That wasn't just an expression, because when Gates of Heaven was released, Herzog actually ate his shoe and made a short film about it.

While I did enjoy Gates of Heaven, nothing about it was as interesting as that story with Herzog. Few things are. I think I set my expectations a bit high for Gates of Heaven. I've always heard about how it's so much better than you'd expect, given the material. And, it is more interesting than the material would require. I did only think the movie was fine. Morris' style is pretty matter of fact, and is only as engaging as the people being interviewed. There are some good characters in this - I especially liked the guys who sets up all his trophies and awards in his office - but I wasn't that sucked into the world. It's good, but I wouldn't describe it as much more than that. I did watch it pretty late. Perhaps nothing would've enthralled me that late at night.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Face2Face

The Pitch: Can a movie about two high schoolers be told completely through Skype?

Two childhood friends reconnect through Skype after many years and help each other through difficult circumstances.

We all have certain types of movies that we can't resist, even if we know they'll be bad. I have many of these, but two of my most significant weak spots are high school movies and found footage movies. That makes Face2Face more of an inevitability than a decision for me.

Eventually, someone is going to get one of these movies told through new technologies right and I want to be there when it happens. People have been trying to figure out how to tell a story through webcams for a while. Unfriended, while a pretty forgettable horror movie in general, was really inventive with how it used a computer screen to tell a story. Other horror movies like The Den and V/H/S have used forms of this as well, eventually reaching a point that strains plausibility a little too much. I believe there's a John Cho thriller that premiered at Sundance this year that tries this style out. Even an episode of Modern Family told a story through a computer screen. It still feels more like a gimmick than something that adds to the overall discussion of film, but it's only a matter of time before someone really figures it out.

Face2Face keeps things simple for most of the movie: Teel (Daniel Johnson) is a social reject who, through Skype, tracks down Madison (Daniela Bobadilla), who he was friends with as a child. She lives across the country, and he hasn't spoken to in years. Most of the movie is their periodic discussions over several months. That much I really like. The movie lost me when it decided to crank things up to 11.

I'm going to treat this movie like a new release and not spoil too much. What I can say is that I didn't care for the misdirect with Teel's story. I like it in theory. I just think the movie pushes too hard to make the audience think one thing before revealing the truth about him. The twist could've had the same effect with half the effort to misdirect. People are already conditioned to see the story in this movie one way, which does most of the work for the filmmaker.

As for Madison's side of the story: calm the fuck down. They telegraphed where that was going pretty early, and I spent most of the time thinking "please don't go there". It all felt like drama for the sake of drama. I suppose it makes sense though why they did it. The film is designed for people half my age. There's not a lot of time for nuance, so they opt to make the conflict black and white. The person who is in the wrong is very, very in the wrong. I think I just wanted a tamer movie.

Tying into Madison's end of the story, the movie does run in the problem all these movies run into. No one carries a laptop around with them in the really dire moments in life. So, when Madison and Teel keep their webcams on in the climactic moments, it feels really false.

Face2Face is the kind of movie that I eat up and even enjoy complaining about the tropes that are really stupid that I secretly kind of love. The movie is great in the smaller moments and struggles when it overextends itself in the more dramatic beats. It's not perfect, but it fits in the middle of the Venn Diagram of my taste just enough to be worth seeing.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

The Pitch: Is it possible to make someone root for a bank?

A documentary about the only bank that the government prosecuted after the 2008 market crash: a small community bank run by and catering to Chinese Americans.

One of my biggest pet peeves in movies is how lazy the villainizing of banks and corporations is. Some of that, I'm sure, comes from the fact that I'm on the upper end of being pro-capitalism (although banking and the corporate structure in the US abandoned a lot of capitalist principals a long time ago. That's a rant for another day). More of my irritation comes from the fact that the way these things are villainized is really boring. It's like making a bad guy in a violent movie a neo-Nazi or KKK member so the movie can excuse the hero killing someone. It's lazy targeting.

That's what made this documentary, sympathizing with a bank, so interesting. This film fucks with all of our sympathies by adding a lot of layers.

It's about a bank that made fraudulent loans.

It's about a big company (the government) going after the little guy.

It's about ethnic prejudices in how the law is enforced.

I'm pretty sure the the majority of the people who watch this will be surprised when they stop to think about who they are rooting for by the end. I know I was.

Director Steve James mostly stays out of the way throughout and let the film be about the family who runs Abacus. He keeps the film focused on them and the events of the indictment, only zooming out to give context when needed. He hits a few points a little strong but leaves a lot to the audience to put together, which I appreciated.

Perhaps my biggest documentary pet peeve is when I feel like parts of the story are being left out so that a certain conclusion can be reached. Blackfish is my favorite example of that. Making a Murder was guilty of it too. I had inklings of this in Abacus. I feel like certain elements of the fraud the bank was being charged with weren't given as critical an eye as they deserved. My best guess is that people are already inclined to not trust banks, so the filmmakers were afraid that going at Abacus too hard would lose the audience's sympathy. If that was the reasoning, I have to say, it was a smart calculation.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend