So much to unpack in this weekend’s box office that it took an extra day for it all to go down.
• The Disney/Star Wars project is perhaps the most successful trainwreck in Hollywood history.
Which is to say, back in 2012 (surprisingly recent!), IP Bob Iger was considering risking his still tenuous chiefdom on a $4 billion bet on Lucasfilm, at the moment in an extended, possibly fatal, hangover from the prequel trilogy,
If at that moment, you could’ve given him a partial glimpse of the future and told him that the new film series would involve firing multiple directors mid-project; a constant drumbeat of rumors and hardcore fan backlash; the first outright Star Wars flop in a Han Solo film (which then aborted a plan for a regular line of standalone films); the arrival and departure of various celebrated showrunners under a cloud of mystery; a plot and tone careening across the galaxy at light speed; a zillion-dollar theme park launch that resulted in headlines about the shortest lines at Disneyland in years; a down-trending opening of the final film; and Mr. Confidence, J.J. Abrams himself, saying that the critics of the film are right. If shown all that seven years ago, would IP Bob have said, thanks for the warning and run as fast as his immaculate tailored suits would allow him?
Or, on another level, he might have taken it in and said: yes, and . . . .?
Because despite all the horrors above, does any of that matter, much at all?
Star Wars has now, 42-plus years in, survived one horrible trilogy, and now one very mixed one.
• The armchair quarterbacking on how well it did vs. Rogue One or the last episode . . . within a certain margin, get a life? This isn’t a contest for some intramural Disney bragging rights around the commissary.
As long as Rise of the Skywalker doesn’t end up another Solo, is a couple hundred million, give or take, at the box office more than a grain of sand in the ocean of toys, rides, more toys, licensing, and video games into eternity? A Star Wars show is single-handedly fueling the buzz on the Disney Plus launch.
• To put it another way: What’s the price to market? If Disney paid $4 billion for this seven years ago, what if they were to put the whole thing up for sale? If they essentially flipped LucasFilm in seven years, what price might it bring?
With Netflix and Apple and AT&T in the water? And the world desperate, hungry, aching for IP to launch new services on the back of? One-hundred-zillion-billion? Something in that range? A few months ago, Hasbro paid $4 billion for, essentially, Peppa Pig. Would you say Star Wars, even on a downturn, is 20 times more valuable than Peppa? 50 times? So in seven years, their Lucas investment will have increased X-fold.
• Now, flagging interest in the film could be a leading indicator of waning interest in the whole downstream product line and that could become a major problem if left unchecked. But even if not a single other person sees Skywalker after this weekend, Star Wars is not about to just take its ball and sulk off the field. The games, the rides, and the buzz-a-tronic streaming series continue. In a few years, there will be a new bunch of movies which, we can pray, will have shaken off the on-screen and off-screen problems. But there will be plenty more at bats.
• So on one level, the accomplishment is pretty amazing. In seven years, Kathleen Kennedy et al took a franchise that really seemed likely to be relegated to cartoon-land if it was lucky and churn out five new movies, four of which were billion-dollar grossers and become an endless font of revenue possibilities everywhere you look.
But on the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore the trajectory here while this chapter is unfolding. No one involved seems happy, and it has to be nothing but relief to be turning the page.
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