Is Star Wars imploding?

[ClanAskani]

That's the point of the article, I think.

With the clickbait title "5 Classic Movies Everybody Hated When They First Came Out", certainly everyone didn't hate Empire Strikes Back.

What I think people would be surprised is the level of hatred directed towards The Last Jedi among people who had been Star Wars fans.

The "backlash" seems to be more along the lines of "a small faction used the intent as a microphone and have been dominating the conversation." Case in point, most credible sources polling viewer reactions show the movie was favorably received (not to mention that box office and home media sales were extremely good). Besides, not every "hardcore" fan rejected it; I, for one, thought it was this generations ESB.

The box office for TLJ was disappointing for Disney. Presale ticket sales carried the opening weekend and even much of December many tickets were sold for Christmas and even New Years Eve before the movie was even released). The multiplier was far lower than Disney anticipated based on the opening weekend.

The fact that Jumanji was able to beat TLJ for so many weekends was utterly embarrassing to Disney (and the fact they had to re-expand Coco to make up for TLJ losing so many theaters is just sad). And it's just encouraged other studios to directly challenge Star Wars. Sony isn't even seeing Episode IX as a threat. They are putting three movies up against it rather than giving it a wide unchallenged window.

As for home video, blu ray sales are down considerably compared to TFA. There's been a lot of articles and YouTube videos about sales figures from The-Numbers.com, which are a little deceptive since they are retail sales and heavily driven by Walmart. Disney isn't giving deep discounts to Walmart, so all Disney blu ray sales numbers are down.

Where Disney is hurting is merchandise sales being down considerably. Hasbro's licencing agreement is up in 2020 and that's going to be interesting to see how they renegotiate - especially with the potential of many Star Wars films with no existing characters (if Rian Johnson's trilogy being used). Hasbro isn't going to pay the kind of licence fee they currently are to make toys that may never sell.

Disney exec want to see upward momentum for their franchises. TLJ took all of the momentum that had been built up with TFA and Rogue One and sent Star Wars plummiting back to earth.