On this topic, Lucasfilm has just confirmed that the proposed Boba Fett spinoff film has been
cancelled, in line with the Disney strategy of scaling back new Star Wars releases. There’s been a lot of discussion about how Marvel can manage to turn out two new films a year and keep making more and more money, while Lucasfilm can’t. Part of it might be that the Marvel films are all quite different, and you don’t need to watch them all to follow the overall plot. Disney seemed to be going for something like this with the spin-offs, but they don’t seem to have been able to make it work.
Alatar wrote: Just goes to show, there's lies, damn lies, and then statistics. Last Jedi more unpopular than Phantom Menace? I was there for both. Trust me, there's no comparison. the difference is that the people who are writing reviews on Rotten Tomatoes were kids when the Prequels came out. They are adults (sort of) now. IMHO of course.
I was a regular poster on TheForce.net around the time Episodes II and III came out. At the time, the fandom community was divided between ‘Bashers’ who disliked the Prequels (I was in that camp) and ‘Gushers’ who liked them. Outside the community, the reactions to the first two Prequels was mostly negative, but there were still a hardcore group of fans who really liked (and still like) them. Opposition to TLJ seems to have united most of the fandom, but among non-fans, the reaction has been the opposite – most casual viewers like the film.
Frelga wrote:Since you mentioned it...
Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds
This is not entirely accurate, as only a small number of trolls were traced to Russian troll farms. But...
The paper analyzes in depth the negative online reaction, which is split into three different camps: those with a political agenda, trolls and what Bay calls "real fantagonists," which he defines as genuine Star Wars fans disappointed in the movie. His findings are fascinating; "Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively [about the movie] was likely politically motivated or not even human," he writes, noting that only 21.9% of tweets analyzed about the movie had been negative in the first place.
"A number of these users appear to be Russian trolls," Bay writes of the negative tweets.
Part of the anti-TLJ reaction has certainly been from trolls. But it would be unwise for Lucasfilm to brush off all the criticism of TLJ as being trolling (or, as some within the studio seem to have implied, racism and sexism).
As yov points out, there’s obvious differences with how films are treated by the internet now than how they were in 1999 or 2002. But this doesn’t seem to have troubled Marvel. And other franchises, like Harry Potter (the new Fantastic Beasts) and Star Trek, have met with fair even if unexceptional reactions, but don’t seem to have antagonised the fanbase in the same way TLJ has done.
