Mouse Wars Finds No Safe Harbor in China

I will not brook any apologia for The Last Jedi now that the opening for its run in China has come: $125 million. Of that gross, over half of it will stay in China and never reach Disney's coffers. That fact sounds impressive, until you consider the following:

• Warcraft's China run pulled in 213 million. That movie--even among Warcraft fans like me--is acknowledged as a dumpster fire that deserved its failure, however much we wanted it to succeed. TLJ did worse than that.
• The Fate of the Furious, the first post-Paul Walker entry into that franchise, did 394 million. That's a beloved film franchise with global reach and power, something Star Wars lacks as its presence in China (a key film business segment now) is weak at best, and is what you'd expect a truly entertaining global franchise film to actually pull in.
• It got beat by a domestic rom-com, which are more formulaic there than they are in Hollywood, badly.

TLJ will not meet expectations. It will not meet them so obviously that it can't be ignored, and can't be lied about by sophist bullshit either. The film business is all about meeting expectations; careers of actors, directors, writers, producers, executives, etc. all depend upon meeting expectations. TLJ is expected to meet performance about that of its immediate predecessor, so about 2 billion. It won't. It will be fortunate to break one billion.

The tricks used to pander to China'a audience don't work. They didn't boost Rogue One there. China doesn't have the long history with Star Wars that most of the rest of the world does, so they have no nostalgia to cloud the issue; it's crap, so they stayed away in droves.

And now we have the Han Solo movie coming out next Spring just as the Summer season arrives. Nothing good has come out of this film; the behind-the-scenes reports are all bad news, and nothing being done to salvage it will make it better than the last salvage dumpster fire (Rogue One). It's likely to do worse, especially once a plot summary leaks out and gets confirmed, as that's what happened to TLJ and sank the film before its official release.

Mouse Wars floundering can be bullshat for now, but not for much longer; the bad word of mouth has already compelled the Mouse Empire to lean on the film media to defend it in their columns, which is not necessary if it were any good. Its Audience score at Rotten Tomatoes is now 50% and slipping. That's why the Fake Media is now resorting to puff pieces about Frumpy Asian Chick (who isn't Chinese; that did play a part in its failure in China) whining about audience reactions while taking Totally Not Staged photo ops.

The downward spiral is now apparent. So long as Kathy Kennedy and the other SJWs remain in place, the spiral will continue and the suck will become too obvious to ignore sooner than later.

On a good note, Geek Gab comes back. Enjoy.