Results tagged “Star Wars”

How badly has George Lucas damaged the Star Wars franchise? At Box Office Mojo, The Clone Wars’ revenues are being compared to Final Fantasy and TMNT — and after two weekends, it’s losing to both.

The Clone Wars would appear to show that Star Wars is now being greeted with audience apathy and critical disdain; with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 18, it’s just a little better than Mirrors, the scribes say.

It could be that the world is simply seeing the movie for what it is: a commercial for the Cartoon Network animated series slated for the fall. I’d prefer to think that critics and audiences alike are trying to compensate for hype-fueled lapses in judgment over the past decade. Revenge of the Sith had a baffling Rotten Tomatoes score of 79, which followed more-reasonable but still far-too-generous scores of 63 and 66 for the other two Star Wars prequels. And the trilogy had a combined domestic gross of $1.1 billion. Shame on all of us. (I’m not above reproach.)

The Clone Wars dropped to eighth place in this week’s Box Office Power Rankings, with Tropic Thunder and The Dark Knight finishing first and second — just like last week. The new releases simply couldn’t compete, with The House Bunny finishing third, Death Race fifth, and The Longshots seventh.

Continue reading for the methodology and the week’s full rankings — in a chart that you might actually be able to follow!

(My new contribution to Edward Copeland’s Star Wars Blog-a-thon. I also offered old essays on George Lucas’ endless tinkering and Revenge of the Sith. And a poll.)

Is it possible that the failure of the second Star Wars trilogy has nothing to do with plot, character, and storytelling and everything to do with physical space?

Fresh off Culture Snob’s own Misunderstood Blog-a-thon is Edward Copeland’s Star Wars Blog-a-thon on Friday, May 25 — the 30th anniversary of Episode IV’s release in the United States.

A couple of fascinating thematic blog-a-thons are also on the horizon: the Ambitious Failure Blog-a-thon (June 20-24) and the Bizarro Blog-a-thon (August 27-29).

For more upcoming blog-a-thons, check out Copeland’s list here or Squish’s list (and a history of blog-a-thons) here.

• How ignorant are you? Cinemarati recently asked its readers:

  “What’s your big, embarrassing, Never-Seen-It movie?”

  To help you out, you can use this tool to track your viewing history against the Internet Movie Database’s “top 250” list. (My list.) My guilty admission is that I’ve yet to see Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) despite its reputation.
• At Slate, rather than mocking people for movies they haven’t seen, Sam Anderson judges his friends by what they want to see. What does your Netflix queue say about you?

The troubles with Revenge of the Sith are large: conception, narrative arc, tone, and pacing, all related to a failure by George Lucas to acknowledge what, exactly, the prequels represent, and to shape the material accordingly. And the raw materials of the movies suggest a startlingly detailed, mature, and nuanced vision, not just a popcorn space opera.

The (mostly rhetorical) question raised by George Lucas’ changes to the original Star Wars trilogy is at what point a movie is “finished.” Put another way: Is there a version of a movie that should be considered the definitive version? If so, who gets to decide?