The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.Apparently Mr Gecko's way to run a business has hit a wall at Lucasfilm, reeling (pardon the pun) from the fact that Solo: A Star Wars Story is a box office disappointment. So far it has generated only $345 million in revenues against a $275 million production budget. I suspect the film is barely breaking even, at best, after factoring in non-production expenses such as promotion. In comparison, the widely-critiqued Episode I earned over $1 billion and the equally critiqued Episode II earned $650 million — without taking inflation into account.
The commercial failure of Solo isn't the first warning. Episode VIII took in only two-thirds the box office that Episode VII did. Rogue One fell short of Episode VII, too.
Clearly the message is that people are tiring of Star Wars. This scares the devil out of Disney, who paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012. The assumption at Disney was that Star Wars could spawn all kinds of prequels, sequels, and spinoffs over decades to come — supporting two or even three releases each year. Ain't working out that way!
One could argue that the recent Star Wars releases are mediocre and deserve the box office they've gotten. But I'm certain Disney had believed mediocrity would be good enough. Disney might recover the situation by releasing a truly great Episode IX in December 2019. Problem is, no one can guarantee a blockbuster. Meanwhile Disney has gotten the message; their plans for films on Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi are said to be under reexamination. "The trouble with movies as a business is that it's an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it's a business," laconically commented the late Charlton Heston.
Gecko was correct about greed in some narrow contexts. This isn't one of them.
