You guys seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that even among the fans, there is not universal dislike for The Last Jedi. At best, it's a 50/50 split. Those who hate it? They simply don't number enough to represent the poor box office performance of Solo.
The more likely scenario here is that almost no one really saw the point of this movie, so the excitement just wasn't there.
Disney's mistake wasn't The Last Jedi. Their mistake was trusting the outlier performance of Rogue One and the box office of The Last Jedi, and using that to justify WAY over-spending on Solo, hoping it would do just as well. Had Disney kept this movie smaller (in terms of budget) as was originally intended, we would not be having conversations about poor performance and no one would be floating theories of some sort of fandom super-power to crash the box office.
It's a mediocre movie performing at a mediocre level. It just had a blockbuster budget behind it.
I hope this doesn't come off snarky. It's not personal to you, @
Zuiun. It's just an IMHO analysis.
In this age of social media, there's never been a better time to be an outlier/provocateur. We see it constantly in political discourse - people that can't possibly be invested in what they're defending, but they feel they're being dictated to, or there are subtleties in positions that they mostly agree on - but not completely - so they strike out their own territory so they can be heard.
There will always be those that defend garbage on the grounds of, "Oh, you just don't get it man, it was soooo deeeeep". Do they really get it, or care? Not really. But now they're special, or even a "superfan", because all those other guys never really understood the subject matter.
TLJ is not deep; it didn't take anything to a new level. In fact, it was the opposite of that, it took everything
potentially deep and profound (whether you liked the options or not) from TFA, and made it about as superficial as it could get. There's a difference between
dark and
diminished. All you had to do was go to the Jedi Council boards and see how whisper-quiet it became (and there are quasi-cerebral sorts all over the place there that will try to defend anything), or go to the toy stores. No one cared.
Good points about the box office numbers that preceded it. Stories that don't
need to be told are risky anyway, and R1 probably survived on being a clean sheet of paper that people were at least curious about. In addition, it was a well-crafted film on merit, IMO. If you didn't necessarily like the Star Wars vibe or buy certain elements or whatever, it stood on its own. There were quality performances. TLJ was always going to do well numbers-wise, merely due to the previous two films. Hell, I even had to see it twice, the 2nd time with someone who wouldn't judge it as harshly as I, just so I would stop feeling so angry about it. I'm a repeat viewer, AND I HATED IT.
So, SOLO was a story that didn't need to be told, but it was always high-risk in that it was going to play with your head regarding a beloved existing character. As a child of the OT-theatre era, it didn't measure up; but our bar is always going to be much higher. For me, it got lost in a couple of details - his time in the Imperial Navy, and the manner in which he met/saved Chewie. But for a contrived storyline, it wasn't bad. I think if it weren't called SOLO, and was just a generic heist film, it would have been really good. I liked the twists at the end. Major crush on Enfys Nest, I admit. I'm pathetic, whatever. I'll take what I can get from a Star Wars movie these days.
That whole thing about when you stop hating someone and now feel nothing, signaling when a relationship is truly over? I think that's where a lot of people are with Star Wars right now. IX has to be good. It has to be REALLY GOOD. It has to give me that sensitive, complex Ben Solo we got a glimpse of in TFA. His character was at first Shakespearean, and got reduced to a wooden slab. That hurts. My bar is high - as is my interest - but for those whose isn't, I think the notion of a "reimagined" SOLO piggybacked onto the emptiness of TLJ, just wasn't alluring enough to make them care. :-\