The Strange Case Of Solo: A Star Wars Story’s Opening Weekend Box Office

 

According to Variety, Solo: A Star Wars Story made $103 million domestically over the course of the Memorial Day weekend. It is news that would usually be met with cheers and pats on certain backs has instead been met with hand-wringing, scorn and — as seems standard with tentpole releases these days — rash words exchanged over Twitter.
The analysts will tell you a movie like Solo should make upwards of $1 billion by the end of its worldwide theatrical run and a $100 million US opening weekend is a poor sign for its intended success. Of course, that projection of success is built on so much math it will make you regret having a hard time in Algebra II. In lieu of understanding the obscure calculus Hollywood studios uses to prove success to investors while still looking like failures when its time to pay the cast and crew their profit participation, audiences — seduced by headlines like “Solo Crashes At The Box Office” — are left to create their own theories why a Star Wars film would open with a gross $120 million less than its predecessor.
To be honest, I rarely sweat the numbers because I don’t use them to judge a film’s merit. Growing up in the video store era, box office returns had no impact on whether or not I rented a movie; and if you read my column, “Your Weekend Cheesy Movie,” you know quality itself does not always matter to me. Nonetheless, Solo‘s opening weekend performance is interesting to me for one key reason: Star Wars has never before released a film 5 months after its predecessor. If there was ever a moment in which “franchise fatigue” appears in the numbers, this is that moment.
And this is before you even get into how divisive The Last Jedi left the Star Wars faithful.
The original trilogy spaced out its release dates by four and three years respectively. The prequel series spaced out its installments in roughly two year increments. The Disney era opened with a promise of a new Star Wars film every year. To a seven year old in 1980, this might have sounded like a dream come true. In the 21st Century, it feels crass.
But then you notice Disney stablemate Marvel Studios gets away with releasing as many as three films a year without the fatigue coming into play — except from naysayer analysts outside the target demographic — and if the films are not billion dollar success stories, they still make respectable amounts of money. So what is the difference here?
Since trying to understand returns on investment, box office tracking numbers and all of the metrics studios and analysts use to define the success of a product is ultimately divorced from the actual quality of the product, it may actually be impossible to define why Marvel can release three films a year while Lucasfilm is left looking like a loser for trying to release two in five months. But I will hazard a guess based on my years of watching the business and trying to understand how it all functions.
Consider this an overall hypothesis of tentpole movies.
The opening box office reflects the success of the marketing, not the product. If the people involved in illustrating why a moviegoer should see the film do their job, the opening box office hits or exceeds the tracking numbers the studios use to entice investors into paying more for shares of their corporate parents. This is also why the second weekend box office generally sees a film lose as much as 70% of its opening weekend take. Marketing has moved on to the next big project and the product — now finally a film — is left on its own to generate repeat business or entice new audiences thanks to word of mouth. Sure, there are still TV ads and posters, but for studio marketing departments, it’s on to the next tournament.
Marketing is also an obscure and complex thing, but I’ll hazard one more guess to say the negative stories around Solo were difficult to counter in a time when fans really didn’t feel the need for another Star Wars.
But you will note none of this has to do with the actual quality of the film itself, a metric which requires the passage of time to really determine. Consider Avatar‘s historic opening box office in contrast to how few people talk about it today. Upon initial release, 2001: a space odyssey did not perform well for MGM, but has gone on to become one of the most influential science fiction films ever made and an important part of Warner Bros Home Entertainment’s giant film catalogue.
Now I’ll come around to quality: Solo is not one of the great films. As I said in my review, it is a fun film. Sometimes, that’s all you need a film to be once you stop looking at it as a piece of commerce. And by that metric, Solo is worthy of the time it takes to watch it. But it is a highly subjective metric and one studios cannot rely to make future production decisions. Which leads me to this question: as fans, should we be so concerned about the studios choices? Sure, we may want more Star Wars and therefore feel invested in the films performing to a box office standard which allows further films to be made, but would it be a bad thing if the film series went a way for a break after Episode IX? Only Disney would have to eat some crow because it paid so much for Lucasfilm, but does it matter to us without a monetary stake in Star Wars?
Maybe some of those answers will be revealed in the months ahead as Lucasfilm and Disney learn Star Wars stories need to scale in proportion to measurable audience interest.