Star Wars and JJ: Daunting Story and Box Office Challenges

by Ray Keating

Analysis

DisneyBizJournal.com

October 18, 2019

J.J. Abrams faces some big challenges with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which will hit theaters on December 20^th.  Is he ready? Well, according to an Entertainment Weekly report, Abrams declared, “We went into this thing knowing it has to be an ending. We’re not screwing around.”

Abrams faces the monumental task of wrapping up the nine-movie Star Wars Skywalker saga that began in 1977, and has become a cultural icon. EW also quoted Abrams, co-writer and director of The Rise of Skywalker, saying, “Endings are the thing that scare me the most.” Yeah, I bet.

But Abrams’ job was made far more difficult given that the eighth entry in the Skywalker series – Star Wars: The Last Jedi – has become so universally, well, hated. And quite frankly, justifiably so. The Last Jedi director and writer Rian Johnson turned out to be the exact wrong man for the job. It’s clear that he failed to understand key Star Wars characters – most glaringly, Luke Skywalker – and other story choices were made that made little sense. (For example, why were Rose and Finn off doing what they were doing? And the space ship chase made sense how? And Leia survived what? And Luke was where? You get the idea. Ugh.)

As a result, J.J. must do triple duty with The Rise of Skywalker in terms of the story. First, he has to satisfactorily close out the Skywalker tale spanning eight previous films. He also must deal with finishing specifics to this final trilogy. And he has to somehow repair at least some of the damage Johnson did. No wonder Abrams admitted to being a bit scared.

In turn, his work on the story obviously feeds into the box office. It’s kind of interesting to note that every Star Wars movie was a box office success, until the most recent one – Solo: A Star Wars Story. So, The Last Jedi, which, for example, serves up a miserable audience score on RottenTomatoes.com of 44 percent, still raked in an incredible $1.3 billion at the box office. However, Solo, while scoring notably higher, though still not great, with audiences at 64 percent on RottenTomatoes.com, wound up losing money, pulling in a box office gross of only $393 million. (See our postmortem on Solo: A Star Wars Story and related issues.) It’s like fans went to see The Last Jedi more than once, just to make sure they didn’t like it, and then decided not to bother with Solo at all. (By the way, the more I watch Solo, the more I like; and the more I watch The Last Jedi, the more it dislike it.)

So, J.J. Abrams – and therefore, of course, Disney – faces formidable story and business challenges. The longtime Star Wars fan in me is rooting hard for Abrams to pull it all off (and yes, the trailers have me excited). The analyst in me is cautiously optimistic.

Ray Keating is the editor, publisher and economist for DisneyBizJournal.com, and author of the Pastor Stephen Grant novels. He can be contacted at  raykeating@keatingreports.com.