AHC: Phantom Menace Flops

Delay it.

The longer it takes to get the movie made, the higher the expectations and costs. At the same time, audiences are less and less impressed with CGI with every year that passes. As ColeMercury pointed out, there is also the social media factor - greater connectivity means harsher reactions to poor films. Earlier versions of Facebook, twitter, and rotten tomatoes are a lot more complicated than a movie being delayed a few extra years.

Plus you can count on it not being the same movie. George would have kept wallowing in his own Lucas. There's the outside chance that it would be butterflied better, but more likely the same trends would just be more pronounced.

Of course, international box offices have taken off in the last decade, so delaying it past 2004 wouldn't help the cause. Hrm....
 
Say the film is held up until 2002. Any more probably isnt realistic. The cause is a perfect storm of the usual stuff - politics and drama and studio machinations - whatever.

We'd best butterfly a heavily CGI-centric Syfy movie into the interim to dull the appeal of endless spinning space battles a bit, but that's no stretch. That Man benefits less from the technology's novelty, and will if anything use it more in an attempt to set The Phantom Menace apart.

That kind of delayed mess in a movies production produces a lot of friction. At some point that friction leads someone involved in production to blow off steam anonymously on the Internet. It's the sort of thing you'd expect now but our past selves never would - "He's ruining the franchise. He doesn't actually know what is appealing about Star Wars. It's full of racial stereotypes." That might be of passing interest for many movies. For an incredibly delayed Episode I it becomes part of the narrative. The initial reaction would actually be to put the future Original Trilogists in Lucas' defense, but long term it preps the world with some of the language for what is terrible about George Lucas.

The film costs $132 million, plus a total of $22 million in advertising (it's been a while since the remastering, and they want to be sure) before its May 22 premier. By May 18 the campaign has been successful, word of mouth is enormous, the fundamental appeal of giant space battles is unquestionable.

Resistance is futile.

But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.

Three men are stopped on the Canadian border in a car with bomb making materials concealed under the trunk lining.

The Homeland Security Advisory System is barely two months old, having come into being only on March 19. It's new, but it's never been anything but Yellow. Based on the border arrests, preliminary interrogations, a minor bombing in Riyadh, and on similarly-worded references on several Arabic-language chat rooms, the threat level is raised to Orange. Although this is a general alert, it takes place in the aftermath of September 11, and people do not behave reasonably. In this atmosphere of paranoia, police in Arizona and Florida are given instructions to pay more attention to crowded areas like malls and movie theaters on the basis of....well, nothing in particular. Local media quickly pick up the story, demanding to know why the threat to malls and movie theaters hadn't been announced. In California the outraged news cycle is focused on the fact that state police weren't ordered to do the same.

By the evening of May 20 the worst of the mess has simmered down after further announcements clarify that there is no specific threat, but since no one is willing to expressly deny that crowded areas are at risk several major cities prevent crowds from camping out in front of theaters.

There's a fair bit of defiantly patriotic cinema-going and shopping ("If you don't accept Jar Jar Binks as a valid character, the terrorists win!"), but nowhere near enough, especially after the threat level falls back a week after the opening. It takes thirteen days for Episode I to make up its production cost, and by then things have calmed down enough that people are already talking about how unsuccessful the movie has been. Dedicated Star Wars fans would have been happy to step up and remedy that, but by now they've already seen it a few times and the consensus is that "that guy on the Internet" was right - the movie's a dud.

Thoughts?
 
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As odd as it sounds, I'd argue that the best way to make this happen would be to make George Lucas much, much more protective of the franchise as a whole. Specifically, if he decides not to approve Bantam's highly successful book run, then Star Wars could well disappear from public consciousness before Lucas gets the idea to make prequels. Of course, there's a hefty chance of the PT getting butterflied away altogether, but if we assume that that doesn't happen, then there might not be enough buzz surrounding the new movie to ensure a smash hit.
 
On a similar note, I feel that was George Lucas problem in this era as a director; he is an extremely capable traditional director who knows the ropes and the to-dos and not-to-dos, but in the digital age he came in fresh just like everyone else at square 1, but still thought of himself as the square 10 director he was in the traditional film era, and he tripped on that ego.
How great of a traditional director is he really though? Given that he only directed one OT movie, and it was apparently not that great before his wife edited the hell out of it?

I do agree that he let his ego get to him. Had he acknowledged his flaws, the movies would undoubtedly have been better and more coherent. This challenge is the opposite though, and I have a hard time seeing how he could do worse in this regard.

That kind of delayed mess in a movies production produces a lot of friction. At some point that friction leads someone involved in production to blow off steam anonymously on the Internet. It's the sort of thing you'd expect now but our past selves never would - "He's ruining the franchise. He doesn't actually know what is appealing about Star Wars. It's full of racial stereotypes." That might be of passing interest for many movies. For an incredibly delayed Episode I it becomes part of the narrative. The initial reaction would actually be to put the future Original Trilogists in Lucas' defense, but long term it preps the world with some of the language for what is terrible about George Lucas.
So like Waterworld, which apparently became a bit of a story in America before it was ever released? Yeah, that sounds like a good way to put the movie on the defensive, if there's already a negative narrative surrounding the production. A delay also makes social media more likely to be a major influence.
 
So like Waterworld, which apparently became a bit of a story in America before it was ever released? Yeah, that sounds like a good way to put the movie on the defensive, if there's already a negative narrative surrounding the production. A delay also makes social media more likely to be a major influence.

Or John Carter, for a more recent sci-fi example.
 
How great of a traditional director is he really though? Given that he only directed one OT movie, and it was apparently not that great before his wife edited the hell out of it?
Three. He directed THX1138 in 1971, American Graffiti in 1973, and Star Wars in 1977. Plus some short films earlier than that.
 
So like Waterworld, which apparently became a bit of a story in America before it was ever released? Yeah, that sounds like a good way to put the movie on the defensive, if there's already a negative narrative surrounding the production. A delay also makes social media more likely to be a major influence.
*points at Waterworld* see, people? this is an example of a film which was ACTUALLY hugely overhyped and was ACTUALLY a huge disappointment, which Ep1 and the Prequel Trilogy as a whole WAS NOT

now, as to the thread's question, one would simply need to transplant (and appropriately modify) Waterworld's hype. looking at John Carter and simply advertising it poorly would also probably work without having to change the film itself all that much. just emphasize only the pod race and the duel with Darth Maul (much like how only the coliseum scene in John Carter was emphasized in advertisements) without changing the content itself and it can totally work to make Ep1 a financial failure while a sort-of critical success (again, much like John Carter; as a note, that one actually has a worse critical reception than Ep1)
 
Could you have one or more of the special effects induce side effects in people who watch it? Maybe something missed by screeners or entirely new? After the first few showings on the first day no one sees it again except the truly hard-core fans...
 
Could you have one or more of the special effects induce side effects in people who watch it? Maybe something missed by screeners or entirely new? After the first few showings on the first day no one sees it again except the truly hard-core fans...
i dont know how you could really do that with cinematic shooting. i mean, Cloverfield, for instance, had all that whole shakey-cam thing going on which, after prolonged viewing, i can completely understand causing motion sickness, but in general films don't do that

unless there were lots of bright, flashing lights like in that banned episode of the Pokemon anime, which caused nearly 700 children in Japan to experience motion sickness-related symptoms and seizures and require medical attention, 150 of whom had to be hospitalized
 
Could you have the Phantom Menace released on the day of some disaster. I don't just mean like the shootings during the Batman premier, I mean some international thing that would utterly distract people. For example, something like 9/11?
 
No one would invest that much effort into the internet at that point. Just bandwidth-wise you'd need huge ass buildings just to run a Facebook type website, like they still do today.

Who needs the internet for social media? Let's say the CB craze continues into the '80s and well beyond, because CB is deregulated under Carter and Reagan, so things like 5-minute talking limits go away.

"Breaker-one-nine, breaker-one-nine, this new Star Wars movie is a Smokey on the warpath, do not see it, ten-four good buddy."

:p
 
*points at Waterworld* see, people? this is an example of a film which was ACTUALLY hugely overhyped and was ACTUALLY a huge disappointment, which Ep1 and the Prequel Trilogy as a whole WAS NOT
Actually Waterworld was so lambasted by the critics that when I actually got round to watching it I was pleasantly suprised.

While the Star Wars prequel, which I expected to be a good movie, was a major dissapointment.
 
Actually Waterworld was so lambasted by the critics that when I actually got round to watching it I was pleasantly suprised.

While the Star Wars prequel, which I expected to be a good movie, was a major dissapointment.
well when did you see it? when everyone was expecting it to be good, or after everyone else saw it and everyone concluded that it was a bad movie, thereby giving you the predisposition of "so bad that it's good"?
 
This might be minor, and might be a stupid legend, but their was a rumor that George Lucas almost listened to his kids and cast members of boy bands as Jedi in the movie.

It would not have HELPED, thats for sure
 
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