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?