Thanks for posting that ajp4mgs. It's interesting that the top three earners are all trilogy starters. Then ESB/TLJ were within striking distance of each other with AOTC and ROTS far behind their respective episodic counterparts.
No problem. Yeah, I think we can safely conclude that the opening act of these trilogies has the broadest appeal. And repeat viewings are probably strongest for the TPM and FA opening acts because there was a large number of years gone by without any new SW. Those repeat viewings for middle acts (even for ESB) dwindle because it wasn't so long since getting to see big-screen SW. Then the final act gets an uptick because people are anticipating big things; and maybe has better legs in terms of repeat viewings because people anticipate that there won't be more of this story to follow for a while (or at all after Ep IX).
The two biggest takeaways for me are 1.) Force Awakens hauling in that much, after the PT had eroded a lot of confidence in the franchise, borders on miraculous, and 2.) A New Hope was an absolutely phenomenal juggernaut. Considering how few screens it opened on, and how it had no pre-existing legacy to support itself on, the box office revenue is staggering. Even the SE re-release of ANH did far better than the arguably-superior ESB SE re-release. A New Hope was/is magic.
I still scratch my head about Fan hate of Midichlorians, I still like the idea. Than again as an atheist, I don give a s--t about the religious themes in Star Wars. So I wouldn't mind adding the whills on top of that.
My problem with the direction on TLJ is that Star Wars shouldn't have complex deep characters or story, it's a simple straight forward good guys vs. bad guys fantasy story. They tried something more complex with the Prequels (the senate) and that didn't end well. K.I.S.S.
Also think where the story and characters ended in ROTJ. The Empire is defeated, Vader redeemed (as much as he could be), Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, and Chewie lived up to being heroes, Everybody's smiling, happy ending.
The ST is Regression. The Empire is back for some reason (First Order, pfft) Han is back to smuggling and thinking only of himself, Leia is still fighting and struggling to keep the rebellion going, and Luke has become evil (just thinking he has to kill his nephew is evil) and a coward. And all those heroes ultimately end in sadness. Not how they should've been treated.
There's so many different ways they could've gone, New characters looking to the past to fight a new evil that are not clones of the Empire, the Emperor, or Vader, or even doing that EU idea that the Deathstars were actually built to stop a new prophesied threat, they don't have to stick strictly to the Yuuzhan Vong story, they can take the gist of the idea. Better yet, set it a hundred years after Jedi and do anything but ruin old characters or recycle the same story.
How was it that the Empire was "defeated" at the end of ROTJ? All they did was destroy a Death Star (for the second time), and the Emperor died. So what? Does that mean that an entire battalion of Star Destroyers, AT-ATs, TIE fighters, Stormtroopers, etc. all just . . . surrendered? Are we saying that the Imperial Army and Imperial leadership structure had no chain of command?
How often has a dictator been overthrown or killed without a fight to fill the void? Even as kid, I thought the heroes were happy at the end because the remaining fight just got a whole lot easier. Not that it was all over. I didn't assume that the Endor celebration meant that Luke, Leia, and Han had no struggles ahead of them. That would be preposterous. There was a ton of Imperial war machine and influence all over the place. Did you think the Empire worked like the battle droids at the end of TPM: when the command structure gets blown up, they just stop functioning altogether? There was a big celebration at the end of A New Hope too. But that didn't mean that the Empire had been defeated just because so much of its leadership got destroyed. In fact, not long after, the Rebellion was running for their collective lives again!
Yeah, the ST could have gone in a bunch of different directions. True. But even Lucas (as we've been learning lately) would have kept his own ST centered around Luke, Leia, and Han. That was the point of there being 9 parts of the
one story. ROTJ ended with the trinity heroes in their 20's/30's. Were we really supposed to believe that they wouldn't face hardships after that? That their lives would just stay as happy as they were when we last see them with Ewoks humping their legs? In what world is that realistic? The fight between good and evil doesn't end. The good guys end up getting hurt a lot. I'm just thankful to have gotten to see the trinity again. Older, wiser, less naive, but still heroic (yes, even Luke). And fighting against what is a very believable extension of the Empire after the command of it was assumed by somebody else, and reshaped into the First Order (I don't care what comic books and novels might have to say as the "canon" for how the FO came to be). I want to see how this 9-part story ends, and I'm willing to bet that a whole bunch of other people will too.
Lucas' own PT got so horrifyingly bad that one of the episodic films failed to be the most watched film that year. I would have thought that to be impossible. Star Wars is notorious for being the easiest cash-grab cinematic franchise, yet the PT movies became such a joke that no amount of nostalgia or fan loyalty could lift AOTC ahead of a couple of other movies that same year. Again: Star Wars got so bad during the PT that it was a joke to many; and even diehards didn't want to see it anymore.
