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#124. The Substandard goes Solo!
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Dudes Chatting — Solo: A Star Wars Story: Vic is absent; guest Matt Continetti (editor, Washington Free Beacon) sits in. All three review Solo. Sonny calls it "fine" — competently made but unnecessary, preferring Rogue One for not being backward-looking; dark cinematography is a persistent annoyance. Matt liked the underground lair scenes and train heist but grew skeptical at the Kessel Run (John Williams callbacks = emotional manipulation) and was annoyed by the Enfys Nest reveal ("12-year-old Maya Rudolph"). JVL finds the fan service oppressive, mourns the absence of the trailer's western-twang score, and declares the universe "too small" — Han's dice as "Rosebud" is absurd. The group debates L3-37: genuine woke droid-rights activist or intentional parody? Darth Maul's survival (via Clone Wars cartoon, now heading Crimson Dawn) gets a brief explainer. Star Wars rankings: JVL has A New Hope #1 and Solo #4; Sonny puts Empire #1 and Solo a distant #7. Weekend chat: Matt attended a millennial barn wedding in Charlottesville (scratch-offs, 1:25 food-to-drink ratio); JVL bought a 350-lb portable pitcher's mound off Craigslist; Sonny schlepped fifty loads of books for a basement remodel and has the ankle pain to prove it.
Box Office: Solo opened to a disappointing $84.4M. Sonny gives a remedial math lesson: with a ~$400M total budget, theaters taking 50%-plus, and China soft at $10M versus Avengers' $200M, the best-case scenario is a $100M loss for Disney.
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00- You're after something. Is it revenge? Money? Or is it something else? - I'm a driver. And I'm a flyer. I waited a long time for a shot like this. - What do you think? - Well, what do you know?
Sonny00:00:47- Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Substandard, sponsored by Quip. I'm Sonny Bunch, along with Jonathan V. Last, and special guest Matt Continetti, the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, and panelist on the incredibly popular Free Beacon podcast. - Right, and writer. - Right, and writer. Everyone should listen to that before they listen to this. So, go download that, then we'll come back. Sorry, that's also my day job. I'm the executive editor at The Free Beacon.
JVL00:01:15- Much better show than this one, frankly.
Sonny00:01:17- Well, it has its pluses and minuses. Great producer on that one.
JVL00:01:20- The production work on that is outstanding.
Sonny00:01:24- I'd like to remind you that The Substandard is available on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Just look under podcasts and search for Substandard. You will easily find us. Please subscribe, tell your friends, and leave a review, a positive review, not one of those bad, nasty, negative reviews. How was everyone's weekend? Matt, why don't you introduce yourself? - Matt, welcome to the show.
JVL00:01:42- Why don't you introduce yourself to us?
Guest00:01:44- I've been looking forward to this. - It's so wonderful to see you, Jonathan. - Can I tell you when I first wanted- - I see Sonny all the time.
JVL00:01:49- Can I tell you when I first wanted to do this? - When? - When we were at John McCormick's house talking about The Force Awakens. So now two years ago, I thought to myself, if we could get Sonny to get off of his stupid no guests in the studio thing, we gotta do- - Well, it's taken us a long time to-
Guest00:02:10- And you know, he has that rule also for the Free Beacon podcast. It's a good rule.
Sonny00:02:16- It's a good rule. It serves a very useful function, which is you don't have everyone who's out promoting a book or whatever trying to beg to get on your show.
Guest00:02:22- I mean, the downside is it means that I have to spend even more time with Sonny today. - Positively. - Right, 'cause typically this is my break from Sonny when he is over here, and I remain at the Free Beacon office. But today I had to come with him, so I'm spending even more time.
Sonny00:02:37- Well, we spent a lot of time in our Uber, too. Our Uber driver was driving all around.
JVL00:02:40- Did you guys hold hands for safety?
Sonny00:02:42- No, we didn't communicate. - We barely talked to each other. - We don't talk to each other. - I looked out the window and at my phone. - Well, you're saving it for the show. - Yeah, you gotta save it for the show. That's the rule.
Guest00:02:51- No, it's really we have nothing to say to each other anymore. We communicate just through glances. - Sort of the way Vic and I do. - Facial expressions.
Sonny00:02:58- Grunts.
Guest00:02:59- How was your weekend, Matt? - My weekend was long, and I was thinking about what I did in preparation for the show, and I realized the highlight probably was the millennial wedding I went to. I went to a millennial wedding, and I'm gonna run down, if it's okay, just how millennial it was. It was in a barn. There was no air conditioning, so it was rustic. The dog, the couple's dog, went down the aisle. - Was he a ring bearer? - He was present. He didn't have any packaging. He was just a part of the bridal party.
JVL00:03:40- Including. He was included.
Guest00:03:41- There was no religious tradition. It was syncretic. It had pieces of everything from Judaism and Christianity to also four weddings and a funeral, because the officiant was trying to do his best impression of the jokey, the humorous officiant. - Question. Was the officiant one of the millennial friends? - The officiant had attended college. So it was college. It was a well-educated, well-schooled group, well-schooled group, as millennials are. And there was a band. And as a special prize for the guests, the bride and groom had purchased scratch-off lottery tickets, which were taped beneath their seats. And as the bride said, you know, we could have spent money on plate chargers and fancy Chivari chairs and air condition and, you know, food. But instead, we decided, who wants all that, and I quote, "crap" when you could have free lottery tickets? - Yes. Fair enough. - Well, I want that crap. I love that. That's why, that's the only thing that makes the weddings bearable for me. But I actually enjoyed them.
Sonny00:04:59- Question. Question. How was the food-to-drink ratio?
JVL00:05:04- I'm so bad at math.
Guest00:05:06- Okay, so food-to-drink means that it was a one to twenty-five ratio. - Okay. So, much heavier on the alcohol than the food. - Yes. Yes. Yeah.
JVL00:05:16- Did you win with your scratch-off?
Guest00:05:19- I won two dollars, which meant that I basically, I was a hundred percent profit. - Well, that defrays the cost of the dry cleaning for your suit.
Sonny00:05:25- Oh, dude. Exactly.
Guest00:05:27- Yeah. But you know what, the key, I learned the key to being in the hot humidity. I mean, obviously the humidity lessened when it began to pour outside during the cocktail hour. That was good. But the key to, you know, keeping yourself comfortable as possible in these type of situations is just to conserve energy, I found, not to move. So I was very still throughout the ceremony. - Do people dance? - Once we were in the barn.
JVL00:05:56- In the barn? A barnyard dance?
Guest00:05:58- I mean, I did not, but the millennials danced. Yeah. The band was excellent. - They had a band, not a DJ. - Bands not being edible didn't really impact me that much.
Sonny00:06:07- Wait. So wait, they had a band, but not a DJ? I feel like that's un-millennial. I feel like millennials are more likely to go with like the iPod DJ.
Guest00:06:15- Hard to say. You know, if you want, I think, because millennials are about authenticity, I think. They're about fun. - They're about faux authenticity.
JVL00:06:26- And experiences. And experience over things.
Guest00:06:28- I see where you're coming from, Sonny, but I would say that having the band, which played, well, here, it played a very diverse range of music and styles. It was basically the equivalent of having an iPod. And they were very good. I think, to me, that was millennials. We're going to emphasize the musical dancing aspect. I would say one other thing about the wedding, which made it enjoyable for me, was it was as though I had, I wouldn't say a time machine, but it was as though I was looking back into my past, right? Because since they're millennials, they're about 10 years younger than me. And so I just was observing people behaving at a wedding that I would have behaved when I was in my mid to late 20s. And there was the pang of nostalgia.
Sonny00:07:12- Ooh.
Guest00:07:12- A lot of people enjoying themselves. - Ooh, happy.
Sonny00:07:18- What? What was that? Well, see, I wouldn't have ever known what that was like. - Well, that sounds like fun. - Yeah. - Charlottesville's a nice town. That's where the-
Guest00:07:25- Well, that was the other benefit. The wedding was located in Charlottesville. - Ooh, did you leave the kids? - And we were kid-free, yeah.
JVL00:07:32- Wow! Well, then it was great.
Guest00:07:34- For one night. For one night. - So you got an overnight with no kids? - We did. We were going to have the weekend without the kids, but of course, one got pink eye, or actually a subsidiary viral infection to the pink eye. So our two nights away was shortened to just one. But that was nice. - You got the phone call.
JVL00:07:53- Oh, we need you. We need you home. We don't know- - No, this all happened even before. - Oh, before.
Guest00:07:57- Yeah. So we avoided the phone call, but it was nice to spend one night in Charlottesville, because it's just a lovely place, and we got to walk the lawn. I was surprised. Sonny,
Sonny00:08:08did you live on the lawn? - No. No, absolutely not. The problem with living on the lawn is that it is both, it is like the worst of everything. It is driven entirely by status seeking, but also the rooms are incredibly uncomfortable. - Right. Well, that's what- - And there's no bathroom. - So that's what- - You have to go outside to go to the bathroom.
Guest00:08:24- Okay. So this- - They're called sink for a reason. - So this is what shocked me, because my wife had never been on the lawn, and so we took a walk around, and I was like, "Oh, this is where the Eccles scholars live. It's a great honor to have the dorm." And then there was a cleaning crew servicing one of the rooms, and we looked inside, and we were like, "Oh my God." - They're tiny. - It's like a sty. - It's like living in a prison. - And then, of course, the question arose, where is the bathroom? The bathrooms are not below- - No, they're like- - They're outside. - They're like back where the parking is.
Sonny00:08:55- Yes. Well, I'm not 100% sure if that's exactly where they are, but they're on the ends of the- - Oh, they're at the ends. - I think- - So you have to walk- - Well, not all the way at the ends, but-
Guest00:09:04- But at the end of every unit.
Sonny00:09:05- Yeah, I think that- - That would be awful. - During the winter, it's- - I know. - Honestly, the people who live on the lawn are very, very into being lawn-y type. - Can you live there for all four years? - No, no. It's like- - So it's the first years, right? - No, no. It's only- There's usually- - I'm pretty sure it's all fourth years, with the exception of maybe one third year. - I see. - Something like that. I mean, but it's like a thing that you work up to your whole career, to live on the lawn.
JVL00:09:33- You mean seniors? - No, fourth years.
Sonny00:09:35- No, not at UVA. - And juniors. - At Mr. Jefferson's University, the Academical Village is a place where you never stop learning. You can't be a senior in learning, Jonathan.
Guest00:09:45- I loved it. I loved checking in on Tommy Boy. And also, I'm just amazed at the the influence of classical architecture. And just, you see how heavily the Greeks and Romans influenced the founders. And it's beautiful. And of course, he hasn't been condemned as a racist yet and torn down from his own school. - Well, of course he has. He will. - Well, he's still there. I checked in on the statue. He's still there.
JVL00:10:09- What do we think the over-under is for how long the Jefferson statue can stay? - 50 years. - You think it'll make 50 years? - I don't know. It's hard to say.
Sonny00:10:19- UVA's still pretty regressive. - You'll be fine. - Regressive school. - You think you'll be fine. - You'll be fine. - Okay. - The great thing about UVA is that the level of apathy is enormously high. People are more interested in figuring out how to get into the commerce school than tear down the statues.
Guest00:10:33- Or the law school or the medical school. I mean, it's a huge thing now.
Sonny00:10:36- Well, good. Glad that was very good. You did well on the weekend segment. - This is what I was worried about. - Solid. I would say that's a solid A.
Guest00:10:44- I mean, I can talk about science fiction, but my weekends, gosh. - JBL, how was your weekend?
JVL00:10:49- I went out and I bought a pitcher's mound. - Ooh, like a whole mound? - It is a portable pitcher's mound, which is less portable than it seems. It weighs probably 350 pounds. And I had to drive up to suburban Baltimore to get it and brought it down. And we set it up, had my son throwing off the mound. We've been doing mound workouts because it really is quite different. And the playoffs for his team, which finished the season undefeated, start on Saturday. - Has he given up a hit yet? - He gave up his first hit. He gave up one hit. I think one was an error, not accounted to him. He gave up one hit over the course of the regular season. His whip was something like, you know, 1.25 or something like that.
Sonny00:11:40- Well, that would mean he's walking two batters every three innings, basically.
JVL00:11:48- Yeah, a lot of walks. More than that, I think. He gave up a lot of walks. - Okay. - And so it was great. We had a college player come over, who's a friend of a friend, and do a little pitching clinic for him and show him a curveball that you are allowed to throw before you're 15, which is kind of nifty. If you grip the ball, sort of normal fastball grip across the seams, and then you pull your pointer finger down. - Getting a lot of good visuals for the podcast.
Sonny00:12:16- And curl it. If we were doing Facebook Live, this would be killing. People can really see the finger work.
JVL00:12:21- And what's crazy is that, again, my kid is 10 years old. He, over the course of an afternoon, basically mastered this pitch. And so now, when I'm sitting, catching for him is where it's like, you can actually see the dot, they say, during curveball. You can tell it's curveball because you see the dot in the ball as it's coming to. Like, son of a , you can actually see the dot as he's throwing it. It's crazy. So he's going to hopefully not hospitalize any other children at playoffs, but it is the playoffs, as Danny Ainge once said.
Sonny00:12:53- If they crowd the plate. - Playoffs! - If they crowd the plate, they get what's coming to them. - He's got to do what he's got to do. - I mean, look, you got to get that batter off the plate. The plate is the pitchers. He's going to own that plate.
JVL00:13:02- So I'm very excited. I'm a little disappointed you didn't ask how much the pitcher's mound cost, but that's okay.
Sonny00:13:07- You said it, oh, no, you said it was 350 pounds. - Yes. - How much did it cost?
JVL00:13:12- Yes, it was. So pitcher's mound, it turns out in sports, like in everything else, once you get to the world of specialty, the prices are much, much higher than they should be rationally because they're not being mass produced at any real scale. And so most pitcher's mounds are $900 to $1,500. - I have a few questions.
Sonny00:13:34- We bought this used off of Craigslist, and so we did not pay. - Matthew, the proper format when you have a question is just to interject and say, "Question." You don't have to gussy it up. - Questions. - What is it made out of?
JVL00:13:49- Steel with a large plank of wood and then covered with turf with a pitching rubber. Thank God there are wheels on the end of it, so you can pick it up and wheel it into the garage. - With your oxen? - Yeah.
Guest00:14:05- And then how did you, to that point, how did you transport it from suburban Baltimore to Prince William County, Virginia? - Minivan. - Minivan. - Minivan. - Did you rent a minivan?
JVL00:14:16- We put the seats down. - Oh, no. You just used your... - We put the seats down in the back of the minivan, slid the thing through. It went all the way from the very back of the minivan up past my elbow almost to the gear shift. - It's always safe. - It's enormous. Oh, yeah, no, I'm sure it's fine.
Sonny00:14:31- Yeah, yeah. - And... - This is like when I try to transport a bookshelf in a box from Ikea to my house in my Volvo C30 hatchback. It goes all the way up to the... - For the favela. - Yeah, for the favela. I have favela news coming up, but we can...
Guest00:14:48- Well, one thing here is just imagining the pitcher's mound. It reminds me of the... There's an alien creature in a Star Trek original series episode. I think it's called the Horta, but it looks basically like a baseball mound. They end up killing it by accident. It meant no harm to them, but they end up killing it. I'm picturing you with this alien in your van.
JVL00:15:09- It was a chore. I had to go get a neighbor. The guy I was buying it from helped me load it in, and I had to get a neighbor to help me pull it out of the minivan. But it was great. The kid loves it, and we're gonna have mound workouts, which really is different. Throwing off the mound is really different, and I've been consulting with some kinesiology guys to see how much is too much in terms of work. - You don't want a blowout. Does that work? - 'Cause I don't want to... We want to hold off the Tommy John surgery 'til probably eighth grade.
Sonny00:15:37- Yeah, well... - Yeah, right. Yeah. - Well, I mean, I would say that... - I've gone full Agassi on this, as you can tell. - Well, once again, as I said, you've been developing this like secret Marinovich personality for the last year or so, and I'm glad that it's finally coming. - Can a player have multiple Tommy Johns over the course of a career? - Can you? Oh, yeah. Oh, I thought it was just one. No, no.
Guest00:15:59- So if you have the first one in eighth grade, then he can always have a later one when he's a college player.
JVL00:16:05- Yeah, yeah. No, you get started...
Guest00:16:07- And then a third when he's in the minor leagues.
JVL00:16:09- Yeah, no. It's like...
Guest00:16:10- Well, by the time he is in... - Like other bodily augmentations, you can do these in stages. - Right. A bionic arm.
Sonny00:16:15- Well, by the time he is a... - A professional baseball player, you'll be able to put on bionic implants into your arm.
Guest00:16:21- Bucky Barnes is... All right. No one will hit him then.
Sonny00:16:24- It's great. - Sonny, how was your weekend? - My weekend was... It was heavy, is what it was. Let me... - Did you buy a pitcher's mound too? - No, no. We're remodeling our basement. - Oh, are you doing it yourself? - Yeah, yeah, definitely. - Hanging drywall? - Putting up drywall, putting in a shower, putting in a new... - Ooh, was it already plumbed? - We are turning it into a full bath downstairs. We have like a half bath downstairs, but we want a full bath. - Was it plumbed for a full bath, or do you have to do... - No, not plumbed for a full bath. - Oh. - So we have to... We're putting in a... I'm not actually doing any of this work. - No, so you have to have an elevated floor where the shower stall is going to be. - I have no idea what it's going to entail. - Look, I'm not in charge of any of this, all right? The only thing I have done any of the work on for this is designing the built-in bookshelves that we're putting in one of the back rooms.
JVL00:17:16- This sort of project would take Dr. Dwyer like three weeks.
Sonny00:17:20- Yeah. Well, I'm not Dr. Dwyer. Unfortunately, Vic isn't here, too, so we could rub it in his face. But what this entails is getting all of the stuff out of the basement. So all the stuff that's in the basement has to go into rooms that are not being demolished and rebuilt. And this involved mostly me schlepping all of my books from the basement to the second floor of our house. So up one flight of stairs to the main floor, then up another flight of stairs to the second floor. - Question. - Yes? - The garage? - No, we don't have a garage. We don't have a garage. - Okay. - I live in a townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia. - Many townhomes in Alexandria have garages. - We don't have a garage. But even if I had a garage, it would have a car in it. Why would
JVL00:18:03I put my books there when I have a car? - That is something that somebody who's
Sonny00:18:07never owned a garage would say. - Yeah. So anyway, my weekend involved approximately, I would say, like, conservative, 50 trips up and down two flights of stairs, carrying about 20 to 30 pounds of books each time. - It's a great workout. - I'm not in the best of shape. - Even more reason to do this. - So when I woke up on Monday after having completed all of this, it wasn't so much my arms or back that hurt, because I was very good and lifted with my legs every time. But it was basically my ankles to about mid-thigh would not move. Properly. It was kind of like, you know that movie, The Arrival, with the aliens that have the legs that go backwards? - The Heptapods. - No, that's Arrival. - What did you just say? - Oh wait, am I thinking, what's the Charlie Sheen one? That's Arrival. - No. - What's the Charlie Sheen one, where the aliens come and they want to-- - Alien Nation? - No, no, it's either-- - No, that's-- - One of these is Arrival. - The Arrival. - Either The Arrival or Arrival. - Oh, The Arrival versus Arrival. - Not the Villeneuve. - The Villeneuve movie is Arrival. - Denis Villeneuve. - Right, and the Charlie Sheen movie is The Arrival. They have these aliens where the knees go backwards. That's kind of what my legs felt like. All, all, but good news, all done, it's all done. - How long will this restoration take? - It's gonna take like three or four weeks. - And then you're gonna have to take-- - And then have to take all the books back down, but fortunately I will have my new built-in bookshelves that I've, I spent literally like an hour yesterday or the day before diagramming how I want them to look because it's, it's clever, it's like, it's, it's tricky because I've got a bunch of DVDs and Blu-rays, but I don't want to waste shelf space by having a bunch of DVDs and Blu-rays on like 10-inch spaces, so I need, I want like a series of shelves that are about eight inches.
Guest00:19:58- Adjustable. - Do you know what happened to my DVDs and Blu-rays when we got the built-ins in the basement?
Sonny00:20:02- They went in box? - They went in paper bags in the storage room.
Guest00:20:06- That's not how, I'm not doing that. - And now whenever I have to, it's like I'm a homeless person rooting through my garbage bags looking for my movies.
JVL00:20:13- Decisions, foundational decisions about your house based on a storage medium that is already extinct. - I, I think that's great. - Look, I'm, I'm... - It's gonna, the resale value...
Sonny00:20:23- I am committing, look, you can put plenty of mass market paperbacks in those shelving spaces, all right? I'm just, I'm building this for me, not for you. Not for the next jack-off who wants to live in this house. - Let me throw something at you.
JVL00:20:35- Yeah. - As an idea for getting the books back down. - Okay. - You, uh, go and get a bunch of, like, go to Costco, get a bunch of boxes, open them up, place the flat cardboard along the stairs. - Make a book slide? - Book slide 'em down. You can have Katie do it, she'll think it's great fun.
Sonny00:20:53- She would, she would have a lot of... - Just slide the books down, sweetheart. - Yeah, she would have a lot of fun doing that. I feel like that would not actually save me any time. I feel like that would actually probably be much, much more effort. - Okay. - But, fair enough. - Just trying to help. - Uh, thank you. Thank you for your concern. So, anyway, the, the sad news is, of course, that the bookshelf favela will be demolished. As part of this. We're getting, it's gonna, that will be gone. - Gentrification? - It will just be, uh, there will just be solid white, uh, uh, drywalls.
JVL00:21:22- Wait, so are you, did you get rid of all the favela bookshelves?
Sonny00:21:24- Well, not yet, but when they... - But you're going to. - But when they, when the people who are doing the work on the, uh, basement come in, they're gonna take 'em all down and get rid of 'em all. - Well, those you can resell. - Uh, worth the effort. - Do people, are people... - More valuable than our Blu-rays, probably. - Well, here's, so, like, one of them is an actual bookshelf, and then there are, like, four CD stands that I converted into DVD racks. - Oh, that's right. - Am I gonna, uh, how am I gonna sell those? - Those are probably not to sell. - So, and then, and then next to the bookshelf, remember, it's just plywood that I screwed into the wall. So, like, the actual, the only, the number of actual bookshelves here is one. The rest of these are add-ons. - Watch this.
JVL00:22:00- Again. - Sonny, why don't you use Freecycle?
Sonny00:22:03- Do you know what Freecycle is? - I would rather light them on fire
JVL00:22:06in my yard than use Freecycle. - It's a service where you expend the effort to put the things up on the web and then put them outside of your door so that some stranger you've never met can come and take them from you for free. - Yep. - Doesn't that sound like the most Bunchian thing ever?
Guest00:22:20- Like I said, I would rather, and you don't know who the person, you don't have to communicate with them. You just leave it. - I think you communicate
JVL00:22:26with them. They, they say, oh, we'll be coming to your, thank you for giving us the address where you live. We will be coming to your house and taking this thing from you that you went to all the trouble to get rid of and we'll take it for free. - But it's, it's Craigslist without any
Sonny00:22:38money being exchanged. - Yup. - Right. - Yep. - So anyway, the book, the bookshelf favela is gonna be demolished. Speaking of being demolished, Solo had a really bad weekend at the box office. Do you like that?
JVL00:22:51- That was so good. - Wait, wait till we do the Gene review.
Sonny00:22:54- Oh no. Solo: A Star Wars Story grossed $84.4 million this weekend over the first three days, while Deadpool dropped 65% in its second frame to gross $43.4 million, and Avengers: Infinity War grossed $17.3 million for a domestic cume of $622 million, and a worldwide gross of over $1.9 billion. Looks like it's gonna get to that $2 billion figure, which is pretty impressive. Only a few movies have done that. And, excuse me, and it's gonna do that in the summer as opposed to opening in the winter when there's less competition. It's actually a pretty, pretty impressive mark. We're gonna get to what Solo's failure, failure means for Star Wars writ large in a moment. But first, at the risk of boring all of our listeners to death , I wanna do a quick bit of remedial box office math. Because some folks on Twitter were disputing my characterization of this film's $173 million opening weekend as a disaster. So much money! It did great! They said, "Oh, it's so good." No, it's, it's disappointing. It's just, it's a disappointing number. It's not a disaster, it's disappointing.
JVL00:24:01You're just a Marvel fanboy.
Sonny00:24:05Uh, wait, no, but I would be a Warner Bros., I'd be a DC fanboy, because Marvel is owned by Disney. Wouldn't, isn't that right?
JVL00:24:12I don't know. But weren't you accused of being a Marvel fanboy?
Sonny00:24:14I've been accused of being all variety. But he is a DC fanboy.
Guest00:24:17Right, no, this fanboy is the ironic. So the criticism of him being a DC
Sonny00:24:19fanboy is completely legitimate. It's not. First off. Second off, shut, shut up, Matt. I'm just, I'm reclining back. Hey, don't make me mute you. All right. Uh, anyway, this suggests to me we need a remedial box office lesson. So a few things to keep in mind when you're discussing these figures. The production budget in Solo's case, a reported $250 million, thanks to heavy reshoots, uh, is only part of a film's outlay. You have to also take in to account the advertising budget, and these numbers are not readily available, but on a movie of Solo's size, the figure is generally assumed to be in the 150
JVL00:24:55to 200 million range. It is often double the production.
Sonny00:24:58It is, it is, it is often. Imagine doing the production. It is often 100% of the production budget. So, uh, but we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna play, we're gonna play it low. We're gonna say 150 million. All right. Uh, so that means the total budget for Solo is something like 400 million in the 400 million range. So if you say, uh, that this movie has grossed 173 million, that is very, very bad. You can't just say this movie has grossed $173 million and say, well, it's already earned almost half its money back. It's not how it works. You're doing it very wrong. Remember, theaters take a large cut of every ticket sold. These numbers are also tricky to calculate. Uh, it depends on the studio. It depends on the movie. It depends on the theater chain. These are all negotiated, uh, et cetera. Uh, Disney is especially stingy on this front. They got 65% of the box office take for The Last Jedi. And my understanding is that they're getting 60% of the take for Solo. Um, generally speaking, you can say it's about 50/50. I think it's fair to say it's about 50/50 usually. But, uh, the point here is that whatever the worldwide grosses are, you have to deduct the theater's cut before figuring out how much the studio is netting. Before we get to that, we have to remember that Star Wars movies tend to gross, uh, about half their money at home and about half their money overseas. Um, this is very bad. This is a bad ratio. Usually movies do about 60 to 80 movies like this do about 60 to 80% of their business overseas. Um, Star Wars has always been soft in China. It continues to be shot soft in China. It only grossed about $10 million there this weekend. Uh, Is that good? It's bad. That's very bad. Avengers Infinity War, for instance, grossed $200 million in its first weekend in China. Uh, Solo doing $10 million. Very bad. So, if Solo grosses about $250 million domestic, and that's a big if, that's assuming a multiple of three off its opening weekend, uh, which is, I don't think particularly likely, but it's possible. So, if Solo grosses $250 million, it will probably gross about $500 million worldwide. So, we take that $500 million, we subtract the $200 million that the theaters keep immediately. That is $300 million for Disney on a film that cost at least $400 million. Can I interrupt?
JVL00:27:08Overseas, the cut for, for the studio is often much lower than 50%.
Sonny00:27:12Right. Right. So, this is, this is, again, this, these numbers are kind of tricky.
JVL00:27:15So, these are all general, these are best possible scenario. Yes. Yes. Right. Right. Depending on country, the studio could take home like 25%, 25 cents of every dollar.
Sonny00:27:24Right. The, the math, it, it depends on country to country. China is very stingy. China, China keeps most of its money, uh, internally. They keep 75 to 80% of the box office figures. China. Trade wars are easy to win, except Terrible deal. Because they're, you know. Just a stupid deal. Um, so, uh, anyway, best case scenario, Solo is looking at a $100 million loss. That's best case scenario. Uh, now look, Disney's gonna make a lot of this money. It, it, Disney will make money on this film going forward in other formats. It will make home video sales. It will make streaming money. It will make, uh, rentals, et cetera, et cetera. It will sell toys based on this movie. Well, I can interject there. Yep. Um.
Guest00:28:07As a collector, the toy sales for Solo have also been extremely disappointing. Really? Not surprising. Yes. To the point where I think they're evaluating, once again, some of the, you know, my, my favorite that I grew up with, the three and three quarter inch product line, may not be long
Sonny00:28:25for this world. And this is after very disappointing toy sales for The Last Jedi. So, I mean, I, I think Disney is really is, is going to have to think about what it is doing with the Star Wars movies. Anyway, the whole, the long, the, the too long didn't read version of this rant is this. If you say that Solo is just a disappointment, you're wrong. It's going to lose at least a hundred million dollars. And if it, if it does as badly at the domestic box office as I think it might, if it's in the 225 million range, it could easily lose $150 million. I mean, that's, that's a big, that's a big, big loss. Anyway, we're going to brush all this box office talk aside for a moment. Uh, and we're going to focus on the aesthetic failures of Solo in one minute, uh, right after we talk about a different, better kind of brush JBL.
JVL00:29:17The truth is most of us are brushing our teeth wrong, not for long enough and forget to change our brush on time. That's because most brands focus on selling flashy gimmicks rather than better brushing, but not Quip. So what makes Quip so different? For starters, Quip is an electric toothbrush. That's a fraction of the quality. A fraction of the cost of bulkier brushes while still packing just the right amount of vibrations to help clean your teeth. Quip's built-in timer helps you clean for the dentist recommended two minutes with guiding pulses that remind you when to switch sides. Next, Quip's subscription plans are for your health, not just convenience. They deliver new brush heads on a dentist recommended schedule every three months for just five dollars, including free shipping worldwide. Quip also comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel wherever you take your teeth. And finally, everyone loves Quip. They were on Oprah's O list, named one of time's best inventions, and is the first subscription electric toothbrush accepted by the American Dental Association. Plus, they're backed by a network of over 20,000 dentists and hygienists, and hundreds of thousands of happy brushers use Quip every day. Quip starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com/substandard right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush. That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com/substandard, spelled G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash substandard. All right, so did we all see the movie? Yes. Matt saw the movie.
Sonny00:30:57I saw the movie. JBL, did you see the movie? Did anyone else see the movie?
JVL00:31:04Did you have a Gene review? So I spent a lot of time thinking about this this morning, and I was trying to do the math in my head as to whether it would be worth the lulls for making Vic upset for one of us doing Gene versus the level of genuine hurt and disappointment Vic would feel for one of us doing Gene. And I settled on basically that it'll be a net negative. Do you agree? I agree. I agree with you. Like Gene is his thing. And even though... Hey, you know what? You know what? I'm going to disagree here and say screw
Sonny00:31:41Vic. He's going on his vacation to Rome. He's gallivanting about town. He's sticking me with all the work back at the Free Beacon, sticking me with more work here. I say do it. But I'm
JVL00:31:52prepared to be outvoted. No, I can't do it. I can't do it. I thought about it. Five stars.
Guest00:32:02He'll do it. Because he'll, you know, he'll see the movie with his son after he returns home. He can always do it belated. Of course, by that point, Solo won't be in the theaters anymore. Yeah, by the time he gets back into
Sonny00:32:11the country, Solo will be on home video. Watching the girl from Game of Thrones. I had to do a little Solo act myself. This is the problem with Vic doing a Gene version of Solo. It's just gonna be a bunch of masturbation jokes. Why do you say problem? Well, okay. Fair. That's a plus. I feel like I just talked for a long time. JBL, would you like to do a review, like an actual non-Gene review? Do you have... Sure, I can do a quick big boy review. First of all, everything from here on out is spoilers.
JVL00:32:43Yeah, yeah. Everything. We're gonna talk all about everything. Solo is basically the origin story for Han Solo. We begin with him as a young scrap rat on Corellia. He is roped into indentured servitude working for this character who is so important that she gets mentioned in The Crawl, which isn't a crawl, but in the... The Cards. The Cards. The title cards. And who is then dispatched after, what, three lines of dialogue. That makes sense. Yeah. He has a girlfriend who is the girl, I take it from Game of Thrones, who everybody loves. Yes. Emilia Clarke. Emilia Clarke. Kira. They try to get off of Corellia. They fail to get off of Corellia. They are separated. Han gets off. He, to get off, has to join Empire by going to an Imperial recruiting station. The Flight Academy. Flight Academy. Yada, yada, yada. He does not become an Imperial pilot. He becomes an Imperial grunt, and when confronted with the horrors of war, decides he'll do anything to get out, at which point he joins...
Sonny00:33:49He's basically a coward like Finn. At which point...
Guest00:33:52I wanted to say, I mean, he's more of a crook, fundamentally. I think he sees an avenue to leave. I think it's less of a horrors of war, apocalypse, now thing with Finn, than just him being himself. I want to join this gang. I think that's right. That's how I get rid of it. Yeah.
JVL00:34:08And so he gets out of the... And joins the gang, and they have to pull this job, and then the job goes wrong, and they have to pull another job, and the other job is the Kessel Run. That's the movie. Oh, he also meets Chewbacca. He meets Chewbacca. And we find out where the
Guest00:34:26Millennium Falcon comes from. There's another gang in competition with their gang that he has to fight. Yes, another gang,
JVL00:34:33who turns out not to be a bad gang. They turn out to be a good gang, much like the whatever from Mad Max Fury Road or something, and they're women, an all-woman gang. The Green Place. The Green Place gang. Who has garish costumes and outfits, and who behave in a horribly evil way, and in fact, kill one of the nice members of Finn's gang. And then it turns out all is forgiven. Two. Yeah. Right. Everybody decides. This is a terrible big boy review. I'm not good at this. This is why you do these things. It's okay.
Sonny00:35:07Did you guys like the movie? I guess there's a lot to unpack here. I thought it was fine. I thought it was competently made. I thought the story beats moved from place to place. I had some issues with how it was shot in the early going. I understand the effect that the cinematographer was going for with it's super dark. We're super, super dark, and then we burst out into the light, and it's blinding, and it's freedom. But it didn't work because I couldn't see what was going on in that early part of the film. But I would say that generally speaking, I found all of the performances to be very entertaining. I thought Alden Ehrenreich did a fine job as Han. He's not really doing Harrison Ford. There's only one Harrison Ford. I thought Donald Glover's Lando was good in that it wasn't a pure impression. It was kind of a, or pure impersonation. It was kind of a, he was kind of riffing on Billy Dee Williams' mode of speaking, his kind of rhythm of speaking, more than trying to imitate his timbre or tone. And I thought the guy who played Chewbacca, I don't know, he's some seven foot tall Brazilian or something. - Jonas. - Yeah, I don't-- - No, he's Finn. He's a
Guest00:36:20former Finnish basketball player named Jonas, starts with an S. - He was great. I thought he was fine.
Sonny00:36:27- He was the best part of the movie. - He was fine. I thought the Han and Chewie stuff was great. I mean, the problem with this movie is that it's totally unnecessary. I don't care about learning any of these things. - I do. I do. - I don't have any interest in finding out how the Millennium Falcon got the little gap in between the turrets. I don't have any interest in finding out how Han and Chewie met. I don't have any interest in Han's dumb last name. Oh, wow, he's all on his own. He's Solo. It's just like Ellis Island, but for the Empire, he's Han Solo. I just, I don't care about any of this. I don't care about any of this. And the problem with this movie is that the problem with basically all of the Disney Star Wars films so far, which is that they're looking backwards. They're filling in the gaps on a story that don't need the gaps filled in on. Move us forward. Take us forward into this new galaxy. - I had a different problem with the movie.
Guest00:37:13I, unlike it seems most reviewers, actually enjoyed the movie less as it went on. The conventional wisdom seems to hold that the movie starts off soft, but then escalates and it becomes more interesting as it develops. For me, I actually enjoyed the scenes in the underground lair. I thought that caterpillar creature was pretty cool. I liked her kind of henchman who had the mask that had a crawl over his head when he was exposed to oxygen or whatever. I liked the separation scene was neat. I liked the train heist. But when you mentioned the Kessel Run, right, which they have to go through this kind of asteroid gas belt and they're being pursued by an Imperial Star Destroyer and they also confront a star creature or whatever. That's when I became aware how manipulative these movies are when they're going through an asteroid belt and the John Williams cues from the asteroid belt pursuit in Empire are playing and it's clearly meant to make me respond emotionally the same way I do to Empire. And I felt I was being played. I was being scammed. And from that point on, I became more skeptical in especially the part where this this villain whose design I thought was Enfys Nest, right, the head of the rival gang that you mentioned, Jonathan. I thought the character design was awesome. I thought the gang design was cool. They come in on these swoop bikes and everything. She has this weird axe that I loved it. But then as the Red Letter Media crew put it, she's revealed to be basically 12 year old Maya Rudolph. I said to myself, what? It's just not believable. And then it becomes even more complicated because it turns out, oh, this gang that, oh yeah, shot to death another member of Solo's gang and then basically led to the death of the love interest of Woody Harrelson. Oh, it turns out they've been the good guys all along and we have to help them. And so then I saw how the movies are manipulating us politically because, oh, the criminals are the rebellion and so that's good. But it turns out actually it's even more complicated because the criminal syndicate that Solo was supposed to be working for, it turns out to be in league with- The Empire somehow. The Empire somehow. And at that point, I just threw up my hands and said, yeah, it's okay.
JVL00:39:43Well, I took that stuff as evidence that the three of us have basically rented a small room inside the head of Kathleen Kennedy. All of these movies, every single one of these movies-
Sonny00:39:56Not to suck our own. Not to jerk ourselves off. But no, every single one of these movies has been dedicated to showing how, no, really, guys, the Empire is bad and mean and vicious, and they do bad and mean things.
JVL00:40:08I mean, you could absolutely leave the crime syndicates
Sonny00:40:14there as their own standalone branch of evil. They don't have to be good.
JVL00:40:18They're just boring gangs. Right. But instead, the movie goes out of its way to say, by the way, the crime syndicates are in league with the Empire, which makes no sense. Except for the good one.
Guest00:40:27Which becomes The Rebellion, which is part of The Rebellion.
JVL00:40:30Oh, it's okay. They're just rebelling. The Droid Freedom Movement. We didn't even touch that. Which is part of this, which is, again, our thing.
Guest00:40:38So here's the thing. But done in the worst possible way.
Sonny00:40:43Yes. Like the Red Letter Media guys, I wasn't entirely sure what... And this is why I think the Droid Freedom stuff actually works, because I wasn't 100% sure if they were making fun of the social justice set or... I think it is very hard to kind of figure...
Guest00:41:01Do you think that a parody of the Social Justice Warriors, even if I can see how... This movie was written by Larry Kasdan and his son, John Kasdan. Even if the Kasdans conceived it as kind of a joke, do you think that joke would have survived the layers of bureaucracy in Lucasfilm, which is totally dedicated to the PC world view? I doubt it.
Sonny00:41:23It is such a pitch perfect parody, though, that I don't know. I actually can't explain it away as not parody.
Guest00:41:29When the female robot is raising her fist in the sky and is going, "Know your rights?"
Sonny00:41:36I mean, it literally says equal rights, but it's all played for comedy. It's not taken seriously.
Guest00:41:44Well, hold it. So if you think that what she basically was doing was raising her hand
Sonny00:41:48and saying, "Yes, all women." Yes, totally.
JVL00:41:50I do not believe that the filmmakers viewed that. That was a joke? 100% a joke.
Sonny00:41:56This was all joke. It's all played for laughs where she's freeing the robots and they're causing chaos.
JVL00:42:02I think it unintentionally played for laughs. I agree completely. I believe that if you were to sit down, Darcy, Marcia, whoever the woman who voice acts L3, who's an indie darling, and say, "So did you realize that you were playing those scenes for laughs?" She would be outraged.
Sonny00:42:21But this is a funny movie. It is a funny movie with comedic beats throughout. And that whole character is played for laughs. The whole character is played for laughs.
Guest00:42:29The concept of the movie is that this terrifying masked creature turns out to be an extremely woke girl. That is the lesson of the Star Wars films. The Star Wars films went from having an intended audience of 12-year-old boys that you are teaching right from wrong, that is George Lucas' Star Wars films, to now it is the intended audience of all of the people who felt left out in the original six films. That's our intended audience. And the lesson isn't right from wrong. The lesson is yes all women, and diversity and inclusion. That is the Disney, that is Kathleen Kennedy's Lucas film. So I don't see how there's any humor meant with that rebellion scene.
JVL00:43:10I agree totally. Although also, I would throw in a, surely this will be retconned with the next movie. It seems to me that you could have a reading of it in which the enfance miserable, or terrible. What was the name of that game? Where their whole thing about how we're really just both a part of rebellion is itself a con. Because they have figured out the way to get.
Guest00:43:34Well, so let me go a little bit deep into the Star Wars universe here. Because if you look at the gang, once they're revealed, one of the members of that gang turns up in Rogue One, which remember, even though Rogue One was released two years ago, it actually takes place later. So what they're showing there is a continuity. I wonder if that was the same character It is. Something two tubes is his name. So I think it'd be hard to retcon that. What they are trying to show is that this becomes the... The irony though, is in that movie, Rogue One, Saw Gerrera's band is considered terrorists by the Rebel Alliance. So maybe you could do something where it's, "Oh no, they're too extreme. They're too criminal." Maybe that was under there, but...
Sonny00:44:18We need to discuss Darth Maul. Sure. We need to discuss Darth Maul because his inclusion in this film is the single worst aspect of it for a reason that has nothing to do with the film, although it's totally unnecessary to the film and kind of is sloppy fan service nonsense.
JVL00:44:34I don't want to talk about fan service in general, so let's go do that after Darth Maul.
Sonny00:44:39It's the worst thing they could have done because what it means is you are going to have to understand everything that happens in the dumb cartoons and the awful books and the idiotic comics to understand what is happening on the big screen. And this is a giant misstep. This is a thing that Matt and I were discussing this earlier. It's a thing that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has avoided doing. You can watch just the movies and know exactly what's happening with all the things. This inclusion of Darth Maul suggests that if you are not up to speed on all of the expanded universe crap, that you are going to have to flee to a Wikipedia page immediately after getting out of the theater to understand what's happening.
JVL00:45:19Okay, so explain to me what's happening because I have checked out of the Star Wars comic books and so I didn't actually know what was happening. So I looked it up. Okay.
Guest00:45:26Apparently, Darth Maul survived falling into that bottomless pit.
Sonny00:45:32Survived being cut in half.
Guest00:45:33After being cut in half by Obi-Wan Kenobi. Survived being cut in half and thrown into a bottomless pit. Falling in two pieces down the bottomless pit at the end of Phantom Menace. Wow. Yes. And in the cartoon series, The Clone Wars, it is revealed that after he somehow recovers and gets bionic legs, he is disowned by Emperor Palpatine. And so he then has to go on his own and he becomes the head of this gang, Crimson Dawn. And so that is where we see Darth Maul at the end of Solo. He is now a criminal master. Currently, he still knows the Force. He still knows the dark side because as they show, he can still call his lightsaber back, his two-pronged lightsaber, and it's played by the same - this is why I was so confused by this point. Who is it? It was Darth Maul, but why is he fat? And he doesn't sound the same as he does in Phantom Menace because apparently he's voiced by the actor who has played him in both the Clone Wars cartoon and the Rebels cartoon. But I was just confused. But just to make it clear, of course, he summons lightsaber. He even activates - just in case you're not totally sure who he is, he activates the lightsaber. Well, it could have been Darth Maul's brother, Savage Opress. But he's yellow. That's a real character, by the way. Yes, he's yellow. Real - Savage Opress.
Sonny00:47:00I just hope Savage Opress -
JVL00:47:01Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
Sonny00:47:02I just hope Savage Opress shows up in the series at some point.
JVL00:47:06So my objection to Darth Maul was actually - not having known this - was different, which is that I just thought, why does Han's story have to be part of the Skywalker-Jedi saga? Like, why can't Han have his own thing? Until he winds up intersecting. But it turns out, you know, as many people have said before, the more they turn Star Wars into the operatic family drama of the Skywalker clan, the less interesting it is. The smaller the universe gets.
Sonny00:47:34Right. The smaller this world - this whole galaxy gets.
JVL00:47:37Right. I mean, you get the sense that although there are supposed to be trillions and trillions of people alive and fighting and complex interests every which way, that the truth is the fate of the whole galaxy is really ruled by, like, ten people, and they are all somehow interconnected, and their lives have been crossing in front of one another the entire time. Can we talk about the music and the fan service? Because I agreed completely - the score is entirely forgettable, except for when it's aping John Williams.
Sonny00:48:04Yeah. Except for when it's totally derivative of a vampire.
JVL00:48:06And I was really bummed by this, because I thought the score of the trailer, which had a sort of twangy, western vibe to it, almost like the, you know, Enrique Marcon, or like the "Way of the Gun" music. It was just totally absent. There was nothing of that. It was just standard, straight-up Star Wars, generic sci-fi music. But the fan service was, I found, oppressive. And I can't tell what they're trying to do with it.
Guest00:48:36Did you think it was worse than Rogue One?
JVL00:48:38Much worse than Rogue One. Really? Rogue One had too much fan service.
Guest00:48:41I have to say, I was waiting on the edge of my seat for C-3PO and R2-D2 to show up, at which point I would totally agree with you. They do not show up. So I thought that was like a small victory, but please go on.
JVL00:48:51So I think I've mentioned this before. The Tom Stoppard script for Shakespeare in Love, the genius of it is that no matter how much you know about Shakespeare, you come out of it thinking that you got all of the Shakespeare references and that you were the only one. And I think maybe that's what they're striving for. So no matter what level of Star Wars fan you are, you come out of it thinking, "Oh, I caught all of the fan service callbacks here. I'm the super fan." But for whatever reason, like, it's just not skillfully enough to be invisible. And so, like, you know, this is a thermal detonator and the Minox. And even the—
Guest00:49:30The Lando costume from Return of the Jedi.
JVL00:49:32The Lando costume, the "I know," where Lando says, "I hate you," and he throws out his "I know" line, which is the— To me, that was—
Sonny00:49:40I got a really good feeling about this.
JVL00:49:42So for my money, if the only callback in the entire movie had been, "I've got a good feeling about this," I think that line would have killed. Like, it's hysterical, it's a funny line— It also shows character, right?
Guest00:49:57It shows character. Because you're trying to show how Han became jaded and cynical, and so— Right, but instead, it's just another
JVL00:50:05piece of fanservice on this enormous pile. And I just— The only other one, the other piece of fanservice which I liked and thought was character was Han shooting first. Right, it was great. Which was, again, it's a character moment. They don't beat you over the head with, "Hey, look, he shot first," and he regrets it, which he doesn't by the time you get to A New Hope. So you can do it in a skillful way—
Guest00:50:26Where he doesn't shoot first. Where he no longer shoots first. So this is, in a weird way, a kind of rebuke of Lucas by Kasdan. Well, this is a real question. When
JVL00:50:35we eventually get the Disney official versions of the original three trilogies, do they have license to go in and fix George Lucas and stuff? I don't think we'll ever get those
Sonny00:50:46versions. Fox has distribution rights in perpetuity, and I can't imagine them giving it up.
JVL00:50:51We need a 4K version at some point on 4K disc. Right?
Sonny00:50:55You're gonna have to— You'll have to remaster it. Well, if Disney buys Fox— Right. They're gonna own everything. I mean, if Disney buys Fox, then we will eventually, I think— That's in trouble now. Well, I know. Comcast— Is it Comcast that was making it? Mm-hmm. But anyway, not to get in the weeds on that. Okay. But can I— The fanservice thing that I hate the most— Sonny, what time is it? 53:17. Enough with the dice.
Guest00:51:21Yeah. Totally. Apparently, the dice are the key to the whole saga. How did we get there?
JVL00:51:25So the dice are this extreme— this funny piece of set dressing that George Lucas throws on because he had just finished American Graffiti, and he won't say, "Yeah, it's like a hot rod." He puts it on, and now they are the key to the entire Star Wars saga. They are rosebud. Yeah. You can't understand everything. And it's so patently ridiculous that it kind of makes me angry.
Sonny00:51:48It's absurd. It's absurd. The only reason I even knew that there were dice on the Millennium Falcon was because I got a card in the Star Wars collectible card game back in the mid-'90s that they released that was Han Solo's dice. You could play it for extra luck. That's like—
Guest00:52:04I didn't even know of— I did not even recognize the dice until Force Awakens, right? No, it's Last Jedi, where they're everywhere. So it's not even until Last Jedi that the dice play. I had thought that he puts them back up on— when he comes back into the Falcon in Force Awakens, he puts them back on. Well, maybe he does. I can't remember. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, that was the first time. But apparently, they're imbued with all of this
JVL00:52:30meaning. Oh my god, I hate it so much.
Guest00:52:32Because they come from Kira. That too. Now we know why he cares about the dice.
JVL00:52:37And this, I— So the problem, the reason I'm slightly self-hating about this is that I feel as though we are criticizing them not for the movie they made, but the movie we wish they had made, which is vaguely unfair. And the truth is that the movie they made, as Sonny said, is fine. It's— Totally. Confident. And in fact, when we get to the rankings, I would say it ranks very high within the relative Star Wars canon. Assuming we're going to— Are we going to rank Star Wars? —do a ranking. But the problem is, at least for me, is that what they've done is a disservice to the character. And so Han is somebody whose backstory everybody knows, but nobody knows, because it's mysterious. And by going and spelling it out, they're demystifying it in ways which don't serve the character well, I don't think. Right? I mean, whatever you imagined the Kessel Run to be, in your imagination, it was better than what you actually saw. It's just—it's just a shortcut through space. Right. So whatever—you know, why would everybody have known the Kessel Run? You know,
Sonny00:53:43like, it—and I just feel— Question.
JVL00:53:46I didn't need an origin story for Han Solo. Rogue One is not an origin story. You know? So just give us a Han Solo story.
Sonny00:53:53Rogue One's problem is that it takes a line of dialogue from A New Hope and turns it into a whole movie. Do you think there will be a
Guest00:53:59sequel to Solo? Because he's contracted for three films. It's based on all of the economics that you were going through. Are you—make—it makes me wonder whether they're going to have to hit pause
Sonny00:54:12and just kind of rethink— I think they're—I think it's possible. I think that the way that you do it—I mean, they should just put the kibosh on the whole thing. But they've clearly set up for a sequel with Kira going off to Darth Maul and Han talking about going to see Jabba about this big deal. You know, they've clearly set up at least a sequel, maybe a trilogy. They're going to pause it and do a Lando first.
Guest00:54:48Or, to your point about demystifying characters who don't need it, what of course did Kathleen Kennedy announce on the day that Solo was opening to disappointing box office? She announces that she has hired the director of Logan, James Mangold, to direct a Boba Fett movie. So here again, they're just going to completely turn in another origin story of a character whose origin—especially Boba Fett—we already know kind of because that was covered in the prequels, but too, like, come on. The more we know about him, the less cool he is. Again, stop looking backward. Give us a
Sonny00:55:24Saul Guerrero movie. You'll care about Boba Fett. Give us a new character who we have seen something of. You'll care about Boba Fett when they take his armor and they give it to a 16-year-old girl.
Guest00:55:34Or he has the white armor. That would be the fan service there. Because when he was designed by Ralph McQuarrie, he wore white. And when he made a first public appearance in a parade in Modesto, California. This is why you're having me on this episode. So hot. So hot. 1978, he makes his first public appearance. He's in white. He was a super stormtrooper when they conceived him. So maybe that will be the plot.
Sonny00:56:00So we're running up on our, this is going to be an expanded episode.
JVL00:56:06Do you want to move on to talk about the IP number stuff, or do you still want to talk about the creative aspect of this? Do you have more creative stuff to talk about? I don't know. I like Lando, I guess. I guess I'll like the Lando movie when they
Guest00:56:20give it. I'll say this, because I feel like- Will you like the L3 movie? I will not like the L3 movie. Can you not wait for that one? That's going to be, that'll be announced this week. No, the movie I want is, I want the Cassian
JVL00:56:31movie with his droid sidekick. That's the, give us a Cassian movie. This is- Who was Cassian? Oh, Rug One. Oh, Rug One. Yeah, he was good. So the things to, because I don't want us to be unfair to the movie. There are three acts, Han is a real character with real motivations and an actual arc. Kira makes sense as motivation. All the characters have clear objectives. And it is an original idea within this, not an original idea, period, but within the Star Wars universe, it's an original idea. This is not a Star Wars movie we've seen before. But it's all just wrapped up
Sonny00:57:03in Star Wars crap. I mean- This is a thin defense,
JVL00:57:07but I'm saying that by the standards of the Disney Star Wars, that puts it already ahead of both Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. The problem for me is that none of this stuck with me for even 30 seconds after I left the theater. I mean, I literally walked out of there-
Guest00:57:25I think that Force Awakens is a better movie. I think it is ahead of Last Jedi. And I think the commonality between Force Awakens and Solo, which make them at least meh, or maybe even better in some cases, is Kasdan. I think Larry Kasdan kind of gets it. And initially, he wanted to work on Solo. He didn't want to work on Force Awakens, but he had to after the first screenwriter, Michael Arndt, dropped out. Clearly, he wanted to say something
Sonny00:57:54more about this character, and I think he did. It is a perfectly competent piece of filmmaking. And I mean that in both the best and worst terms. There isn't a single shot in that movie that stands out in my memory. There's not a single image in that movie that stands out in my memory. I mean, that's not the worst thing in the world, but it's also not the best. It's fine. Are we going to rank the Star Wars?
JVL00:58:22Let's rank. Do you want to rank the Star Wars, or do you want to go to the intellectual property thing? How about the ones that have come out?
Sonny00:58:29Why don't we rank the Star Wars and then do intellectual property?
JVL00:58:32All right. I have the proper ranking. If you'd like. Of all 10 movies? Yes.
Sonny00:58:38Go on. Yeah, I want to hear it. You want to start from best to worst? Worst to best. Worst to best.
JVL00:58:44Number 10, Attack of the Clones. Number nine, The Last Jedi. Number eight, Revenge of the Sith. Number seven, Phantom Menace. Number six, Force Awakens. Number five, Return of the Jedi. Number four, Solo. Number three, Empire. Number two, Rogue One. Number one, A New Hope. Oh, my God. That is insane.
Sonny00:59:02We just spent an hour, literally an hour, talking about how Solo is mediocre.
JVL00:59:08You're saying it's the fourth best one? Well, I would say with this, there are only three good ones.
Sonny00:59:15Wrong. What is your ranking, Sonny?
JVL00:59:17No, there are only three good Star Wars movies. I'm going to give you the proper ranking here. God.
Sonny00:59:22Wars Among the Stars ranked. Updated for Solo. Number 10, Attack of the Clones. Yes. Obviously. Worst. The worst. Number nine, The Last Jedi. Correct. Bad. Just bad. No one denies this. Eight, Phantom Menace. How can you put anything... I mean, I could see maybe swapping Last Jedi and Phantom Menace. Number eight is Phantom Menace. Number seven, Solo, frankly. I don't think it's as good as The Force Awakens, which is number six. Number five, Rogue One, which has grown a little bit in my memory. Ridiculous. Number four, Return of the Jedi, which is not nearly as good as number three, Revenge of the Sith, which is a great movie with some fantastic action sequences. Love it. Are you high? Number two, A New Hope. Number one, Empire. I mean, this is the canonical ranking of Star Wars movies.
Guest01:00:12I would just say, I'm not going to rank all 10. I think, like I was saying earlier, you have to distinguish between George Lucas' Star Wars and Walt Disney Corporation and Kathleen Kennedy's Star Wars. I'll just rank the Kathleen Kennedy Star Wars. The worst was Last Jedi. Solo is three. Force Awakens is two. And Rogue One is one. And I base that on rewatch value, which is for me, growing up, I've seen the six movies that George Lucas made dozens of times each. But the only one of the Kathleen Kennedy movies that I've watched with any reliability now is Rogue One. Rogue One is a legitimate, very good movie. Which is self-contained. It's exciting. It always gets your interest.
Sonny01:00:58To be fair, you have watched The Force Awakens probably 15 times.
Guest01:01:04But I may have watched Rogue One more now, because I've stopped watching Force Awakens. And now, and now if Rogue One is, you know, it's on, it's on their Netflix. I just need Netflix and chill by myself. You know, the best kind of Netflix and chill, right? With, you know, talk about solo, a bottle of wine. Oh, God. This is getting weird. Yeah, Rogue One. So. All right, go. All right. I
Sonny01:01:28think that's fair. Let's let's talk about let's briefly talk about what this box office disaster means for Star Wars as a brand. And as a series of films going forward, JBL. So I
JVL01:01:40interviewed my my buddy Richard Rushfield about eight months ago, and I said to him, he's he writes The Anchor as a Hollywood insider guy. And I said, So what would the level of freakout be in Hollywood if a Star Wars movie bombed because Star Wars is the most bankable property in the history of of Hollywood? And he said, basically be like DEFCON one, DEFCON five, which is the one where all the keys are turned and we just poise it be like DEFCON one. I think you could say that that's where we are as of this week. Solo, so we needed solo to understand what was happening. Because we needed a fourth data point. And, and what solo has revealed is that there is underlying weakness in the intellectual property here. Think of it this way, you essentially have two types of Star Wars product, there is the saga product, and then the standalone products. The saga products have The Force Awakens, which had $2 billion, and then The Last Jedi $1.3 billion, a huge decline, right? 35% drop, then you had Rogue One, which only did a billion dollars on its own. So, again, if you had been looking just chronologically, oh, you know, Rogue One's going down, but Solo, then is if you if you assume the Rogue One multiplier, which is 3.4, Solo will top off, no chance, no chance, but I'm saying, is going to wind up at 40% below Rogue One. So what you have is both products showing nearly a 40% decline. That's bad. I mean, that is really, really bad news. And if you go and plot that against the first five Marvel movies, what you see couldn't be more different. So the first five Marvel movies are Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America. And what you see there is the grosses bounced around a lot. There was small variance, like, you know, on the order of magnitude of 20%. But it'd be like 20% up 20% down. And so you went down from Iron Man to Incredible Hulk, then up to Iron Man 2, then down a little bit to Thor, then down a little bit more to Captain America, but all very, very closely tied together. You could look at those, I would say you couldn't look at the first five Marvel movies and guess that Marvel would become what it has become. But you also wouldn't look at it and say, "Huh, this is a thing for which the appetite is declining." You would say, "We don't know what's happening here." And that is clearly what's happening. And it must scare the crap out of them. And Bob Iger. Yeah.
Sonny01:04:08And the other big difference between the Marvel movies and this is that the Marvel movies were all building to something. They were building to the Avengers, and the Avengers was an enormous, enormous hit. The Star Wars movies aren't building to anything. They're building to episode nine in one of the series. And then everything else is just kind of a mishmash
JVL01:04:26hodgepodge of backwards looking crap. They were all building to burning the wills.
Guest01:04:31Do you think that Bob Iger has talked to Kevin Feige about Star Wars and
JVL01:04:37what's going on there with the IP? I wonder, honestly, if Kathleen Kennedy keeps her job. Me too. If I were Bob Iger, I would look at this- There is a 0.0% chance that she gets
Sonny01:04:47fired after this movie. 0.0% chance. If episode nine is a disaster, which I don't think it will be, I think it will probably wind up being somewhere between Last Jedi and Force Awakens, in terms of gross, I think. Why would we think that? That would be my guess. It'll be the longest buildup. You have 18 months. Anyway, they're not going to fire Kathleen Kennedy because of, again, we're all obsessed with social justice and wokeness, blah, blah. They're not going to fire the woman head of the studio. My one critique of your take on the box office here is that I think they made a huge tactical mistake by putting this movie out in May instead of December. I think if they had put this movie out in December, the drop off would not be as fantastic. We're six months away from I would say almost inarguably the most hated Star Wars film since I don't know when. It's a movie that the fans have really turned against, and they're putting it out six months after that. I think if you would wait just a little bit longer to December when there's less competition, you get a little time to breathe, the numbers are better. That is the most optimistic
JVL01:06:00slash Pollyanna view of this that the corporate suits could take from this. If they want to talk themselves into believing there is no problem. However, look at the audience scores, right? If you believe in the cinema score and the Rotten Tomatoes stuff, then the Solo scores are much worse than the Last Jedi ones. This is a real question. Mark Hemingway asked this on Twitter today. Is there a hangover effect where people talk themselves into loving Last Jedi, but then actually hated it in retrospect, and this left a bad taste in their mouth?
Sonny01:06:32The relevant and interesting data point here is that Solo got an A- from CinemaScore as opposed to an A, which the three previous Disney/Star Wars movies have gotten. They've all gotten A's, even as people have kind of cooled on them afterwards. People were already cooling on this coming out of the theater. That's obvious. I don't put any stock in Rotten Tomatoes audience scores. They're too easily mucked about with by the jokers on Reddit and 4chan, whatever. So I don't put much faith in those. But I mean, if you just look at the A- CinemaScore, I think it's a movie that has gotten a very soft reaction. So even with the 90% recommend, those movies always have 90% recommend. As Richard Rushfeld said to me when
JVL01:07:09we talked about this, he said, "Look, the truth is, these movies exist to sell products. In terms of the total revenue to the company, the actual movie products are a very, very small percentage component." And that is undoubtedly true. They will make up all the money they lose at the box office on lunchboxes and Legos and sheets and diapers and everything else you could possibly imagine that they sell licensing for. But the danger for them is long-term, which is that if audiences are slowly starting to not care about Disney, or about Disney, about Star Wars, they're building a giant theme park. They're turning the MGM studio at Disney World into the Star Wars world. There are huge, huge implications for Disney as a conglomerate, all circled around Star Wars. And that's why I actually think that Kathleen Kennedy gets one more movie at most to write the ship here, especially the problems she had with Lord Miller. And Rogue One.
Guest01:08:05With Gareth Edwards. Had to replace him, had to replace the director for episode nine, right? Colin Trevorrow fired him, then J.J. Abrams, then she's been like Oprah. You get a movie, you get a movie. Rian Johnson, you get a whole trilogy. James Mangold, you get Boba Fett, Benioff and Weiss, you get a new series. It's not a trilogy, but it's not a standalone. Oh, and Jon Favreau, you're going to have a live action TV show. And where does it all go? I agree. I think the chances of overload are very high. Oh, totally. I mean, this is, the problem is Star Wars is not special anymore. You went from having one movie every three years to then having a 15 year break to then having again, one movie every three years to then having another 10 year break, a decade break. So you have this time where actually generations kind of grew up with specific sets of the IP and they develop an attachment to them. Again, they watch them as children, which has in my view, always been the intended audience. And now of course, you think, oh, well, we're basically we want to do the fan service for the two older generations, but we also want to teach the kids this kind of PC lesson. And we're going to do it in every single property or medium rather that we can. And I think it's already showing that it's backfiring.
JVL01:09:18It's kind of hot. Kind of looking forward to watching it all burn, frankly, because it'd be a big deal if she if she gets she won't get fired. Of course, she'll be promoted to do something else with something.
Guest01:09:29You know, it would be ironic because remember, Jonathan, you probably remember the date where Spielberg and Lucas' last five years or so said that, you know, the the tentpole model of Hollywood with the big blockbusters is clearly going to reach an endpoint. It would be ironic if the IP that began the era right of Star Wars ends up destroying it. And we go to the next development
Sonny01:09:52of Hollywood. Let's just make the other obvious point here that Marvel is the new Star Wars. Yes. Marvel is where all the intellectual energy is. It's where all of the creative energy is. It's where all the fan energy is. Star Wars is limping because it's it is looking backwards. It's all based on nostalgia. Marvel is building a story and moving things forward with each successive movie.
Guest01:10:12And that's why I think Feige will end up with Star Wars. I don't think so. I really do. He made them he made Disney a lot of money.
Sonny01:10:19Sure. What does he and he gets it? Would he even want Star Wars?
Guest01:10:22He was on the Star Wars show three weeks ago talking about how everything he's done with Marvel comes out of his experience watching Star Wars.
JVL01:10:32Oh, this would be like John Lasseter taking over Disney Animation. Right. I mean, that's almost the perfect analog. Does he like to hug people? Kevin Feige?
Guest01:10:43We don't know anything about him. I've told Sonny about this. He's very and I'd love to have a biography of him to read or something to see where he's coming from. But he's Bob Iger's secret weapon right now. And I got to tell you, yeah, sure. Kathleen Kennedy, powerful female executive, but all they care about is money.
JVL01:11:01So he's got to I mean, Feige has to do something before he's forced to reckon with the phase three of Marvel, where they lose all of their their bedrock stars. Right. And decide whether they're just going to retire those characters for the meantime or try to invent them as minority characters or what.
Guest01:11:21I mean, I mean, that yeah, Marvel is actually three might be his test, right? Yeah. Isn't
Sonny01:11:25this phase three now? Isn't the end of the Avengers phase three? What starts? I thought
Guest01:11:32it starts three begins in the end of phase two with Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel.
JVL01:11:37They start phase three. Yeah. So they're gonna and but see in a weird way, though, he's helped out by Disney acquiring Fox if that happens, because then instead of worrying about like, God, what do I do about Thor and Captain America? You just mothball those characters and the X-Men deal delve into the X-Men world and the Spider-Man world X-Men versus Avengers.
Sonny01:11:55All right. That is we are running very long. Do we have any corrections or additions?
JVL01:12:01JBL? No, I don't think so. All right. I don't have any pretty good show. We don't we don't have
Sonny01:12:07a spirit this week because we're taping too early. All right. That is all the time we are giving to this episode. Questions, comments, complaints, compliments. Tweet us at Sonny Bunch at Continetti and at JV Last. Again, be sure to subscribe to us on iTunes or Google Play. Just type in substandard under podcasts and we're there. Leave a review. Tell your friends until next time. Outtakes. Do we have any outtakes? So, Matt, did you like it? Was it fun?
Guest01:12:45The substandard? Yeah. Yeah, it was fun. It was like solo. It's okay.
Sonny01:12:54I think he's trying to say, he's trying to say, I will never do this again. I was sitting
Guest01:13:00here thinking, could I do this every week, talking about a different movie every week?
Sonny01:13:05And I don't know. But we also talk about shoe shining. Talk about shoe shining. We talk about bookshelves. Watches. I was waiting. I'm disappointed I didn't get this. What watch
Guest01:13:14are you wearing? You got a watch there. What are you wearing? I don't even know. Can I see it? My wife bought it for me seven years ago. Probably a Patek Philippe. He's been
JVL01:13:25wearing a Patek Philippe for seven years and not. It's literally the only watch I've ever
Guest01:13:28owned. Oh, this is nice. It's
JVL01:13:30solar powered. It's a Citizen EcoDrive. I like the Citizen EcoDrive. God, stop. EcoDrive's a nice watch. I'll take it back now. I'm sure it's fine.
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