Wow, Rian Johnson actually has a Tumblr account. That statement is plausible. And explains a decent amount.
There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction.
Does that mean revenue for Disney? I googled and it looks like you mean “The Love Hypothesis”, which is being adapted by Netflix. Though I doubt Disney anticipated that particular result in any case.
Remember that the ultimate question here is whether what Disney did made business sense, knowing what they knew at the time.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
“An additional group of Star Wars superfans”, as in, the group of people that were fans of Star Wars, buying Star Wars toys and games and attending Star Wars Celebration, since before Tumblr was created (2007)? Their preexisting repeat customer group, in other words? (I haven’t been able to find e.g. statistics on what percentage of Star Wars Celebration attendees were male, but I’d be surprised if, as of 2016, it were less than 80%, and 90% would not surprise me. I expect similar numbers for “people who’ve seen more than one Star Wars movie”, “people who have bought a Star Wars video game”, etc.)
You seem to be saying that Disney treated that preexisting customer group as an afterthought, instead targeting the Tumblr/AO3/etc. fandom group. (In fact, as I say, TLJ looks to be somewhat actively hostile to the first group—having characters criticize them by proxy for liking classic Star Wars stuff.) I’m not saying that’s an incorrect description of what they did, but, given what I expect the revenue numbers from the two groups were at the time TLJ was being created… I think this can be accurately described as “the decisionmakers for TLJ [most importantly Rian Johnson, but also any higher-ups who didn’t countermand him] were acting in a way that any profit-maximizer in their position should have recognized as expected-to-lose-profit”. Which was to be demonstrated.
And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase
So, for franchises with pre-existing fanbases… is the recommendation to go full woke, cater to the Tumblr fandom, and alienate some portion of the pre-existing fanbase? Does the recommendation depend on the relative sizes of the two?
Wow, Rian Johnson actually has a Tumblr account. That statement is plausible. And explains a decent amount.
Does that mean revenue for Disney? I googled and it looks like you mean “The Love Hypothesis”, which is being adapted by Netflix. Though I doubt Disney anticipated that particular result in any case.
Remember that the ultimate question here is whether what Disney did made business sense, knowing what they knew at the time.
“An additional group of Star Wars superfans”, as in, the group of people that were fans of Star Wars, buying Star Wars toys and games and attending Star Wars Celebration, since before Tumblr was created (2007)? Their preexisting repeat customer group, in other words? (I haven’t been able to find e.g. statistics on what percentage of Star Wars Celebration attendees were male, but I’d be surprised if, as of 2016, it were less than 80%, and 90% would not surprise me. I expect similar numbers for “people who’ve seen more than one Star Wars movie”, “people who have bought a Star Wars video game”, etc.)
You seem to be saying that Disney treated that preexisting customer group as an afterthought, instead targeting the Tumblr/AO3/etc. fandom group. (In fact, as I say, TLJ looks to be somewhat actively hostile to the first group—having characters criticize them by proxy for liking classic Star Wars stuff.) I’m not saying that’s an incorrect description of what they did, but, given what I expect the revenue numbers from the two groups were at the time TLJ was being created… I think this can be accurately described as “the decisionmakers for TLJ [most importantly Rian Johnson, but also any higher-ups who didn’t countermand him] were acting in a way that any profit-maximizer in their position should have recognized as expected-to-lose-profit”. Which was to be demonstrated.
So, for franchises with pre-existing fanbases… is the recommendation to go full woke, cater to the Tumblr fandom, and alienate some portion of the pre-existing fanbase? Does the recommendation depend on the relative sizes of the two?