[keg in kc]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

Yeah, it's irrelevant.

Yes, I'm saying it's irrelevant. Because the Star Wars brand is the reason for that box office success, not the films themselves. You'll see the exact same thing with the new trilogy.

But the case can be made that home theater didn't exist, HDTV didn't exist, Blu-Ray didn't exist and times were different altogether.

Furthermore, that's untrue. When The Phantom Menace was released in 3D, it did some nice numbers, like $45 million domestically.

Home theater didn't exist? How many different versions of the original trilogy were released before the prequels even came out, on VHS/Beta, Laserdisk, eventually on DVD and now on Blu-Ray. There was an 80s special edition, a 90s special edition, the 2011 blu-ray special edition, and there'll I'm sure be another edition at some point when the next video technology hits (whatever that ends up being). And they played back in the 80s (IIRC) on network TV, USA and on HBO. There's never been any lick of home saturation when it comes to Star Wars, along with comics, novels, video games, etc. That established brand has to be large part of the reason the prequels made money.

(And lets be honest, when we say the prequels made money, let's just say TPM made money. Ep 3 made 200 million less and Ep 2 400 million less. The first one had steam from being the first new Star Wars film in decades, it sucked so Ep 2 struggled, and then Ep 3 did a little better because people wanted to see Anakin become Vader).

Everything those movies made were thanks to the original trilogy, which, again, completely destroyed them at the box office if you adjust for inflation, if we're going to be stuck with talking about box office as some vain effort to characterize awful movies as something not awful based on commercial success thanks to brand name.

But no one's been able to capture that since.

But you do concede that it existed. So it wouldn't be the first time...

FTR, George Lucas started Pixar.

I don't actually care about Pixar, and I'm not trying to equate SW to it, it was just the first name that came to mind.