(1) KEENE HEALTH UPDATE. Brian Keene’s fan newsletter carries the latest details.
Last Tuesday, June 5th, I was clearing flood debris from my ex-wife’s yard. The property is prone to flooding. If you’ve ever read SCRATCH, that novella was inspired by a previous flood we experienced on the property. Thw weekend prior, she’d experienced not one but two flash floods, and they’d left behind dumptruck loads of debris, as well as a good half foot of standing water across much of the yard. She and her boyfriend tried to clean up, but both of them were exhausted and have normal day jobs, and since I’d just finished writing the season finale to SILVERWOOD: THE DOOR, I had some time to help. So, I went over Tuesday at 8am and started clearing the debris — dumping logs and branches and cut up wood into the fire pit, Hauling away rolls of carpet, car parts, hypodermic needles, broken glass and all the other shit the flood had deposited. My son was determined to help, on what was his first day of summer vacation.
By the end of his first day of summer vacation, he’d watched his father get loaded into an amublance.
The brush pile was about 8ft tall. Earlier in the day, I’d used some gasoline as an accelerant to get it going, because most of the wood was wet. Around 2pm, I sent my son into the house to get us both a drink of water, while I stirred up the fire to get it going again. I poked the coals with a stick, and the flames swelled up. Then the wind shifted, suddenlyu blowing the fire toward me. I threw my arm up releflexively. I guess maybe I had some residue gas left on it, because suddenly my arm was on fire. I stared at it, and thought, “Fuck” and then realized my head was on fire, too.
… I’ve been told by several in the medical field that I can expect my bills to be north of $300,000. Probably more. I made $60,000 last year as a freelance writer.
The GoFundMe has raised a little over $50,000 as of this moment.
(2) SAVING THROW. Deadline got the inside story (well, as inside as execs ever let you see) — “Amazon Studios Boss On How ‘The Expanse’ Was Saved & Would Amazon Also Rescue ‘Lucifer’”.
The Expanse pickup announcement followed an elaborate fan campaign that included renting a plane to fly a #Save The Expanse banner over the Amazon headquarters. It was made in a dramatic fashion by Amazon’s chairman himself, Jeff Bezos, at National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles where he was an honoree an hour or so afterThe Expanse cast and showrunner had done a panel at the same event.
“There were airplanes circling us, I was having cakes delivered, there was a whole thing happening,” Salke said of The Expense campaign. “And then really smart people, whose opinions I really value creatively, started reaching out to me, saying, “have you seen this show, The Expanse, it’s actually great”. I hadn’t so I spent some time, I watched the show and I was like, this show is actually really well done, why is nobody watching it? At the same time, Jeff Bezos was getting emails from everyone from George R.R. Martin to every captain of industry, like the founder of Craigslist, and they were all writing, saying, there’s this show, it’s so great, you have to see it, you have to buy it or save it.
(3) SHARK ATTRACTANT. Lynn Maudlin recently stayed at The Headington Shark in Oxford. She successfully warded off shark attacks with a copy of Diana Glyer’s Inklings book, Bandersnatch. A word to the wise!
(4) DARLINGS PROTECTION SERVICE. Yesterday’s Scroll reference to Delilah S. Dawson’s Twitter thread about the traditional writing advice “kill your darlings” prompted an uproar in comments. And inspired a couple of Filers to list other writers’ threads with a range of reactions to that phrase.
Tasha Turner said —
A lot of great discussions on Twitter about “kill your darlings”. I’m lucky to follow a diverse group of authors from around the world. Below are a few different perspectives:
Standback noted additional offshoot threads:
- Ann Leckie (Ed. note: I think this is not a duplicate)
- Alex Acks
- Max Gladstone
- Tim Clare
- Arkady Martine
- Chuck Wendig
And this morning Ann Leckie joined the discussion here, closing with these thoughts:
Which brings me to the idea that a writer ought not write to please themselves. I am so not on board with this idea I can’t even begin to express it. One of the ways you know your writing is working–to the extent you know that, which is its own issue–is that it’s working for you. Now, it’s possible to go off track into pleasing your id in a way that just looks unseemly and strange to anyone else, but once again, it’s a case-by-case thing. And there, it’s often not a question of cutting the thing, removing it, so much as turning it around and refining it so that all those other folks out there with similar grooves and folds in their ids can enjoy that feeling of it fitting into place. So, again, it’s a matter of asking why do I want this in the story so much? and not automatically cutting it because it’s self-indulgent. Hell, even long political screeds can please some readers. If that’s what does it for you, and you have readers who respond to it, well, go to. Indulge yourself!
And I’m about done with people telling me I don’t understand what kill your darlings means, thank you.
(5) TALKIN’ ABOUT MY REGENERATION. Could copies be in private hands? According to ScreenRant, “Archivist Says 97 Lost Doctor Who Episodes Could Be Recovered”.
Although many episodes have since been recovered, there are still 97 old episodes missing from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton era. Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Doctor Who archivist Paul Vanezis has suggested they’re still out there. “There are missing Doctor Whos with private collectors,” he explained. “They may be interested in handing them over.”
The quest for the missing Doctor Who episodes is a fascinating one, and a labor of love for the fans. Some lost episodes were found in Ethiopia back in 2013, and were released by the BBC in time for the show’s 50th anniversary. More recently, the BBC has begun using audio recordings, surviving photographs and brief film clips to create animated versions of some of the missing stories, such as 1966’s “The Power of the Daleks”. But the real hope is clearly that black-and-white video recordings could yet be recovered, and the BBC is sure to offer a premium price in order to purchase the copies.
The Holy Grail of Doctor Who is the episode “The Tenth Planet”, which includes the Doctor’s first onscreen regeneration. This saw William Hartnell’s First Doctor transform into Patrick Troughton’s Second, an unprecedented change of direction for the science-fiction TV series….
(6) VICK OBIT. Shelby Vick (1928-2018) died June 9. His daughter Cheryl told Facebook friends:
It is with a sad heart that I tell you that my dad passed away early Saturday morning. He said his goodbyes to us and even laughed earlier Friday. He passed away peacefully in his sleep.
He was married to Suzanne Vick, who predeceased him. His Fancyclopedia entry recalls he famously introduced Lee Hoffman to Bob Tucker at a time when she was known only through fanzines and everyone had assumed LeeH was a man. Vick also started the successful WAW with the Crew in ’52 fan fund to bring Walt Willis to the US in 1952.
Vick became the leading figure in the Fan Federation for Sound Productions, also known as Wirez, a national effort to make wire recordings and circulate them in the same way fans produced typescript round-robins.
He organized Corflu Sunsplash in Panama City, Fl in 1999, and was named Past President of fwa there. He was honored with the Southern Fandom Confederation’s Rebel Award in 2012.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 11, 1982 — E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was released
- June 11, 1993 — Jurassic Park premiered
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
- Born June 11 – Peter Dinklage, 49. The obvious role, but also Eltri in Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Trumpkin in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.
- Born June 11 – Shia LaBoeuf, 32. Mutt in the Indiana Jones film that Shall Not Be Named, Sam Witwicky in Transformers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Farber in I, Robot. Somebody needs a better agent.
(9) COMICS SECTION.
- Cat Eldridge has seen the light in xkcd’s “Attention Span”.
- Mike Kennedy learned how Brewster Rockit decides which movie to see:
(10) SFWA BULLETIN INDEX. New online is “The SFWA Bulletin Index, 1965-2018” compiled by Michael Capobianco, Erin M. Hartshorn, and Sean Wallace. It went live just before Nebula Weekend. Try it out, see how you like it —
Table of Contents
- Magazines:
- Stories, etc.:
- Appendices:
(11) UNBEEVABLE. Surely this has never happened before.
https://twitter.com/StewartFHoffman/status/1006262327568527360
(12) FAREWELL PROJECT WONDERFUL. The internet advertising service Project Wonderful, which has funded a great many webcomics and online narrative projects, will shut down August 1.
For over a decade, we’ve been so happy to be your choice for getting the word out about your comic, music, or anything else you come up with. And we’ve been so proud to represent our publishers, who have been creating some of the most interesting, exciting, and worthwhile things online.
But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn’t track readers, we didn’t sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet – because our technology simply wasn’t built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.
(13) TOXIC FANDOM. Salon blames the internet. And everything that came before the internet… “After years of stewing, “Star Wars” fandom goes to the dark side”.
So how did a franchise of adventure movies for children create this noxious tribe of entitled haters? The short answer is that it was a long time coming.
The first hints of this seismic shift in the Star Wars fandom occurred when the prequel trilogy came out, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There had been decades of novels and fanfiction speculating how little Anakin Skywalker became evil Darth Vader; the new addition to the canon didn’t sit well with some. Tin ear dialogue, Jar Jar Binks’ perceived minstrelsy, and mediocre acting led to fan furor. Feverous claims of director George Lucas “raping” childhoods were common in pop culture reflections on the prequel trilogy. Both of the actors who played Anakin Skywalker — Hayden Christensen and, at the time, 10-year-old Jake Lloyd who played young Anakin — were more or less harassed out of the spotlight. Lloyd retired from acting two years later after “The Phantom Menace” premiered, after winning Razzie Awards and being relentlessly bullied by classmates and fans alike. Lucas, after “Revenge of the Sith” premiered, swore off making Star Wars movies forever.
(14) MORE PETAFLOPS THAN EVER. From the BBC: “US debuts world’s fastest supercomputer”. More than doubles Chinese record, and powerful enough that pieces of it were working on real problems while the final computer was still being assembled.
Summit, the US’s new supercomputer, is more than twice as powerful as the current world leader.
The machine can process 200,000 trillion calculations per second – or 200 petaflops.
China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, until now the world’s most powerful machine, has a processing power of 93 petaflops.
Summit’s initial uses will include areas of astrophysics, cancer research and systems biology.
It is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, where it was developed in partnership with IBM and NVidia.
(15) LET SLIP THE DOGS OF VENUS. A NASA group at Langley Research Center is studying the High-Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) to float a manned airship high in the Venusian atmosphere as a way for astronauts to visit and study our sister planet.
NBC News reports “NASA has a plan to let humans soar above the clouds on Venus”.
Mars and the moon are already at the top of NASA’s prospect list for future human exploration and possibly colonies, but another planet has recently been getting some unexpected attention.
What a group of NASA scientists have proposed is a steampunk-like spacecraft that weighs nearly nothing and would float in the Venusian atmosphere. This High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC) would allow astronauts to study the planet at an unprecedented level, in less time than it would take to complete a crewed mission to Mars.
…Some technological advancement needs to happen before we get to Venus. Among the tech aspects of this mission that still need to be figured out are how to keep the spacecraft and its solar panels from corroding in that atmospheric sulfuric acid, never mind successfully inserting and inflating the airship on arrival at Venus and performing aerocapture maneuvers on Venus and Earth.
“It opens up a strange, exciting, and even slightly terrifying way to live,” said [HAVOC team leader Chris] Jones. “It would be a challenging environment, but one that would bring opportunities we can’t even imagine.”
(16) A CAT’S BREAKFAST. Not entirely sure why I was sent a link to this “Review of Audrey Hepburn – Breakfast at Tiffany’s Deluxe Sixth Scale Action Figure” — except that one of the extras you can get is her cat, so there’s the SJW credential collectible aspect to be considered….
Very few companies – companies that actually play by the rules and get licenses, anyway – are willing to play with the lesser known properties. Star Wars? Marvel? DC? Sure, there are plenty of options, and the big boys like Hot Toys are all over them. Other second tier licenses like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones are getting covered by smaller companies, but you can’t really claim that those properties aren’t popular with a large number of collectors.
Star Ace is looking at some of the much smaller properties, particularly those that involve female characters. They haven’t been hitting on every release, however, and they need a win right now. Their next upcoming release is Audrey Hepburn from the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where she portrayed Holly Golightly. This is a slightly early review – she should be shipping any day now.
She comes in two versions. There’s a regular release that runs around $220, and a deluxe version that sells for $237 or so, depending on the retailer. I’m looking at the deluxe tonight, but I’ll point out the difference in the Accessories section.
[Thanks to Tasha Turner, Standback, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Dann, Carl Slaughter, Danny Sichel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Kip W.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
First!
(16) For some reason, I keep looking at that and seeing Selina Kyle.
third
Schrödinger’s Fifth!
(It’s the thought that counts.)
15
A model for a Benevolent Airship?
And fifth? moi?
(16) Scrolling down fast, I missed the headline and saw the photo. My first thought: “Lady Penelope?”
ETA: Hey, Best Fiifth!!!!
It’s the observation that counts.
@Iphinome: “It’s the observation that counts.”
Except on Sesame Street, where it’s the Count who observes (and counts).
Racking my brains for an Audrey Hepburn connection to SFF – didn’t she play an angel once?
jayn: Robin and Marian (1976)?
jayn: Racking my brains for an Audrey Hepburn connection to SFF – didn’t she play an angel once?
She played Ondine on stage.
14) Somehow this reminds of the worlds tallest building race. The new biggest computer is probably already under construction.
(13) TOXIC FANDOM – I have a hard time with that Salon article. Firstly, the internet had not nearly evolved into Watt’s Maelstrom, as it has now. In 1997, there was only the simplest outline of what social media is today. It was not the raging hellstorm infecting almost everyone’s lives that it is today. I don’t believe erstwhile Annakin’s problems came specifically from being in the most-hated SW movie of all time (though I’m sure that didn’t help), but more likely that he was a child who was abusively forced into an adult job (professional actor). It’s not a surprising or uncommon outcome. People on the internet were hyperbolic about the movie at the time, of course, but not specifically aiming at individuals, in the troll-you-til-you-slit-your-wrists hyperbolic style as they are today.
Secondly, Phantom Menace was a huge deviation in style and quality from the previous movies. Even Return of the Jedi, which aimed hard at the under 12 crowd, was more of a grownup movie. I recently re-watched Phantom Menace at the urging of a much younger fan who is a friend, and found it nearly impossible to watch. It is aimed at 10 year olds. A New Hope was aimed at teenagers to adults and captivated pretty much everyone I knew at the time other than parental-types (that subset of everyone I knew being between about 4-10 years old). Kinda how Seventeen magazine always appealed to 12 year olds, not 17 year olds, who were more likely to read Cosmopolitan or other magazines aimed at adults. When adults aim at the 10 year old demographic their movie is pretty much unpalatable for anyone who first saw it over the age of 12.
Thirdly, and most obviously, anyone who was a fan of the original Star Wars trilogy and wasn’t aghast at the treatment it was given in the Greedo-shot-first retcon era… I actually don’t know anyone who was a fan of the original trilogy who wasn’t aghast at that. That was a ridiculous over-reach on the writer’s part, and should have been cut out of the story. When James O’Keefe’s reboot of Raiders of the Lost Ark comes out showing how the bad guys were actually just misunderstood and didn’t deserve to have their faces melt, I hope Salon won’t excoriate the outraged fans of the original.
Maybe there were seeds of the toxic, horrific… thing the internet has evolved into in the reactions of people to the SW prequals, but I think that Salon article over-reaches.
Click!
(1) the technical term for this is “catastrophic health expenditure” and it shouldn’t happen in a developed country.
(13) the Guardian has a highly interesting article up: “Pro-‘straight white male hero’ group behind Star Wars actor’s abuse”. Who the people taking credit are, is not very surprising, sadly.
(1) Jesus fucking Christ. I wish him a speedy recovery, and also hope that his medical expenses aren’t anywhere even close to six figures.
I started hating Star Wars in 1983, years before it was fashionable, when Luke cut loose with his cool new green lightsabre on Jabba’s yacht and the bad guys fell down as if he hit them with a stick.
If you can’t do that scene right (because kids are watching?), don’t put it in the movie!
I first noticed Peter Dinklage as the hired-gun children’s book writer in Elf, which is a pretty good fantasy.
@Msb – I think I saw the post that Guardian article refers to, where some douche proudly proclaims (I *ahem* assume) he brags about harassing Tran. I can’t see how any even slightly, even possibly redeemable, human being can take joy in hurting her like that after watching the video where she squees over fans squeeing over her character.
Peter Dinklage’s role in Infinity War was named Eitri with an I, not Eltri with an L. (It’s a name taken from Norse myth.)
8) Meee-ow! Would you care to appertain yourself some cream? 🙂
11) It happens. The worst case I’ve yet encountered was the version of “Winterfair Gifts” in Miles In Love (hardcover) — positively riddled with typos and formatting errors. And there was a Mercedes Lackey book (one of the Valdemars, I don’t recall which offhand) in which “discreet” was used 3 times, two of which were spelled “discrete”.
16) This is not what I normally think of as an “action figure”. It’s a ball-jointed doll (BJD), which is a different category altogether and explains what I would otherwise consider an exorbitant price. BJD collectors are a very specific market.
11) Snuff by Pratchett was very nearly unreadable in ebook for all the typos, dropped spaces, and occasional random insertion of the author’s name mid-page. And I’m still pretty mad that Tepper’s last, Fish Tails was allowed out the door by a editor when the prologue and one of the chapters are nearly word for word the same.
Stuff happens. Alas.
Meredith Moment, local edition: Amazon UK has Oor Wombat’s Clockwork Boys in today’s Kindle deal.
Ninjaed by James, but link
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clockwork-Boys-Clocktaur-War-Book-ebook/dp/B0783P29QP
[Clockwork Boys]
Ka-ching!
Haha, now Filers are jostling each other to see who can be the one to provide the most informative RedWombat Meredith Moments. 😀
David Goldfarb notes Peter Dinklage’s role in Infinity War was named Eitri with an I, not Eltri with an L. (It’s a name taken from Norse myth.)
My bad as I sent this in. My several head injuries cause mild, and sometimes not mild, spelling problems.
Got my ebook of Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun from Amazon this morning! (Note to self: keep on watching for pre-order discounts.)
5) Sadly, I will believe it when I see it.
Also I have an irrational fear that there are copies in private hands, but in the dickering, they will degrade beyond usability and then truly be lost.
WAtching the Twitch tv stream of Doctor Who, or having it on in the background, the last couple of weeks has been rather enjoyable, and yesterday the stream got up to my “birth” episode, INFERNO.
Also for those interested, Paul Cornell has done a pre-show video for the Third Doctor (since, inaugurably, that IS his Doctor), here: https://t.co/b5oEL55Tx0
/Whostalk!
“If it Scrolls like a Pixel, and it Files like a Pixel…”
@Rob Thornton: I read the first chapter right after work! I hope I don’t accidentally stay up all night to finish it (I need to be cromulent for work unfortunately)
@Oneiros:
The ebook arrived just as I was going to bed and I am dining with friends tonight, so it will have to wait. 🙂
(13) I think we might be approaching the point were it will be hard to find actors, writers and directors for Star Wars movies, because the risk of harrasment is so huge.
Fascinating. Every single pixel in this scroll is wrong
(Im sure this has been done. Maybe even by me).
11) Drives me crazy. Books are so darn expensive, then to find it full of typos and sometimes plain errors! There was a sentence in a book by Cherryh that I lost valuable time puzzling over until I realized that it made perfect sense with one word changed. A small word, but it changed the statement from a positive to a negative-or maybe vice versa, not sure now.
Not/now.is the notorious typo which nigh reverses the meaning of a sentence in the Phoenix Guards (And survived through more than one edition even after it was pointed out). Sounds like the Cherryh is in the same category.
@Peer
I very much doubt that. Being in a SW film in any capacity still carries with it tremendous commercial and cultural weight. There might be the odd established professional that decides they don’t need the hassle from the fans, but I would be astonished if it is more than minimal at most.
That said, the blowback is likely to come in the form that it is currently taking, which is less interaction and openness with the fanbase and less chances for real discussions with creators. We’re seeing that with a lot of fandoms. Dan Harmon openly and publicly loathes the insane part of the Rick and Morty fanbase. The ComicsGate morons have driven a couple of comic writers off social media. So what these entitled jackholes are setting up is that fandoms are going to start interacting through gatekeepers again; spokespeople who can create a buffer to mitigate the abuse and bile that reaches creators directly and respond to any questions with standard corporate speech.
8) Peter Dinklage. Don’t forget the TV show Threshold, which sadly lasted only one season. It showed so much promise… Somehow I get the feeling that it got resurrected in spirit a few years later with Fringe.
13) Toxic fandom. Just like bad drivers, toxic fandom has always been around; it’s just much more visible in the age of instant media. There’s no denying it, and the more popular a franchise becomes, the more people will voice their displeasure with it. I’ll grant the article and similar articles that. However, I posit that this is always just a tiny minority; otherwise those franchises wouldn’t be successful in the first place. And giving this minority credit for successful boycotts is just plain stupid. The Guardian doesn’t go that far, but other similar articles blame toxic fandom for the failure of Solo, when the sad truth was that The Last Jedi was simply a bad movie, and the silent non-toxic majority soured on the franchise.
Tor’s free ebook for the month of June, available from June 12th to June 15th, is V. E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic. I’m afraid it’s only available in the US and Canada, except for Quebec.
https://ebookclub.tor.com/
@jayn Racking my brains for an Audrey Hepburn connection to SFF – didn’t she play an angel once?
Always (1989) — she played the angel who cut Richard Dreyfuss’s hair.
@kathodus
Either my Google-fu is lacking or I’m missing something.
(11) Sadly, far too often.
(12) A regrettable loss. They introduced me to a number of great comics that existed beyond newspapers.
Regards,
Dann
TAGLINE ERROR! Report to tech support
1) Here’s hoping for a speedy recovery. As for his medical expenses, $300K is likely a low end estimate. A decade ago, when I broke my leg and had routine surgery, after the first two-three days in the hospital, my insurance had already been billed roughly $50,000, what with surgery and all. This per the hospital’s billing office.
16) Audrey Hepburn played an angel in Always (Hap, in her final film).
(16) Obviously because one of her co-stars in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was Stanley Adams who was Cyrano Jones in Star Trek. It’s all about the tribbles.
Pixel Scrollightly seems like a good character name.
@Jack Lint: “It’s all about the tribbles.”
Dammit, now I’m imagining Quark singing “It’s All About the Latinum.”
Though I am old with commenting
On tedious threads where boredom lurks,
I will find out where they have gone,
And read their books and rec their works,
And nominate them with all praise,
And file till files and scrolls are done
The silver pixels of the moon,
The golden pixels of the sun.
@ Bruncvik
The Guardian doesn’t go that far, but other similar articles blame toxic fandom for the failure of Solo, when the sad truth was that The Last Jedi was simply a bad movie, and the silent non-toxic majority soured on the franchise.
I disagree. The Last Jedi had its problems but overall it was a good movie and the box office receipts reflected that. Why Solo did not meet expectations is not entirely clear, but I think it was because Ron Howard made a clunky meh movie and the fanbase wasn’t into another prequel.
The toxic Star Wars fans will always claim that any problem with the franchise occurred because *their* wants were not met (men only, men always heroic, women always admiring the men, etc.) Those wants sound suspiciously familiar, eh? But I digress. Anyways, I just think that Solo didn’t make the grade, despite prodigious efforts to provide fan service to a new generation.
@Dann
I was saying that claiming any kind of fan “outrage” is toxic is overly simplistic. And that’s what they’re doing when they equate the reaction against the Greedo-shot-first retcon with toxic behavior. Sure, fans were mad, but I don’t recall any toxic attempts to hound people out of the public eye. My example was imagining an alt-right propagandist remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark into a Nazi apologist movie, as I suspect that would anger almost all of Indiana Jones fandomo (would’ve said “all” a few years ago, but alas, times have changed).
If IX flops, *then* it might be time to blame The Last Jedi or toxic elements. Solo flopping could be much simpler: people being much more indifferent to a random spin-off prequel than to the main flow of the movies.
That’s certainly where I stand. I enjoyed the Last Jedi, and I am looking forward to IX, and while I *could* care less about Solo than I do, I don’t care about it terribly much. If I run off to watch a movie anytime this summer*, Deadpool 2 has a much bigger chance of getting my money, or maybe one of the animations if the reviews come in good enough.
* with two kids, and general difficulty with getting babysitters (which does tend to need to be a plural at bedtime), getting to a movie in the theatre is not that common a prospect. Add two July festivals to which I am thoroughly dedicated, and a weekend getaway to a small town already eating up one June weekend (yay!), and it gets really awkward to find time. We also have a projector at home and surround speakers so we get a reasonably big movie experience on our couch, so even if we wait to get a movie after it’s out on blu-ray, we can have a lot of theatre-style fun. And the popcorn is cheaper.
This non toxic minority loved TLJ and skipped Solo because if I wanted to see another SF movies about a dudebro Deadpool 2 sounded a lot more fun (which, holy shitballs, it was).
This flash fiction from MicroSFF might have been written with filers in mind:
https://twitter.com/MicroSFF/status/1006563491279441922