As you may have heard, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has taken in more than a billion dollars worldwide, so far. $1.09 billion, to be exact.
But the folks over on Return of Kings still think that their “boycott” of the film was a HUGE SUCCESS. How’s that, you ask?
Well, as RoK contributor David Garrett figures it, if Return of Kings hadn’t warned the men of the world that The Force Awakens is “SJW propaganda,” the film might have taken in roughly $4.2 million more than it did.
That’s right: it could have made $1,094,200,000 instead of the paltry $1,090,000,000 it’s taken in so far.
IN YOUR FACE, SJWs!
So how exactly does Garrett arrive at that $4.2 million figure? WITH SCIENCE.
Fifty-five percent of respondents to a Return of Kings Twitter poll have said that online reporting of the social justice nature of The Force Awakens influenced their decision whether to see the film. Extended across our readership, with over 900,000 users accessing ROK between November 21 and December 21, this amounts to a potential direct impact of $4,219,456.54 (55% x $8.38 x 915,482) on total revenues. $8.38 is based on the average cinema ticket price in the US, which is now an all-time high.
Well, you can’t argue with that!
And that $4,219,456.54 figure doesn’t even take into account the other right-wing media outlets that warned their readers about the evil SJW agenda behind The Force Awakens. Add that in, Garrett suggests, and the total cost of the right-wing “boycott” is in the “tens of millions of dollars.”
I have done a similar calculation to determine how much of a financial effect my writings about their “boycott” have had on the box office of The Force Awakens.
8.38 (ticket cost in dollars) x 7,390,966,099 (the number of people who might have been influenced by my posts, based on total world population) + 0.47 (amount of change in my pocket) – 7.67 (estimated cost of lunch today) / 2 (number of cats in my apartment)
So that comes to $61,936,295,906 per cat in my apartment. In other words, without my influence, The Force Awakens would have lost $60,846,295,906 at the box office (per cat in my apartment), making it the biggest financial disaster in Hollywood history. (I think. I’m not really that good at math.)
A loss of that magnitude would have had a disastrous effect on the world economy, including my cats. And I have prevented it.
You’re welcome!
I think we’re discussing an average price for theater tickets here. It just makes everything a hell of a lot simpler.
Yes, of course, Series 35, how provincial of me. *sips sweet iced tea*
I thought Greg Davies was a trooper for sticking his head through a wide variety of surfaces. At least the scenery was convenient for the chewing.
I’m afraid we’re going to have to fight very hard not to smirk when we hear the phrase “irritable bowel” for a while.
“Robots of Death” was Beloved’s first exposure to Doctor Who, by the way. It was the only ep available in the local Blockbuster.
My god, I’m never going to rent The Force Awakens from a Blockbuster, am I.
I still haven’t seen Force Awakens, but in general I don’t get why people want the plot to a fantasy (and I’d consider Star Wars to be as much of a fantasy set in space as it is a Sci fi) to be plausible. Nothing about the original Star Wars trilogy is particularly plausible. It’s a fun action movie.
The complaints Bryce was making are similar to complaints I see about Daenerys in ASOIAF. And plenty of other female genre characters. A lot of male fans are simply looking for an excuse to disapprove of female characters. Male characters never get criticized as much.
I loved the fact that, although there was a bit of CGI, for the most part it was just Greg D sticking his head through a hole; that’s so Doctor Who.
And he was brilliant; did seem to be channeling a bit of his Inbetweeners head of sixth form there too (I keep trying to persuade teacher friends to use “Try not to kill anyone, it reflects badly on the school”)
Robots of Death is one of my all time favourites (and not just because of Leela). To bring us full circle it demonstrates the earlier point about ripping off ideas, when done well, being a good thing.
Basically, in the earliest literature, the engines have to please Sir Topham Hatt or they get sent away or bricked up into a wall.
I wondered if it had anything to do with the Rev. Awdry being a Rev., but Beloved just thinks it’s capitalism.
The engines are clearly both personified and treated as property, so does it border on slavery?
My turn to confess unfamiliarity with Bagpuss.
Unfortunately, Leela’s time gives us “The Talons of Weng Chiang” which has some pretty good bits to it but also yellow face. :/
Best comment on Hollywood accounting ever was on Freakazoid:
“Always ask for a percent of the gross, not the net. The net is fantasy.”
@ Falconer
Awdry was quite a lefty though wasn’t he? So if it is about capitalism/slavery then presumably he was making the point that these were bad things (the trains are the protagonists after all) rather than approving.
My main issue with ‘Talons’ is that Leela behaves totally out of character in the rat scene. She wouldn’t scream; she’d be wearing its skin two minutes later.
The yellow face aspects though bring up a topic I have been thinking about generally since someone mentioned something about the Big Bang Theory on here.
You know how nowadays we cringe at things like yellow face and even moreso stuff like ‘The black and white minstrel show” yet at the time they were just ‘family entertainment’?
Do you think in 20 years time people will be as aghast at Sheldon as we would be about jokes about a physically disabled person?
It’s the “mores/temporares” thing. Like how we can’t understand how anyone could have thought slavery was acceptable yet that was a mainstream view at the time. Some of my animal rights friends are convinced that in 100 years time we’ll look back at farming and meat consumption with the same revulsion as we now do about slavery and cannibalism. So are we (well, those of us who are carnivores) as equally evil as slave owners or does being a product of the time negate that?
It’s a fascinating topic (to me at least).
One of Awdry’s stories involves Thomas crashing through a house because someone left his controls open a little bit, so as he warmed up he started producing power, and while he thought he was moving by himself, he couldn’t brake, there was no buffer on the end of the track, and so he interrupts the stationmaster’s breakfast.
He gets all the blame for everything even though nothing was his fault.
@ Falconer
Ah, so now we know what was regular reading in the Scott household!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstoppable_(2010_film)
If we’re going with the theory that Awdry was sticking up for the working (wo)man, that could be a commentary on how big business blames things on ‘human error’ rather than cutting corners on health and safety for financial reasons though.
Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like that.
BFE or including matinees into the mix, perhaps?
I just pre-purchased two tickets for reserved seats (plush, reclinable seats in which we may drink beer) for The Force Awakens on Friday at 2pm for a bit under $30.
Totally worth it.
(FWIW, comparable tickets where we live may run another $10-$20. These are for several counties south of us so that my Mom may watch our children during the movie.)
On the subject of “What About teh Menz?”:
http://www.themarysue.com/jessica-jones-gender-equality/
Semi-spoiler alert
The Force Awakens has seriously evil Nazi-like villians with serious anger and control issues. RoK and guys like Aurini seem like they’re interested in rehabilitating National Socialism and Hitler. They want to look to a historical radical chauvinist group that hates leftism and liberalism but isn’t traditional or religious or doctrinaire on economic issues. Ergo, they want people to forget how bad fascism was.
I like that he knows how much money they lost down to 9 significant figures.
@mockingbird
That is an excellent article!
It’s not the first time I read about people perceiving gender parity as “too much on the women’s side”, but I couldn’t find (as easy as I expected) the research to back it up.
I did find this study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, also interesting to read and somewhat hopeful:
http://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/key-findings-status-quo-2013.pdf
Newbie:
That is the best penis info, EVAR. I am agnostic with an atheist bent now, but from birth until last march, I was a Christian. I was really bad at it, but whatever.
I read about a scholar a while back that said that the word “foot” had been used as an incorrect translation of what was supposed to be “penis”. All those stories about feet in the bible, and it was actually penis. THAT made some Christian’s heads explode around here, and it was info I shared liberally. It was severely underappreciated, in my opinion. I only wish that I could share this new info with Christians, but oddly enough, I don’t see them much anymore.
I have a general question. I know I saw the original SW movies years ago, I was 6 or so when they first came out.
I didn’t pay them much attention, and my husband said something to me that I think I might disagree with, but I can’t be sure. He said that the princess Leia character was a pro-woman character.
Is that the impression of SW people?
See, I paid those movies very little attention, but when I think of Leia, I picture her chained up in tiny clothing being rescued by a white guy. THAT is the image of those movies that I have retained as a very casual watcher. That is my impression of her, and it doesn’t seem pro-woman.
900k??? oh please… lol…
900k uniques is not 900k different users. The uniqueness is checked by the MAC address of each network interface that exists on the device… computers, cell phones, etc. Even the same device can have several network interfaces/IDs, like Ethernet or Wireless. So lets say I visit a site using my:
– Cell phone
– Tablet
– Laptop (through the Wireless interface)
– Laptop (through the Ethernet interface)
– Desktop
– Work computer
As a single person, I have generated 6 uniques. By checking the data from:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/333861/connected-devices-per-person-in-selected-countries/
and even though its for 2014, the average on the US is 2.9, so, roughly 3. Its estimated that by 2017 each person will each have 5 devices:
http://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-predicts-mobile-2013-5
Given that the sample period was fairly extended period (1 month) that only increases the odds of these uniques growing, simply because I might not use my iPad today, but might do it tomorrow, the work computer the day after, and so on. So at the very least, whatever number they claim, should be just one third, unless they are buying movie tickets for each device… lol…
@raysa, yes, Leia gets forced to wear a brass bikini and a chain in the second act of the third movie. While Luke does manage to smuggle his lightsaber into Jabba’s court, when he busts it out he’s trying to save all of their skins, not just Leia’s. While he is busy with that, Leia uses the chain that Jabba makes her wear to strangle his fat, greasy ass to death.
My take-away from that is, don’t make Leia your prisoner.
She is captured by the Empire at the start of the first movie. They torment her, trying to make her divulge the location of the secret Rebel base, but she doesn’t break and only gives them out-of-date information when she’s trying to bargain for her planet. They blow it up anyway and make her watch. Then they stick her in a cell. Once Luke and Han and Chewie blast their way into the cell block, and get cornered, Leia spots their way out, takes command of their exfiltration, and shoots more than one stormtrooper on the way.
In the second movie, she’s in a position of authority at Echo Base, and while she doesn’t go out to rescue Luke, she stays until there is no chance to reach the transports and she has to leave with Han on the Falcon. She helps make repairs to the Falcon, and while she is made prisoner on Cloud City, so is everybody else. Then, when Lando springs them, she takes charge of their attempt to rescue Han and their exfiltration, then leads them to Luke.
Yes, she does tend to sit passively while incarcerated until someone outside her prison busts it open. I wish she could have been more pro-active while imprisoned. Once she is out, though, she makes her captors regret the day they locked her up.
@ raysa
I’d say Princess Leia is a rather pro-woman character, Yes. While the metal bikini bit has problems, ultimately it’s a very small part of the trilogy. (Actually, even when she’s wearing that, she defeats Jabba the Hutt, and escapes herself, so she isn’t really rescued as much as she escapes with the others.)
She’s very much an equal to the male heroes, I’d say (apart from the Jedi, but they seem wiser than everyone.)
Perhaps the reason she sits passively was because she wanted to lower the captors guard while she planned the escape of her and her friends and perhaps even murder the villain? (ie strangling Jabba, the absolutely hideous creature that he is.)
Leia’s held pretty securely both times; unassisted escape wasn’t really an option.
It’s interesting. The US State Department (and I assume equivalent agencies in other countries) recommends that if you get taken hostage in another country that you wait for rescue. It’s much more likely to end with you getting out alive than if you try to fight back or escape. But in fiction, we get annoyed with characters, particularly female characters for waiting to be rescued even though it’s actually the smartest thing to do. It’s seen as weak. I do of course understand why feminists will often get annoyed at damsels in distress being rescued by men plots though. I think the issue isn’t that there are too many times that female prisoners don’t escape on their own. The issue is that the rescuers are too often men instead of women or mixed gender groups.
Anyway, not on topic at all but I just read this and thought it might be of interest.
http://jezebel.com/when-your-fat-pic-goes-viral-as-a-feminist-cautionary-t-1749947791
The author is quite the misanderer and is doing Katie proud!
I’d say that Han is in far more need of rescuing at the beginning of RotJ than Leia. HOWEVER, Leia was sexualized by Jabba in a way that none of the male characters experienced. There are a couple of levels to that: it’s something that happened to her because the men making the movie wanted to put Carrie Fisher into a sexualized outfit, but it’s also extremely close to reality that a female captive is more likely to be sexualized than a male captive. There are several messages about the objectification of women in it, depending on what layer you choose for your analysis.
Right, because Star Wars is well-known for its completely plausible plot elements and slavish dedication to established canon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAOX_CHU0JY
Game over, folks. Bryce has mansplained that female leads are required to meet Bryce’s personal standard for what constitutes a believable, complex person, and if they fail to meet this standard then they are not allowed to be female. Male leads are not required to meet this standard, of course. Rey doesn’t meet Bryce’s personal expectations, therefore she doesn’t matter whatsoever, and whatever you female-identifying people might think about her importance is actually wrong.
So a movie which is on pace to be the highest grossing film of all time has somehow been negatively impacted by a boycott of White Supremacists?
In an alternate universe perhaps but not on planet Earth.
The delusion tastes strong and bitter.