By Tanner Kinney The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinion of Byte or Byte’s editorial board. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Disney has control of the box office with every film it releases. If you want your film to succeed, and it has the same target audience as the next big Disney film, you move your release date. Whether it be animated films aimed towards families or their films aimed towards an older audience, Disney is a black hole, absorbing all ticket sales within a 10 movie radius. Despite claims that “superhero fatigue” will eventually hit Disney Marvel films, they are still going strong. It seems superhero fatigue is more just fatigue of terrible films, like Justice League. Yet, the impossible seems to have happened. A big budget blockbuster film from a well-established franchise tanked in the box office. The winner of the big loser trophy is Solo: A Star Wars Story. A Star Wars film with a troubled production, that got released after two major titles in Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2. Despite ranking first in its opening weekend, Solo bombed with only roughly 100 million dollars in domestic sales, and roughly 172 million dollars worldwide. Those numbers seem pretty good though, but with a 250 million dollar production budget that doesn’t even include marketing, which could easily add another 250 million onto it, Solo has quite a deficit to overcome. The questions: why did Solo fail? Is Disney Star Wars in trouble? And can Solo even have a chance to make its budget back? Let’s break out the calculators and see if Solo can win in the end. I don’t have a really good feeling about it.

Let me preface this by saying that I feel nothing about Star Wars. Despite writing about Star Wars twice previously, I was never a long time fan of the series. I think prequel memes are funny, even if they are a cynical fabrication by Disney executives to get people to love the prequels (even if it’s ironic love). I think the original trilogy is good. I even actually really like The Last Jedi, being one of the 46% of audience members on Rotten Tomatoes to give it a positive score. But Star Wars was never really my thing. I’m here for the numbers, and to see if it wasn’t Rian Johnson, but Hollywood hack Ron Howard who put Star Wars in a grave.

Blockbuster budgets

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Opening weekend woes

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Week two worsens

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The Rotten truth

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Box Office Mojo Observer RottenTomatoes IMDb