TCTTS, was Philip Wise running TheForce.net back then? That guy is a grade A d-bag

I can't say I'm excited about Abrams simply because I hate all of his alternate universe stuff... hopefully he leaves that out.

My immediate reaction was "really?"

I mean I understand why they wanted him. He's a huge Star Wars geek that loves the franchise. But on the other hand, he's already at the helm of Star Trek. Do we really need both of those franchises being directed by the same guy?

But after further introspection, I think I feel a little better about having the Star Wars franchise in his hands. He's an uber SW nerd, and I'm sure he will want to do it justice.

I can't wait to see all the nods/references to the original trilogy he'll put in, and he will no doubt get John Williams to compose.

Agree with what simplebay said about Startrek being sci-fi action, and star wars needing to not be that. Which is funny, because when I was a kid, the star trek nerds told me star wars was sci fi action, and star trek was more of a thinkers' show.

super 8 sucked donkey nuts.

bankshot11 - The only person I really worked with at TheForce was a guy by the name of Scott Chitwood, who kind of co-ran the site. I didn't have much interaction with anyone else, as I wasn't a true employee or anything. Philip Wise very well could have been around then, but the name doesn't ring a bell. All I did was just write/manage the scriptment, and updated it once a week or so. It was something I was originally doing/hosting on my own, and it got so popular that TheForce asked me if I'd do it for them. This was like 2000 to late 2001, I think.

Holy crap. I used to read your stuff tctts.

Future headline:

"JJ Abrams announces Firefly revival, ascends to heaven"

Theforce.net was THE go-to site for info during the prequel era, so as a SW geek I frequented it quite a bit. Probably read your stuff too TCTTS.

boogieman, sharkenleo - That's pretty funny. It's been years since I've even thought about that scriptment. The whole Abrams secrecy thing is what reminded me of it today. There was even some random North Carolina newspaper that called me at one point and interviewed me for like 30 minutes about the whole thing. They did this entire article / write up on it and everything. It was just bizarre.

I really am curious if the hype for these new SW movies will come close to matching the hype for the prequels. After a 25+ year void of anything Star Wars, it just started to get insane once the prequels were actually becoming a reality. But now, given the (much) shorter time between the prequels and this new trilogy, the bad taste in people's mouths from the prequels, etc., I just don't see the hype reaching those past levels, It'll be absolutely crazy, for sure, but honestly, I don't know if we'll ever see anything like what we saw in '97/'98/'99. Kind of hard to believe, but there may never be a more anticipated movie than The Phantom Menace again in our lifetime.

I thought the hype for The Avengers was about on par with Star Wars.

^no way. Phantom Menace had people camping out for tickets for weeks, if I remember right. And not just a few people, sidewalks were covered in them. Never seen anything else come close to that.

I wonder how the increase of star wars content aimed at kids (IE clone wars tv show, etc.) will impact the hype/excitement among fans for the new ones when they come closer to release.

Gotta agree with Aggie_Journalist on this one, syag. Avenger hype was huge, but it didn't even come close to what we saw for TPM. I remember Leno mocking/interviewing people in line outside Mann's Chinese theater like two months before TPM even came out, if not before. And there were lines like that all over the country, all months before the release. Heck, I even remember going to see Enemy of the State opening weekend with friends the November prior - the movie the first TPM trailer was attached to - and as we were exiting the theater, there was a newspaper reporter waiting to ask people if they came to the movie just to see the trailer, which many people actually did. That was actually a "thing" being covered by the news. And this wasn't in LA or New York, this was in Wichita Falls, TX. Once March/April rolled around (the movie came out in May), the hype was just at this insane fever pitch. Star Wars was EVERYWHERE, and EVERYONE was talking about it. Since then, I'd say only the hype for The Dark Knight, or MAYBE the last Harry Potter movie (which was really more of sentimental thing for audiences), has come the closest, but really, neither one holds a candle to what it was like back in '99.

And yeah AG, the kid fans now, who have grown up on The Clone Wars, etc., could definitely make up for any lack of hype from the older, jaded crowd. Will be interesting to see.

[This message has been edited by Tctts (edited 1/25/2013 3:33a).]

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Theforce.net was THE go-to site for info during the prequel era, so as a SW geek I frequented it quite a bit. Probably read your stuff too TCTTS.

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Same here.

Some day, Tarantino is going to make a sci-fi movie with a downtrodden hero fighting against terrible odds to right wrongs with horrible brutality. It will have lots of little in-jokes and homages to classic seminal sci-fi movies from his childhood. And I will wait in line for weeks to see it. So say we all.

Avengers was not even 1% of the hype of Phantom Menace.

If writing is as bad as Phantom Menace, it won't matter who the director is.

Inverse lucas theory: the less creative involvement lucas has with a star wars project, the better it is. That bodes well.

TC,

so is that link and subsequent word doc. you posted what you came up with from all the info that was leaked?

That is basically, at least what I've read so far, pretty much the movie in script.

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I thought the hype for The Avengers was about on par with Star Wars.

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You have absolutely NO FREAKING IDEA what you're talking about, junior.

This reminds me of my one of my favorite Onion stories of all time.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/clinton-takes-leave-of-office-to-stand-in-line-for,743/

As for Abrams, I think he COULD do a good job, depending on how much he tries to revamp the SW galaxy. I don't think Star Wars can work if you completely change the style the way Abrams did with Star Trek. And please, no alternate timelines.

Yet The Avengers destroyed the Phantom Menace opening weekend. I agree that Phantom Menace was much bigger among fanboys, because lets face it, Star Wars fanboys are the craziest bunch out there. And the media latched on to it because it was a good story even for people that didn't watch it. But even counting for inflation and 3D, The Avengers sold more tickets. Unless I did my research wrong, The Avengers made 207 million on its opening weekend. I have know idea how to look it up, but lets say average ticket prices were 15 dollars. That means The Avengers sold almost 14 million tickets. The Phantom Menace made 65 million on its opening weekend. Lets say the average ticket was only $5. That means it sold less tickets than The Avengers. Am I wrong on this? Does anything else go into the gross besides tickets sales?

I bet you they just considered Ben Aflec in order to blackmail JJ into doing it.


"JJ, if you don't take over star wars, we are giving it to Ben Aflec...."

"That's cold blooded. What other choice do I have now?"

wow I used to read TCTTS stuff back in the day as well! Philip Wise runs rebelscum.com

I remember the guy I knew on FR that wrote for TheForce he went by Darth Sidious but I can't remember his real name.

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rebelscum.com

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HA! I'd be afraid to visit that site while at work.

the two words are rebel scum, not rebels.......

it's all about SW toys

Ya, but that domain name is almost as good as Pen Island's

Syag - I think movie theaters handle midnight release crowds much better now than they used to for big movies, which allows for more tickets to be sold. When I saw Dark Knight Rises this summer, that was a well-oiled midnight machine showing on every screen. I was younger when PM came out, but I thought I remembered everyone watching it during the day, not midnight.

Phantom Menace had midnight showings. First I can remember a movie doing that. But only one like 2 screens each theater.

I don't disagree with that, but I taught middle school during the release of both movies, and the hype for The Avengers was way more among the students than Star Wars. I think the hype was so focused on the fanboys, which make up a small portion of the movie going population, but The Avengers had a much wider appeal. Star Wars did have fans camping out for days, no doubt. But so did Twilight. And as someone that has been going to Comic-Con for years, The Twihards are much crazier than Star Wars fans.

phantom menace had 20 years of hype.

avengers has less than 1.

^
I think hype on The Avengers probably started with the post-credit sequence in the first Iron Man movie, but it really blew up with the credits of Captain America.

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phantom menace had 20 years of hype.

avengers has less than 1.

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This. Did Avengers make more money? Yes. Did more teens/kids see it opening weekend? Probably. But there's no way people like my parents would ever go see The Avengers, yet they were in line opening weekend for TPM. Granted, that's not the best barometer, but TPM wasn't just a fanboy thing that the media latched on to. All ages and all types of movie goers were ridiculously hyped to see Star Wars again after a 25+ year absence. I'd say Avengers was mainly a teenage boy thing, with obvious exceptions, of course.

As for the whole midnight showing thing, I'm sure there were, but yeah, I don't remember ever hearing of midnight showings before TPM. I was a senior in high school when TPM came out, and I'll never forget people coming to school the next day who had attended the midnight showings, hearing about the movie from them and thinking that was just crazy. And ever since then, every big blockbuster had to have midnight showings. TPM more or less started that trend - if not made it the norm - and that has to count for something. It literally changed the way movies were shown/released, something Avengers obviously didn't do.

Hmm avenger's have been around a bit longer than one year...

They started 9/1963...

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TC,

so is that link and subsequent word doc. you posted what you came up with from all the info that was leaked?

That is basically, at least what I've read so far, pretty much the movie in script.

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Exactly. I'd say about a year after TPM hit theaters, small bits and pieces about Episode II started to leak. But there wasn't one source for it all. A rumor of one scene/aspect/character would be at one site and rumor of another scene/aspect/character would be at different sight. So, being the organized/OCD freak that I am, I started to compile all the script rumors into one document. Plus, it was just kind of good script-writing exercise. Granted, it was a chore trying to separate the legit stuff from the fake stuff, but it became easier and easier to distinguish over time. After a few months, once I had a decent snapshot of the story compiled, I hosted a version of the document on a couple message boards, and it just blew up from there. As more info leaked, people would ask for an updated version, and after a few weeks of doing that, TheForce.net came calling, asking if they could host it instead of me posting it myself to places. And that's when it really exploded, to the point where legit "sources" were sending me actual script excerpts and what not. After another few months, I basically had a scene-by-scene breakdown of the entire movie. And this was back in the day when stuff like that didn't really leak out. There were no pdfs of scripts or anything. So it was kind of novelty in a way, though, it wasn't the first time I had done something like that.

Truth be told, I had done roughly the same thing for the first X-Men movie the year before, in late '99 / early '00. And that one got to be such a "thing" that Bryan Singer himself actually emailed me, telling me that a couple of scenes I had weren't going to be in the final edit (specifically, Cyclops' and Storm's origin sequences). Of course, being just some Joe-schmo in college who idolized guys like Singer, it absolutely blew my mind that he'd take the time to email someone like me. But he was super cool about the whole thing, and we even exchanged emails for the next few months or so, me asking for writing advice, etc. (And yes, before anyone asks it I was Tuiasosopoed, I had his email confirmed through a couple other sources. It was him.)

[This message has been edited by TCTTS (edited 1/25/2013 12:07p).]

Another great breakdown of what to expect from a J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars movie, this one from The Playlist...

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/what-should-we-expect-from-a-j-j-abrams-star-wars-movie-20130125