When it comes to Star Wars rumors online, it’s a good idea to approach them with healthy skepticism. That’s why, when we heard that test screenings for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had gone so disastrously that Lucasfilm called in George Lucas to fix the movie, I raised an eyebrow. That eyebrow then threatened to escape my forehead and shoot off into the stratosphere when I read that Disney had to spend an additional $300 million to get things back on track.
Given that the budget of the entire film is already roughly $300 million (in the same territory as The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi), spending another $300 million on top of that to fix it is near implausible. For one, it’d make the The Rise of Skywalker the most expensive pic of all-time at about $600 million, dwarfing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ $378.5 million budget. Furthermore, reshoots tend to not be as expensive as the original shoot as production assets have already been created.
While there have been reshoots on the pic, they’ve been of a similar scale to the other Disney Star Wars movies. After all, there’ve been no credible sources saying there were production complications that’d have warranted such ludicrous costs. If you’ll recall, when Rogue One and Solo had their production troubles it was front page news, so I don’t think there’s any conceivable way that The Rise of Skywalker could have kept a whopping $300 million worth of fixes under wraps.
The story smelt so fishy that we spoke to our own sources to find out what was going on and according to them, Disney did indeed enlist George Lucas to help as things weren’t going very well with early test screenings, but the cost to fix the project was apparently a far more sensible $20 million. At least, that’s the ballpark figure our sources gave us, and given that they’re the same ones who revealed the movie’s big twist months ago, which has since been confirmed, we have no reason to doubt them.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a heck of a lot of money, but it’s also roughly what it cost Disney and Lucasfilm to fix Rogue One when they brought Tony Gilroy in to supervise the final cut. And while I’m not making any judgments about whether The Rise of Skywalker will be any good or not, I suspect that a lot of these stories we’ve been hearing lately might be total fabrications. My bet is that they’re simply a way to attack Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy, who’s become target number one for the toxic elements of the Star Wars fandom.
from Movies – We Got This Covered https://ift.tt/32A0Mbh
0 comments: