Topic: Rogue One A Star Wars Story (2016)

This week Topher Mac briefly discusses the most beloved movie of the Disney Era of Star Wars, Rogue One.  He also briefly touches on why Marsha Lucas was important to George Lucas’s best creative works and he also can’t hold back what he really thinks of Ryan Johnson when it comes to the Skywalker Saga.  

Transcript

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The force is with me, and I am one with the force. The force is with me, and I am one with the force. The force is with me, and I am one with the uh shadows that shine. Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Shadows That Shine. I am Tophimak, your host, and here we are. Uh, today we're gonna be covering uh Rogue One, a Star Wars story, and uh that would be because later this week, the first Star Wars movie to come out uh in movie theaters since the pandemic, it's gonna be uh Mandalorian and Grogu. Are you excited about it? Let me know. Come on down, comment under uh this episode's uh entry on Instagram at Shadows That Shine and let me know. So I'm curious to know what you think. And in just a few minutes, we'll dig into Rogue One. But before we do, um, as I said before, I'm Tophimack. Let's get into the box office real quick. Uh, this week, taking back control of the top of the list is Michael, adding $26.1 million for Lionsgate. That brings the totals to $283.8 million domestic, $424 million international for a total of $706.8 million dollars against a budget of $200 million. I'd say I'd say they're making money over there. Um, I hear it's a fluff piece though, you know. Uh Devil Wears Prada 2 comes in uh what seems like a pretty distant second place. $17.9 million dollars added to Walt Disney Studio Motion Pictures, bringing their totals to 175.7 million, and and that's domestically. Internationally, they've done 370.3 million for a total of 546 million dollars against a budget of about 100 million. Another movie making money, huh? Yeah, I guess people really did want that uh sequel. Um I have to admit I'm a little surprised. Third place new movie on the list is Obsession, 17.2 million dollars added to focus features. Now, as it was you know just coming out, that means that's what it made domestically over the weekend. 7.7 million internationally for a total of 24.9 million. Now, the budget for that, here's what's weird, okay. I have seen estimates that range between 775,000 to a million dollars, but I've seen budget uh as a matter of fact, from a uh from Forbes magazine saying that it was five million dollars, and that's the difference between I mean, no matter what, it made its money back. Obviously, it's what people were wanting. It is a Blumhouse film, from what I understand. Um and I mean it's it's made some bank, especially off the uh international distribution rights. This film actually was released, uh it was premiered last year, and then there's a bidding war for it, and now we're getting the wide release for it. And hey, there's an object. I I would love to go see it. I'd I'd like to get into the movie theater and check that out if I get a chance to leave the house. Mortal Kombat 2 is in fourth place with adding $13.4 million to Warner Bros. Bringing your domestic total to $62.2 million, $39 million for the international for a total of $101.2 million. That's against an estimated $80 million budget. And here we have bringing up the rear, fifth place, the sheep detective. And that movie looks cute. I want to see it. I want to say cute is I think the right word to use. It added $9.6 million to Amazon MGM Studios for a total of $29.9 million domestically, $29 million internationally for $58.9 million altogether so far total against a budget of $75 million. So it hasn't even sort of broken even yet. It's not doing Wunderbar. Um a noteworthy mention here is in the gray, I believe, got like eighth place with $2.9 million. Uh, their budget is somewhere between um 40 and 80 million dollars from what I've been able to see. Not a strong opening. Uh, but that's wild, you know. Uh the director is a fantastic director, so I I wonder maybe bad marketing, maybe it's the wrong time for something like that. Uh I mean we'll see how this summer plays out for movies uh of the sort. The weekend total was uh 106.7 million dollars, means it was down 36 percent. And that, of course, is our box office. And you know, yeah, that's your box office. I'm Topher Mac. Again, you're listening to Shadows That Shine, and I appreciate you for it. We're on Facebook. We are. You can look us up at uh but just by hitting that search bar, type in Shadows That Shine, following us, commenting, we can get into actual discussions there. If you're right there, I'll be right back, man. That's that's how that works at this stage. You know, if you're listening to this in three years, I can't promise you the same thing. But you know, if you're if you're with us for the new episodes, yeah, let's go, buddy. Let's go. Um yeah. This week, since we last met each other, I uh I really haven't watched much movies. I finished playing Hogwarts Legacy, but I did because I was watching, I mean, I was playing so much Harry Potter-like stuff, I decided to crack open a few of the Harry Potter books, give it a little giddy go, and then on top of that, I um I checked out the Fantastic Beast trilogy. I revisited that, and I do got words to say about that. Um, they're better than I remember. The third one, uh, you can see that Warner Brothers made a huge mistake not keeping Johnny Depp in. They caved to well, you would say they caved to pressure, but you know, Amber Heard was convicted of things, and they still released um what was that superhero movie? Uh Aquaman 2. But they took Johnny out, and it's a strange double standard, and I, you know, that was just before JK Roland had completely shot herself in the foot, or maybe it was after, it's hard to tell. And it's why we're getting these Harry Potter uh television show remakes that have already um have already been filmed and will hit the airwaves in you know two or three months. I'm curious to know if you guys are excited for that. I'm I'm pretty much done with Hogwarts Legacy, so I should be back to watching movies soon. Speaking of watching movies, friend of the pod, Michael, the success story. Um, I don't know if you're listening, but I want to say congratulations. I heard that next week, and I gotta look up the date because I don't want to get that wrong. I believe the date is the 26th at the Cameo Collective that's in downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina. He's gonna have some short films air. They have this little $5 ticket thing. I haven't been paid to advertise this. I'm I'm just wanting to show some support for Michael, the success story. Um, he's a stand-up comic who dabbles in the filmmaking arts. He was our very first uh guest host, uh guest co-host, sorry. And um I'm wishing you all the luck in the world. If I can make it there, I'm gonna check it out. If I can't make it there, you know, I'll try to send someone in my place. Uh really happy for you, buddy, and um keep it up. Alright, we're gonna take a little short break. When we get back, we're gonna dig uh dig on in. It's it is May, which is a Star Wars month. Um, and we're gonna dig uh deep into Rogue One a Star Wars story. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I need to be more enthusiastic. Yeah enthusiasm, right? Quieter enthusiasm, gotcha. Alright. Here's the break. October 2012. That is when Bob Iger made things official that Star Wars, Lucasfilm, the entire Lucasfilm company, had been purchased from George Lucas for just over four billion dollars. Within three years, we would get our very first new Star Wars film since the prequel trilogy. Now, when I say first new, I'm talking live action. I know there was an animated film in between there. Don't come at me. Um, but this is the first live action, and when I say this, I don't mean Rogue One, the first one out the gate was Star Wars Episode 7. I remember walking out of that theater and telling my buddy, you know, this might be a really good movie, but I'm not gonna know until I watch the next one because it this is setting up for something, but if it doesn't pay off, then bump this movie. I'm not for it. Well, we all know how that turned out, and if you happened to listen to the episode last week of Zach and JP's Burnout Hijinx, you would have heard me talking about Star Wars. Uh it came up, and I I told a version of that story, uh, a more colorful version of that story, and I ripped on Ryan Johnson because I don't uh care for what he did. But before he went and destroyed uh Star Wars for me, um we got this Final Little Gem. Released December 16th, 2016. Rogue One, a Star Wars story came to us. It was rated PG 13, it uh was two hours and 13 minutes long, directed by Gareth Edwards, who previously had directed the Godzilla remake, and before that, a movie called Monsters. He has not done very much uh in terms of directing. But those are strong, you know, strong things to have done. Story by credits go to John Noel and Gary Widda. I'll tell you more about that in a little bit. Screenplay, uh, that credits uh those credits go to Chris White and Tony Gilroy. The budget is somewhere between 200 and 280 million dollars. What did they bring in? 533.5 million dollars domestically. Hey, earlier, if you were listening to the Box Office 2 films, have done that, uh have done more than that, that are currently out. 525.1 million dollars internationally for a total of 1.06 billion dollars. Now, that made it the second highest grossing film of the year behind Captain America Civil War. It was a good year for Disney. It was originally pitched as an episode of a TV series that never was produced. Uh, way back in 2003. The show would have been called Star Wars Underworld, and John Kroll was the guy who came up with it. He saw the opportunity when Disney bought, I'm sorry, acquired. Um, when Disney acquired Lucasfilm, they're like, we're gonna make a movie every year, we're gonna make a Skywalker film every other year, and every other year we're gonna do these um other Star Wars stories. At the time, nobody knew what that meant. There were, of course, rumors of a Han Solo prequel story that nobody had asked for, and uh apparently people had asked for it, but uh no one I know wanted to see that. And wouldn't you know it? The movie Theatre Box Office for that proved it, but hey, I'm getting ahead of myself. Um, he picked this idea back up and he went into Kathleen Kennedy's office and and pitched the film, and within a week it was greenlit. And uh, you know, that's how it came to be. That's how he gets his story by credit. Now, Tony Gilroy, who's credited as a uh screenplay guy, he actually came in to do the reshoot, the scheduled reshoots, uh, which is what led to his writing credit, because they they made a lot of changes. You'll you would know that if you ever saw the original trailers for the film, and then when you went to finally watch the movie, saw nothing from the trailer inside inside the movie. They did uh apparently significant changes to the movie. Um speaking of little tidbit fun fact things, this is the first Star Wars film without a John Williams score. Now you'll see little allusions to it here and there, but no John Williams. John did episode seven right before that, and then now it's time to let some fresh blood in to do some composing because now we're in Disney's. Now we're in Disney's Star Wars. Um, this is before we knew everything was gonna go bad, and I I think it's fair to say that most people really like this movie. That it is uh one of the strongest movies in the franchise. Um I mean I I don't I personally could not entertain anything being better than four and five. I don't think any of the movies are better than that. Some of them are newer and fresher, uh, but none of them, in my opinion, are all around uh better than A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. That being said, um This is kind of the last great Star Wars movie. Uh, and I think it's interesting that 11 days after the premiere of this film, Carrie Fisher passed away. Um again, subsequent subsequently after, uh we haven't had a good Star Wars movie. Uh I thought that Ryan Johnson's Star Wars episode 8 was terrible. And I thought, um while I enjoyed uh 9, I think the the reason I enjoyed 9, same reason I enjoyed 7, uh the filmmaker is a good filmmaker, but they are not uh objectively good movies, and they just a lot of stuff. I mean, you could do a whole episode on the new trilogy, and I probably should at some point, and I should get a Star Wars fanatic, and I think I'm very likely to do that. But there's actually another Star Wars topic that I wanted to cover now, but because I couldn't get a co-host in, uh, currently my situation doesn't allow for me to have co-host temporarily, uh, or else I would have covered um a topic that's important to me to cover about George Lucas. I personally believe, now before I get into this, I know that we haven't talked about Rogue One yet. I'll get to it. Please be patient. Now, everybody knows Star Wars, super important, great movie. Uh Empire Strikes Back. Oh my goodness, this movie's so good. George Lucas uh really hadn't made a great movie since you know the third one was uh pretty good. There are parts of the third one that are fantastic, but it's you know, there it's it's not as strong as the first two movies were. But here's the thing about that I have a theory that Marsha Lucas is the filter we needed for George Lucas to be brilliant, because I think George Lucas's early uh films, THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars, and Empire Strikes Back, all of them he was married to a fantastic film editor. And she was able to help edit him into reality. She literally helped edit Star Wars and gave it its rhythm. Brilliant, brilliant person behind every great man. Nine times out of ten, you're gonna find a great woman. Christopher Nolan is, in my opinion, the greatest living director right now. Guess what? His wife is his producer, wouldn't you know it? When a director works with somebody that's in the industry, that especially if it's someone that doesn't do the same thing as them, you see incredible collaboration. And I think Marsha Lucas was a great example, even though you know she sort of helped out here and there and she gave her advice here and there, but that's all she needed to do. You know, she was the one that was like, I don't know about this quills stuff. Uh deep cut for the Star Wars fans, and and actually referenced in Rogue One. Now, one day I'm gonna do a deep dive into that whole Marshall Lucas stuff. I just wanted to get off my chest in case I never get the chance to say it. Alright, Rogue One. Here's the thing. I don't see Rogue One as a Star Wars movie, I think it is a war movie. It's a good thing Memorial Day is Monday. Thank you, uh troops and people related to troops uh who have secured uh what was once our freedoms. Um you know, I love what this country's supposed to be. Uh, and so happy memorial memorial day if you're listening to it then. Star Wars, Memorial Day, when you know it. It's telling a war story. I mean, it's Apocalypse Now, it's Inglorious Bastards, it's you know, it is a lot more of a war film than a Star Wars film. Star Wars, and you're like, well, that's silly because there's war in the Star Wars films, those are space operas. They feel totally different than this movie feels, and it's not just because it's a different director, they even feel different than the other Disney movies that have been made. Now, rumor has it, Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a TV show, which is wild because John Favravo is an incredible director. So I'm curious to see for myself. But with Rogue One, you had someone come in and say, Let's do something fresh with it, and he did something fresh. From what I hear, George Lucas loved the movie, and I believe that he would, based on what I I just sat down and rewatched the film. I remember thinking it's pretty alright the first time I saw it. I liked it a lot better this time, and that's a good thing. If you're rewatching a movie and you like it more than you did the time before, it's a good sign of the quality film that it is. This was Um it had a lot to like it told a story that I mean frankly, Rogue One is based on the opening crawl of the Star Wars New Hope. It is the truest form of prequel because it's fulfilling a story that actually was told way back in 70, I think, six. All these years later, it comes back, it gives us what it is, what 40 years later, and um solid storytelling, fantastic characters. Uh the droid work was great by uh Tucker and Dell. I believe the guy who played Tucker is the guy who did the uh really what's Tucker and Dell? Tucker and Dell versus Evil is a great little um comedy slasher film if you ever get the chance to see it. Anyways, he plays the robot. Um I don't recognize, and I'll probably get ridiculed for, but I don't recognize the two leading uh actor and actress for this, but I did recognize our our villain guy. He's been in a few things, he's a fantastic villain. Uh, it's always great to see Darth Vader, it's always great to see Moose Tafar. The best uh movie in the uh prequel trilogy is uh I don't think anyone would argue against me. It is Star Wars uh episode three, Revenge of the Sith. And it's nice to be able to touch something that touches that, and and then the whole way through this movie, they shot it knowing people are gonna watch this thing back to back with the other one. I had to fight the urge to immediately put in Star Wars A New Hope. Uh, because I knew I had to record this, and it's like I kind of really want to watch it now because it does a great job of setting it up, and you're like, oh, what's gonna happen next? I mean, the minute that uh spoiler alert, the minute that Vader comes through with that lightsaber and starts slashing and dashing. It's first time he's ever killed a non um first time he's killed a non-Jedi with the red lightsaber. Of course he killed some sand people in episode two. But you know, here we are. Evil, he's so evil. Um these movies are supposed to be uh fun, but they're also supposed to touch your heart, and this movie has both of those things throughout. There are a lot of funny moments, again, very cool characters. The two Chinese gentlemen that uh play these side characters are easily my favorite thing about the movie. Feels very Korosawa, uh Korosawa being a huge influence on the original trilogy, and it feels very Korosawa in the best of ways, even though Korosawa would be a Japanese filmmaker and these were Chinese actors. I mean, it's a solid thing. I I think if you haven't watched it in a while, you should go and revisit it. And I don't have too much to add to it. I think I think my hot take thing is definitely that I don't think of it as a Star Wars movie, I think of it as a war movie, but it does super make me want to watch Star Wars. And honestly, I'm not much of a Star Wars fan anymore. Ryan Johnson killed my fanhood. I used to be a hardcore, super duper Star Wars fan. Now I just ugh ugh, you know, Ryan Johnson slapped the taste out of my mouth. You know, I'm gonna make Star Wars different. I'm gonna shit all over everything. You know, I almost got a whole episode without cussing. Frickin' Ryan Jansen over here making me a uh G Wellickers. Well, uh, that'll do it. I don't, you know, that's all I really have to say about this. Beautiful movie, great score, absolutely worth the watch, deserved the billion dollars that it made. Um, easily the best thing that the Disney Star Wars has produced. Uh, the first couple seasons of The Mandalorian also deserve an honorable mention of the best things. I've heard good things about uh there's like a I guess a prequel to Rogue One that's on Disney Plus, but I don't have streaming services, so I don't know anything about it. And this is not a uh this isn't a TV series podcast, this is a cinema podcast. So, you know, I'm probably not gonna know about it, to be honest with you. Uh I I do fully intend on going to watch uh Mandalom Mando and Grogu. We'll see how it happens. I've got a crazy week ahead of me. Um, what is next? What is next? I'm gonna tell you this week we got a few movies coming out. Um and those are uh, of course, one more time, Star Wars, uh, the Mandalorian and Group, Baby Yoda in the house. What would there are two other movies of the uh horror persuasion that's passenger and corporate retreat? Both of those are probably gonna be good movies. I don't know that I would say that they're gonna make a ton of it's I'm curious who's gonna win the weekend. I really couldn't say from what I'm hearing. Star Wars is projecting to be on the low side of ticket sales. I don't foresee Passenger or Corporate Retreat, you know, doing bigger than that. And in a month where Michael is dominating, it kind of makes me think Michael might win the weekend. But I I hope good things happen to good movies. That's what I hope. Um I still haven't had anyone tell me what they thought of Devil Wars Prada 2. Having never seen the original, I don't plan on going to see the sequel. Uh, but I'd love to know if it was good or not, so I can tell all you fine folks if somebody I trust who's seen it wants to reach out and say, well, Jay Weller Christopher, then I can pass that word along. Um, in addition to those movies, of course, if you happen to live in southeastern North Carolina, check out the Cameo Collective. Um, I'm sure that if you go to Michael the Success Story's profile, that he'll have the information about it on there. He's on Instagram. We are friends, Shadows That Shine is friends with Mike the Success Story. And you know, you can find it through that avenue of searching. Um, and there we are. I'm Topher Mac, and we're gonna we're gonna cut this one short. This seems like a good stopping point. Thank you very much. This has been Shadows That Shine, a movie podcast. I'm Topher Mack telling you bye!