Solo: A Box Office Bomb?

The Business Insider reports that Solo: A Star Wars Story has had a less than stellar opening weekend:

It turns out Star Wars is not bulletproof.

The beloved franchise released its latest A Star Wars Story movie over Memorial Day weekend by telling the origin story of space scoundrel Han Solo, and it greatly underperformed.

Solo: A Star Wars Story earned an estimated $83 million domestically over the weekend and is projected to take in $101 million by Memorial Day, according to Exhibitor Relations. That's $29 million off what the industry had for the movie's low-end projection.

In the middle of last week, Solo was projected to earn between $130 million and $150 million on 4,381 screens. If that held, Solo would be set up to be the latest Star Wars movie having a record-breaking box office opening — taking the crown from current Memorial Day record holder, 2007's Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End with $139.8 million.

But by the end of day Friday, Disney hinted that the weekend wouldn't go according to plan as it drastically adjusted that projection to between $105 million and $115 million over the four-day weekend.

The $101 million performance by Memorial Day for Solo would be strong for any other movie at any other studio — especially over a holiday weekend where audiences would rather be outside than in a theater — but for a Star Wars movie, this just doesn't cut it.

[Excerpt edited for punctuation]

The Business Insider speculates that the weak performance by Solo at the box office is due largely to three factors: "opening over Memorial Day weekend, Star Wars fatigue, and the movie's lackluster reviews."

The Beginning of Stephen King's Success

This is a scan of an old newspaper article outlining Stephen King's success in selling his novel Carrie to Doubleday. Given that this was the '70s, the money was huge for King and gave him an opportunity to write full-time.

Stephen King has had a long and prolific career as a writer, and he doesn't show signs of stopping any time soon.

His career is a lesson in perseverance for those who want to write.

For a previous post on Carrie, please click here.

Winchester the Movie

The Winchester House has an incredibly fascinating history so I was disappointed to see that the movie, now available on DVD and blu-ray, has received such poor ratings from both critics and movie-goers.

The movie description is as follows:

Inspired by true events. On an isolated stretch of land 50 miles outside of San Francisco sits the most haunted house in the world. Built by Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), the heiress to the Winchester fortune, it is a house that knows no end. Constructed in an incessant twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week mania for decades, it stands seven stories tall and contains hundreds of rooms. To the outsider it looks like a monstrous monument to a disturbed woman's madness. But Sarah is not building for herself, for her niece (Sarah Snook) or for the troubled Doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke) whom she has summoned to the house. She is building a prison, an asylum for hundreds of vengeful ghosts, and the most terrifying among them have a score to settle with the Winchesters...

If you'd like to learn more about the history of the Winchester House, please see my previous blog post on this subject: http://wallsofnightmare.blogspot.ca/2015/04/the-ultimate-haunted-house.html.