Walt Disney is promoting Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in ways that will be familiar to fans of the respective series finales of Avengers, Harry Potter, Twilight, The Lord of the Rings and previous Star Wars trilogies.
We should get the first official pre-release tracking for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a week from today (or a week from about two hours ago). I’d advise folks not to go bonkers if the tracking suggests an opening closer to Avengers: Age of Ultron ($191 million) than Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($220 million). I’m still of the mind that A) the release schedule which will have the holiday break period kicking in on the film’s first Monday (like Force Awakens) as opposed to its second Monday (like Last Jedi) will create a leggier run than the last Star Wars movie. Moreover, the whole “end of an era” hook is just that, a huge hook that should draw in fans, general moviegoers and even those who claim to be burned out on Star Wars. That hook has resulted in some amusingly familiar taglines.
Walt Disney has been, correctly and understandably, going all in overall “series finale” factor. It has been a pretty consistently successful hook going back to, at least, Return of the Jedi and/or Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in the early 1980’s. It worked like a charm for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($1.1 billion in 2003, the second movie ever to top $1 billion), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II ($1.346 billion in 2011, the third-biggest grosser ever at the time), The Dark Knight Rises ($1.081 billion in 2012) and Avengers: Endgame ($2.796 billion worldwide, the biggest grosser ever). It even worked for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II ($819 million worldwide, or up 16% from Breaking Dawn Part II’s $712 million cume the prior year) and Logan ($619 million in 2017).
So, yes, in terms of recent history, along with the standards set by the first two Star Wars trilogies and the initial Indiana Jones trilogy (all of which peaked with the first movies but had threequels that earned somewhere between part II and part I), The Rise of Skywalker should be just fine. My main concern frankly is a huge drop in overseas interest, akin to Jurassic Park III ($180 million domestic but just $187 million overseas compared to $229 million/$389 million for The Lost World) as opposed to a domestic decrease like Matrix Revolutions ($137 million/$424 million versus $279 million/$742 million for Matrix Reloaded). But to make sure the movie performs as well as hoped, Disney has been selling the film in a manner somewhat familiar to previous marketing campaigns for previous “series finale” movies.
The most recent TV spot featured its share of new footage and a tagline “We’re all in this. Til the end.” Not only was it an attempt to create a social media-friendly tagline akin to Avengers: Endgame’s “Whatever it takes” tag, it stood out as one of the emotional button points in the final trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. If you remember Harry’s mum and the late Serious Black reassuring their doomed son/friend that they’ll stay with him... always... til the end, it’s probably because that’s the part in the trailer where your eyes started getting dusty. The entire marketing campaign sold both Deathly Hallows movies as the climax of a generational cinematic event, which at the time was a somewhat unique gimmick because the eight-film Harry Potter series was unlike anything that had been attempted at that time.
And the D23 sizzle reel, which played in theaters, emphasized the deep history of the Star Wars movies, both the original trilogy and the prequels, in (again) emphasizing that this would be the end of all things. That’s not a terribly original notion for a “finale” trailer, but it’s effective as hell, as we saw for the marketing campaigns for both Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Avengers: Endgame. And even the tagline for the last theatrical trailer, stating that the saga will end but the stories will live forever, feels akin to both The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (”This Christmas... this saga ends.”) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part II. The final poster for the Twilight movie states that it’s “the epic finale that will live forever.” At least with Twilight it’s a pun related to the franchise’s immortal vampire protagonists.
This marketing deja vu is not a criticism, but merely a curiosity. The notion of this kind of big-scale “the story ends” cinematic storytelling is a relatively novel idea, as even Saw: The Final Chapter is just over nine years old. Up until recently, sequels continued until they stopped making money, and each installment was a strictly stand-alone feature that could provide a stopping point should the story not continue. That this is the third time that we’ve seen “the final chapter in the Star Wars trilogy” and “the final chapter of the Star Wars saga” is interesting in terms of how Star Wars keeps reviving itself after the presumed final chapter. And, alas, most of these franchises did continue in some form after their finales, usually with prequel franchises like Fantastic Beasts and The Hobbit. As such, The Rise of Skywalker is only “the end” for right now.
