Gary Kurtz Star Wars Episode 5
Explaining the Reasons Why New Star Wars Fans Avoid Watching Star Wars Episode 5 v Five The Empire Strikes Back At All Costs George Lucas Irvin Kershner Gary Kurtz Star Wars Trilogy Star Wars Movies Films Classic Star Wars Classics
Written by the Unquestioned World Famous Ultra Legendary Iconic SuperShadow the Genius Mastermind Guru Expert Overlord of Star Wars
Written by the Unquestioned World Famous Ultra Legendary Iconic SuperShadow the Genius Mastermind Guru Expert Overlord of Star Wars
Constantly receiving complaints about all aspects of Star Wars is a time honored tradition here at SuperShadow.com, which is the most influential and popular Star Wars web site. I don't control reality and I don't appear to be the master of the Universe so there's not much I can do about what upsets you most about Star Wars. The biggest plague experienced by new Star Wars fans is having to watch Star Wars Episode 5 The Empire Strikes Back for the first time.
I do my best to warn the ardent fans about the limitations of The Empire Strikes Back, but you actually have to watch it to understand the true horrors of this motion picture. New Star Wars fans are able to see the Star Wars film saga in chronological order as originally envisioned by ultra genius director, producer and writer George Lucas. After watching the mind stunning Star Wars prequel trilogy, you can't expect to ever top those stellar achievements. However, I have to admit that Star Wars Episode 4 A New Hope is even superior to the Star Wars prequels, which are absolutely perfect.
It's a true heresy to claim any movie can surpass the Star Wars prequel trilogy, but PLEASE give me a chance to explain. Lucas created A New Hope with virtually a zero U.S. dollars production budget and with the whole world seemingly against Lucas literally. Not a single person, not even Lucas' own wife Marcia Lucas, thought Star Wars was a good idea. Every friend and film making acquaintance Lucas had in the early 1970's told Lucas that Star Wars was an unquestionable awful idea for a film.
Lucas was warned many, many times that Star Wars was going to end Lucas' career as a film maker. For some inexplicable reason that no one can understand, Lucas didn't listen to the critics. Lucas innately believed that a mythological story based in a science fiction setting could work with audiences. At the time Lucas was writing the script for A New Hope, Lucas' beliefs were completely insane. The average science fiction movie produced by Hollywood didn't make any significant money at the box office in the 1970's. There was absolutely no objective evidence to support what Lucas believed to be true.
Of course, Star Wars turned out to be the single greatest and most profitable idea in the history of cinema. A New Hope showcased Lucas at his creative peak when Lucas was extremely hungry for success and Lucas realized failure was something to be avoided if Lucas wanted a lasting career as a film maker. In the final examination, A New Hope is the pinnacle of all films including the reality altering Star Wars prequels. A New Hope is better than the Star Wars prequel trilogy although few of you believe this in your hearts.
A New Hope is extremely slow paced with few action sequences as compared to the mesmerizing Star Wars prequels. The Yoda seen in the Star Wars prequel trilogy is utterly spectacular. The muppet Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back can't move much. This ruins the whole movie. The Battle of Hoth, which is the only major large scale and expensive action sequence in The Empire Strikes Back, is a direct rip off from the military elephants of Hannibal of Carthage from the Second Punic War against Rome.
The se7en seconds of screen time that Boba Fett has can't save the film. Lobot, Lando Calrissian and the Ugnaughts aren't enough to make up for the many, many deficiencies of this sequel movie. The Empire Strikes Back is basically irrelevant today since the amazing Star Wars prequel trilogy revealed the secret that Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader, who is the father of Luke and Leia Skywalker. There's no actual reason to watch The Empire Strikes Back.
Also the fans can NEVER forgive Lucas for NOT directing The Empire Strikes Back. Irvin Kershner (Kersh) had no financially successful movies before or after The Empire Strikes Back. Can you name one non Star Wars movie directed by Kersh? I didn't think so. Kersh doesn't have the magic uber brilliance of Lucas to maximize the ingenious story idea Lucas wrote for this movie.
When it was finally time to release the Star Wars classic trilogy on DVD, Lucasfilm conducted extensive research and fan surveys to determine the interest level of the general public for Star Wars on DVD. From this crucial data, Lucas learned there was no interest from the common customer to buy The Empire Strikes Back as an individual DVD. Lucas had no choice, but to offer the three Star Wars classic movies as one DVD package in order to make the buyers purchase a copy of The Empire Strikes Back.
This really didn't matter because the people weren't actually watching The Empire Strikes Back on DVD. Having all three classic Star Wars films in one deluxe unit, which cost around $ 60 U.S. dollars, dramatically lowered the overall sales of Star Wars on DVD. This DVD package sold about 6 million copies. This is very, very disappointing for Lucasfilm because the VHS video tape versions of A New Hope have sold over 25 million individual copies during the 1980's and 1990's.
Most Star Wars fans weren't willing to pay this steep price for all three Star Wars classics in one unit because the vast majority of fans prefer A New Hope and Star Wars Episode 6 Return of the Jedi, but certainly NOT The Empire Strikes Back. Now that the Star Wars classic movies are available as individual DVD's, nearly all retail stores don't stock the DVD copy of The Empire Strikes Back on their shelves because there is absolutely no demand from customers.
The individual DVD formats of The Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope remain top sellers. Attack of the Clones and Return of the Jedi don't move as many copies while you can't even find The Empire Strikes Back at the discount bargain table. You have an easier time finding the Star Wars Holiday Special on DVD compared to finding a DVD copy of The Empire Strikes Back. Ever since the Star Wars classics have been available individually as DVD's, the three Star Wars classic movie DVD unit is manufactured in very, very extremely low quantities because of a lack of demand from Star Wars fans. There is no interest in buying something that expensive when most fans don't care about seeing The Empire Strikes Back.
The few Star Wars fans, who claim to worship The Empire Strikes Back, are the same delusionals, who believe in vast global conspiracy theories, UFO's and Sasquatch Bigfoot. Crazy people don't have a right to speak regardless of what Kajagoogoo might think. The only truly objective way to measure the greatness of theatrical movies is by their box office earnings in multiplexes. It's no accident or coincidence that the lowest money maker in cinemas from the Star Wars movie franchise is The Empire Strikes Back by a significantly large margin.
After watching The Empire Strikes Back for yourself if you are so daringly brave, it's obvious why this sequel film made less than half the worldwide box office gross of the astonishing A New Hope. It's not unusual for a follow up sequel movie to earn much, much more at the cineplex box office when compared to the original movie. The most prominent examples of this are Terminator 2 Judgment Day, The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King, The Dark Knight, Toy Story 3, James Bond 007 Skyfall and Transformers Dark of the Moon. All of these sequel movies made vastly more money at the theatrical box office than the first film in the film series.
If The Dark Knight had made half the box office revenues of Batman Begins, then there would absolutely be no The Dark Knight Rises sequel movie. At the time in 1980, The Empire Strikes Back was a relative box office mega flop ultra disaster zero failure in multiplexes. It took over 6 months in theatres for The Empire Strikes Back to surpass the $ 125 million U.S. dollars mark in North American movie houses. In the ancient days of cinema, major motion pictures weren't front loaded with massive opening week box office grosses.
As a modern example of true box office success, The Avengers movie grossed over $ 380 million U.S. dollars in cineplexes in less than two weeks, but during the 1980's movies didn't open with huge monetary numbers in theaters. Instead a movie like The Empire Strikes Back would slowly build its total box office gross money amounts over many, many months. This was horrendously terrifying for Star Wars creator George Lucas because Lucas had his entire financial net worth invested in the production and promotion of The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas has not always been a multi billionaire with nearly unlimited wealth. In fact, Lucas didn't have a lot of money when he was creating The Empire Strikes Back, which explains why its production budget was under $ 30 million U.S. dollars. The results were so dire at the box office that film producer Gary Kurtz NEVER worked on additional Star Wars movies. Fast forward nearly 30 years and it's understandable that young Star Wars fans from the next generation pass on watching The Empire Strikes Back.
For those of you who are new to Star Wars, I apologize for The Empire Strikes Back in advance. Not even Lucas is perfect although he would be perfect if Lucas had directed both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Lucas argues he didn't direct The Empire Strikes Back because filming A New Hope was the worst time of his entire life, which almost caused the early demise of Lucas. Lucas also lamely claims he didn't have enough resources to micromanage all aspects of the sequels to A New Hope.
The fans reject Star Wars movies that aren't written and directed by George Lucas although we must accept Star Wars Episodes 7 8 9 10 11 12 without Lucas since Lucas has quit Star Wars for all eternity after The Walt Disney Company acquired Star Wars and Lucasfilm from Lucas. Without the guiding genius of Lucas, this explains the failure of The Empire Strikes Back and the Star Wars The Clone Wars movie in theaters. Fifty years into the future, Industrial Light and Magic will have the necessary digital special effects technology to make The Empire Strikes Back the equal of the Star Wars movie episodes written and directed by film making mastermind George Lucas.
However, this is completely futile and hopeless for those of us trapped in the present day. Perhaps, we can convince Lucas to invest his considerable monetary riches into making a working time machine. After retiring from making high budget blockbuster movies, Lucas owes us big time after the results of the dreadful The Empire Strikes Back.