[chipotle_coyote]

The Last Jedi was clearly a polarizing film, and it's fine if you didn't like it, but I think it's worth keeping in mind that the movie...

* Has an 85/100 on Metacritic ("Universal Acclaim")

* Has a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes

* Made $619M

So it was both a box office success and a critical success. Personally, I think it's far from an atrocious film. I think it's a flawed film, although my complaints have to do with structure and film mechanics, not story choices.

[dageshi]

The franchise itself is so big that it has/had a lot of momentum, fans were willing to give it a lot of chances.

The test will be this years film and how it does.

[chipotle_coyote]

My suspicion is that it's going to do very well even if, unlike the first two movies, it's a critical flop -- which I should note I'm not predicting. The last two movies did very well and the saga is going to have an awful lot of people who want to see how it officially ends regardless of whether they think TLJ (or TFA, for that matter) completely "worked." And J.J. Abrams certainly isn't likely to take the kind of story chances that Rian Johnson would, but he's also likely to make a leaner, less messy film, and might successfully thread the needle here. (I really hope the film doesn't try and pull off shocking twists to reverse the last film's shocking twists; it's always been in the back of my mind, though, that one of the story points some fans seemed to be so outraged about -- Rey being "a nobody" -- is a point that we technically only have Kylo Ren's word on.)

Having said all that, I don't think you're wrong -- I just think it's going to be the film after this year's that's going to be the real test!

[gremlinsinc]

None of them are perfect (except maybe RO imho), all exceeded my expectations (Lucas set that pretty low after 1-3).

[hoseja]

Now let's see those audience scores.

[chipotle_coyote]

Okay! The most reliable audience score metric -- in that it can't be brigaded by a relatively small number of online fans mobilized to affect the score of a movie because they want to prove a point[1] -- is probably CinemaScore, which has been polling actual moviegoers on opening nights since 1978. The Last Jedi's CinemaScore is A.

[1] While this is usually to drive down a score, you can find the reverse occasionally, such as the Atlas Shrugged movies. It's hard not to notice that the point the brigades are making usually revolves around "stick it to the Hollywood liberals," although I don't think that's true in TLJ's case.

[megablast]

It made $1.333 billion.

[chipotle_coyote]

Ah! The score I looked at must have just been the US box office scores.