3 hours: About 85 percent of patrons will say they loved it, while 10 percent will say they were a little disappointed and 5 percent will say they loathed it. That 5 percent was going to loathe it no matter what. Sales will be spectacular.
24 hours: It will run an initial 90 percent Tomatometer, give or take 3 points.
36 hours: Small questions, complaints and confusions about the story and characters will emerge quietly in the socialsphere.
1 week: The nits will have spun up into full-scale viral controversies. About 12 percent of the people who initially said they loved the film will start backpedaling and say they did not really like it all that much. Sales will be spectacular.
1.5 weeks: The filmmakers will be ambushed with these controversies at press events. They will initially shrug them off, saying, “It’s just a movie.”
1.6 weeks: The filmmakers’ apparent refusal to take fans’ concerns seriously will generate a social media backlash. Polls will start to show that only about 75 percent liked the film. Multiple websites and Facebook pages titled with variations of “EPISODE VII SUCKS” will debut to heavy traffic. Sales will be spectacular.
2 weeks: A reporter will ambush George Lucas at lunch with a question about the controversies. Lucas will roll his eyes, say nothing, and go back to his Waldorf salad.
3 weeks: The filmmakers will hold a press conference for the sole purpose of addressing fans’ concerns. They will apologize for being “flippant” before. They will address each problem point by point, in excruciating detail, and confess that they wish they had made some different choices. They will blame a tight schedule and exhaustion for their egregious errors.
3 weeks and 30 seconds: Fans will be outraged by the explanations. Peer pressure will push the film’s favorable rating down to 63 percent. Sales will be spectacular.
6 months: The film will finish its initial global run as the highest-grossing in history.
8 months: The first graduate theses explaining the film’s flaws as symbolic of all that is wrong with American culture will be published.
1 year: A consensus will have settled that it was an acceptable effort that fell far short of what it could have been.
2 years: Media shorthand and the repetition of such words as “flawed” and “regrettable” on every reference to the film will have hardened the consensus into a myth that it was actually bad, despite most people having enjoyed it.
5 years: The film will begin to receive a generous reappraisal in the press, in stories with titles such as “Was Episode VII Really that Bad?” Famous fans will bravely step forward, facing ridicule, to declare that it was their favorite entry in the whole franchise.
6 years: When the very next Star Wars movie after this reappraisal is released, 100 percent of fans will lament that the new film is not as good as Episode VII. Sales for the new film will be spectacular.
