Yup... money talks and BS walks. As griffin said, while TFTM has become a cult classic with fans, it tanked at the box office. The live action movies made truckloads of money with ticket sales -- time will tell if fans will continue to think of it fondly in years to come.
George Lucas made a similar point when the prequel trilogy came out (especially Phantom Menace) which copped heaps of flak from fans. Lucas said that when Episode IV first came out in 1977 a lot of fans were already complaining about See Threepio whom they criticised as a rather needless robot who just walked around all the time whinging and complaining (or as MAD Magazine called him, a "<camp> robot")... but most people didn't hear about these complaints because the internet didn't exist back then (at least not for public use). Lucas said that the crucial difference between fan reactions towards See Threepio and Jar Jar Binks is that Jar Jar Binks came out at a time where fans had the internet that they could use as a massive soapbox. Sometimes when I talk to younger people who were kids when Episode I came out, they often remember Jar Jar Binks fondly as a fun comedic character. Quite different to those of us who were adults at the time and just found him irritatingly annoying.Originally Posted by griffin
But to Lucas' credit he did take fan opinion on board and significantly reduced the role and screen time for Jar Jar Binks in Episodes II and III... so perhaps Michael Bay could take a similar cue and try to alter some of the less popular decisions from the first two movies for the third one?
Yes, I'm an optimist.(cos the realist in me is reminding me that the amount of crude humour was significantly higher in the second movie compared to the first)
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