Both the recent Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings trilogies baffle me. I thought the first Lord of the Rings film was fantastic. The story built on thousands of years of human mythology and offered visually arresting pictures of a fantasy world inhabited by humans, almost humans, and many other strange creatures that you have never dreamed of.  The movie’s special effects went beyond everything that Hollywood had pulled off until then. Since I had not seen any of first three Star Wars movies, my eyes enjoyed the adventure of seeing George Lucas’s vision of what life of the human species in science fiction world on distant stars and out in space would look like. But for me, the second and third episodes in the two trilogies were repetitive and boring.  The drama and the script in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sixth are so poor that excellent actors such as Samuel Jackson and Natalie Portman lose their ability to act. Now here is what baffles me. The horrendously boring third episodes draw in more visitors than the much better predecessors. How do you explain that lower-quality films are more successful at the box office than their superior siblings? My guess is: the movies become an event that everyone wants to be a part of and when people go home and tell other people about the film, people evaluate not the films but the social event they were just participating in. The final episodes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were marketed into gigantic social events!

Now here is what baffles me. The horrendously boring third episodes draw in more visitors than the much better predecessors. How do you explain that lower quality films are more successful at the box office than their superior siblings? My guess is: the movies become an event that everyone wants to be a part of and when people go home and tell other people about the film, people evaluate not the films but the social event they were just participating in. The final episodes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were marketed into gigantic social events!