By the fall of 2005, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith finished its tour in theatres and the world assumed Star Wars forever concluded its theatrical presence. To the surprise and delight of many, six years later, Lucasfilm was sold to Disney for $4.05 billion. The engine was reignited. Disney promptly promised new Star Wars and more Star Wars and so much Star Wars that fans were compelled to surgically extend their jaws to ram it all down. A new trilogy was hastily announced coupled with “anthology” stories every year in-between. All of this would launch as early as the winter of 2015, ten years after what was presumed the final credit roll. Solo: A Star Wars Story is the most notorious of this batch. For various reasons, Solo had the tragic fate of being a scapegoat for agitated Star Wars fans, who shred it like carrion birds over roadkill.
Prior to handing over his colossal franchise to Disney, George Lucas intended to make an origin story for Han Solo. He considered whether to include a young Han in the Battle of Kashyyyk scene in Revenge of the Sith but excised the idea. He then planned a Han Solo TV show called Star Wars: Underworld, which would feature Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, and the Millennium Falcon, but dropped that idea. In 2012, he hired Lawrence Kasdan to write a screenplay for a stand-alone movie about the young Solo but decided to sell his hand at Lucasfilm before it could be completed. The impetus of the idea caught on with Disney. The script Kasdan was writing passed to his son Jonathan to become 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. The events of Solo’s production and release were a curious clash of studio intention versus director vision, followed by seething fan contempt and troll hate-mongering.
“Mis-Direction”
2014’s The Lego Movie was a smashing comedy success with a vision and tone unlike anything seen in a children’s movie, which was primarily made for product placement. Its creators, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were at the peak of their careers. The duo was eagerly tapped by Disney to direct Solo. They began filming in January of 2017 with a target release of May the following year.
Lord and Miller believed they were making a comedy film. They allowed for improvisation by the actors on set, and they were firm in their directorial decisions with regards to the number of shots they captured for scenes. In a comedy, once you got the right take, it would be exhausting to recreate the energy over and over.
Lawrence Kasdan directly opposed their style and wanted them to stick to the script. To him, Solo was only to have a splash of comedy. Kathleen Kennedy gave him access to the set and permitted him to give input and comments to the directors on their work. This became another source of contention for Lord and Miller against Disney. Were they the directors, or was Kasdan? By June of 2017, to their dismay, they were fired from the project. It was a contest of vision versus studio, with the studio coming out on top. Two days after the duo was let go, Ron Howard was hired to complete the production. He not only had the daunting task of completing what Lord and Miller started but had to reshoot seventy percent of the film, all within a breakneck period of eight-and-a-half weeks.
The Politics of it All
In May of 2018, the reputation of the Star Wars franchise was in a sorry state when Solo: A Star Wars Story was released in theatres. Rogue One was a hit, but fans were intensely divided by Star Wars:The Last Jedi, which released in the winter of 2017, five months before Solo. They rejected the themes and the character portrayals of the Last Jedi so much that they had lost confidence in the overall vision laid out by Disney.
It was also paired with a feeling of too much too fast. The Force Awakens came out in 2015, followed by Rogue One in 2016, and then Last Jedi the year after that. Yearly releases, which were originally hailed with enthusiasm, became the fatal flaw in Disney’s corporate schematics. By Solo, franchise burnout was a real threat to the future of Star Wars. Solo was a box office bomb. It earned a hair under $400 million on a budget of $300 million. Its fate caused a divergence in the Force, as Disney halted all plans for Star Wars anthologies and alternative content…for a time.
A Vision of What If…
Had Solo succeeded, the yearly Star Wars circuit would have included a Boba Fett stand-alone, an Obi-Wan Kenobi stand-alone, and much more. All of these would either already be out by now or scheduled for near release. Solo was the maiden voyage of the Star Wars Cinematic Universe. Rise of Skywalker was winter of 2019, which would have put one of the aforementioned titles this past Christmas, and the other the forthcoming.
In a way, Solo’s failure was Disney+’s success. The Mandalorian launched the month before Rise of Skywalker and has expanded to include characters from all over the Galaxy, a trait that the anthology films were supposed to carry. Instead of on the silver screen, Boba Fett and Obi-Wan will live again on the small screen. Enough time has passed since the controversy of Last Jedi and the financial wreck of Solo for Disney to resume their anthology stories, with Patty Jenkins upcoming Rogue Squadron set to release in 2023. Disney+ is also slated for a whole slew of streaming shows spanning the next five or so years, some spawning off TheMandalorian, others coming directly from the anthologies of the first batch, like Star Wars: Andor.
Solo does not hold the same necessity as the main films for Star Wars fans. It offers nothing new to impact the Saga. Nor does it succeed Rogue One as a celebrated anthology piece. As a standalone feature film, however, it does have a decent story, it contains a couple of intriguing characters, and it offers some entertaining action for the price of admission. Years since its release, the true fans of Solo: A Star Wars Story can enjoy it peaceably and without all the contention. Like any subjective knee-jerk reaction, time cools all raging infernos.