Yesterday, it was announced that current Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy is piloting the starship for another three years. All in the same week that Solo came to physical media. A controversial decision, but one that makes me happy…
It’s obvious. Kennedy’s staying because numbers don’t lie. Combined, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi grossed $4.4 billion at the worldwide box office, each made a killing in home video sales, and merchandise is of course flying off the shelves. Add in the relatively disappointing $392 million collected by Solo and you’re closer to $5 billion. Four movies. Lucasfilm cost Disney $4 billion to acquire. I think they’re pretty happy with how Mrs. Kennedy is running things.
Oh, but what’s that? Solo flopped at the box office? There’s been several behind-the-scenes dramas? Many directors have been booted off of their respective movies?
I re-watched Solo on Blu-ray the other day. My opinion on the overall film didn’t change too, too much.
Like Rogue One, the first live-action standalone Star Wars movie, Solo has many strengths but it does have some structural issues that keep it from being a big-league, bona fide Star Wars masterpiece. Something it probably didn’t need to be in the first place. I only consider three Star Wars movies to be in that league anyways, that should tell you a lot about how I view this franchise. The first half of the movie is quite rousing, much more exciting than it was in the theater for some reason. The opening chase on Corellia sets the mood, the cast is ace, and the look of the movie is quite cool. Theater projections made the shadowy movie, set in the seedy underbellies of the Star Wars galaxy, seem too dark to watch. On Blu-ray, everything’s fine! You can see the details, and the low lighting in several scenes actually effectively brings out the mood the picture is going for.
Solo feels like an old-school action-adventure, and it’s no surprise because it’s a film set roughly ten years before the Original Trilogy, and also because Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark writer Lawrence Kasdan – and his son Jon – wrote it. There are shades of a Western, a gangster picture, and more mixed into the proceedings as well. Unlike Rogue One, it is about a major player in the OT, and is a straight up fun flick. Rogue One by contrast was grittier, on-the-ground stuff. A snapshot of seemingly everyday individuals who all band together to do something for the greater good. The characters in Rogue One, because of this, aren’t as rich or deeply-layered. They didn’t need to be, because of the kind of story Rogue One is telling. Solo, by contrast, is attempting to add layers to a well-established character and introduce new ones that play a big part in his life. It does its job very, very well. Alden Ehrenreich was expected to fill some big boots, but I think he does a fine job as Han Solo because he’s playing a much younger, relatively inexperienced Han. A cocky and charismatic Han, but a Han who’s still getting there. A Han who is, at heart, as Qi’ra says, the good guy. A good guy in a pocket of the Star Wars galaxy that’s pretty gray compared to what we’ve seen before. It ties nicely into the events of the Original Trilogy without any tainting.
So with all of that in mind, Solo should be up there with the best, no? Well, it almost feels like two movies about young Han Solo are within this 134-minute stretch. His life on Corellia is detailed quickly, and then in no time he’s part of the Empire, then he’s with a rag-tag gang of criminals. It’s all told well, shot nicely, and edited effectively, but I almost feel like you could make a whole movie out of this period of his life. Everything that happens before his reunion with Qi’ra on Dryden Vos’ yacht. A whole movie about Han and his mentor Tobias Beckett, one that ends with the death of Val (making it more emotional and hard-hitting) and the failing of the coaxium heist. Instead, the movie wants to illustrate everything we’ve known about Han, from his first encounter with Chewie to the legendary, record-breaking Kessel Run. Maybe all of that didn’t need to be crammed into one movie?
Then you have the second half of the movie, where Han, Beckett, and Qi’ra put a new plan into action which leads to the Kessel Run. Again, it’s all great stuff. Dryden Vos’ yacht has some really cool things in it, Han’s first encounter with Lando Calrissian (played perfectly by Donald Glover) is a fun moment, the mine heist is riveting, the Kessel Run is straight-up a pure thrill ride… Then there’s the final 20-or-so minutes, which bring the movie to a simmering close, rather than a grandiose one that Rogue One nailed. It feels like another movie is beginning here, but perhaps cramming everything into one makes it seem like this climax has a ton of conclusions: Dealing with Dryden Vos, Han being betrayed by Beckett, the end of Han and Qi’ra’s relationship, the reveal of the masked marauder Enfys Nest, etc. And on top of that, Han reuniting with Lando and finally getting the Millennium Falcon from him. It feels like too much is being tied up here.
This has been a thing with a couple of blockbusters, lately. Sometimes it feels as if multiple threads are being stuffed into one picture. Contents that could perhaps cover two separate movies. For a Marvel Cinematic Universe comparison, I’ll point to Avengers: Age of Ultron, which – to be fair – had to develop multiple Avengers, new characters, and more. Still, I felt as if it could’ve been longer because of all the stuff going on. Joss Whedon reportedly had a four-hour cut of the movie, and a lot of scenes that made sense did get cut during production, but the rumored 4-hour version could’ve very just been an early cut meant for seeing what had to go, which is the usual for most movies. Solo certainly didn’t need to be longer, if anything it could’ve been a little shorter. Why does every blockbuster action movie need to be a two-hour behemoth? My question is, could the first half of Solo be its own unique movie about young Han? Thinking about YouTuber HelloGreedo’s recent reassessment of the movie, imagine this… From his days on Corellia to the failure of the coaxium mission, I think you could’ve had a solid 90 minute flick, with a sequel being all about reuniting with Qi’ra, meeting Lando, the Kessel Run, and perhaps something more. Jon Kasdan did recently say in a twitter session that something with Han and Qi’ra’s relationship has yet to be resolved, not to mention what happens to Maul between the events of this film and Star Wars Rebels.
Problem is, are we going to see that in a feature film? If not a feature film, then a television series? Solo 2 isn’t happening.
We all know it now. A Star Wars movie flopped at the box office. Lost money. The theatrically-released TV pilot The Clone Wars didn’t lose money because it was so low budget. This film is the first Star Wars movie to be a box office flop. Not that people avoided it, $392 million isn’t a terrible gross by any means, it just wasn’t enough to cover the astronomical costs of the finished film. It’s also well below what Star Wars movies usually take in. Autopsies have been done, but I think this is what happened…
Kathleen Kennedy, in her run as Lucasfilm president, made a single mistake. That’s it. Not The Last Jedi. Not the firings of directors of Josh Trank and Colin Trevorrow. Not being in charge of the franchise. No.
Her single big mistake was NOT taking action early on in the production of Solo. Dynamic duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were originally tapped to direct the film, off of the Kasdans’ script. I love Lord and Miller’s work, they make some of the best stuff to come out of the current Hollywood system. Some of their strongest work is a straight-up mockery of modern Hollywood excesses, from forcing cinematic universes out of everything to gratuitous sequels. The Lego Movie in particular is such a fun riff on all of that. In the end, they tie everything together with a fun, kooky sincerity… Now, does that exactly fit something a little more rigid like Star Wars?
I don’t understand why some people out there think that Star Wars has to be some auteur’s paradise. The Original Trilogy wasn’t exactly that, and didn’t a lot of these same people fry the prequels because only George Lucas seemed to call the shots on those? Now, I do want variety in my Star Wars. I think The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi are all different from one another. J.J. Abrams called back to the classics with his movie, Gareth Edwards and Tony Gilroy crafted a rougher, ground-level epic with Rogue One that looked at Star Wars from a different perspective, and Rian Johnson cracked the whole chestnut open. Solo differs from the three of these in ways, but is similar to Rogue One in some ways. It’s the closest film to the tone and style of the Original Trilogy outside of The Force Awakens. You could argue that Solo ultimately suffers from being a plain, risk-averse film. Oh, it certainly is. I guess the one thing you could consider a risk in this movie is the fact that it has a grayer sense of morality than the usual Star Wars film, but Rogue One kind of did that beforehand. Solo simply didn’t bring anything new to the table, story-wise, but I suppose that’s why Lord and Miller were hired in the first place.
If we are to believe reports, tension was there before shooting, and there were fusses and quarrels over little things. Ask some of the actors, like Emilia Clarke, and they say Ron Howard “saved” the movie. Ron Howard basically reshot the entire three-quarters of the film that Lord and Miller laid down before getting booted, which no doubt ballooned the budget, which was probably very big to begin with. Something like Solo didn’t need to cost anywhere near $200 million to make, let alone $275 million. The release date was mostly Disney’s doing, according to some out there. Apparently Kennedy and Lucasfilm wanted the film out this coming Christmas, in keeping with the current Star Wars release strategy. Understandably, Disney has several other movies to accommodate: Animated features, live-action tentpoles, Marvel movies, etc. Marvel kinda took away from the May frame from Star Wars, and also hogs up spaces like July.
So Solo became the first May Star Wars release since 1983’s Return of the Jedi. The Last Jedi debuted just mere months earlier, in December 2017. Lucasfilm and Disney’s marketing department waited until after the release of The Last Jedi to begin marketing Solo, the launch of the campaign occurring on Super Bowl Sunday… Three months before the release of the movie. Solo‘s early posters plagiarized designs made by a French graphic artist, no doubt showing that things were getting off on the wrong foot. I also think that a lot of general audiences, who – contrary to popular belief – help make these movies so BIG, weren’t interested. “Young Han Solo? We know how that’ll end. We’ll save our money for Infinity War.” Oh yeah, and the movie opened smack-dab between two other Disney-released giants: Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War and Pixar’s Incredibles 2.
So now it’s on Blu-ray, and it’ll begin its second life. Maybe once more people actually see this movie, it’ll catch on and be a favorite from here on out. It’s breezy fun that probably would’ve fared A LOT better during the holidays or even in the late summer/early fall. Imagine that, a Star Wars movie opening around Halloween, or somewhere near Valentine Day’s. Who says it’s gotta be confined to late spring and early winter only?
Oddly enough, I think there’s some good in Solo‘s flopping.
It certainly sucks for all of the people who put all that effort into it, and I never wished any failure on them. I want a Solo 2 to happen or some follow-up movie, but at the same time, I get a tinge of satisfaction out of this. Sometimes Hollywood as a whole needs to be told loud and clear that they can’t depend on franchises and “proven” brands. Star Wars is a 41-year-old franchise, and not every franchise entry was/is going to be successful. Every live-action entry has been successful at the box office except Solo, the one animated feature that few saw in theaters made its money back. Odds are, one was going to lose money one day. We can argue why this particular film didn’t haul gargantuan numbers till we’re blue in the face, it may not matter at this point. The movie’s been out, and it lost. We packed up and moved on, and those with sanity will hope that Lucasfilm rebounds at the box office with Episode IX next Christmas…
Disney bought Lucasfilm in fall 2012 for over $4 billion. Around this time, Disney was really beginning to weed out different kinds of movies. They’ve become much more focused on franchises and movies that are guaranteed to cover their respective massive budgets. Disney ushered out traditionally-animated films, Muppets movies, smaller-scale live-action family films that aren’t rehashes, and ambitious high-concept blockbuster-type movies. Every year, it’s a helping of Marvel, Star Wars, a few remakes of animated classics, and some Walt Disney Animation Studios and/or Pixar films. Only the WDAS and Pixar movies, the ones that aren’t sequels, are the ones taking risks. A few live-action films like A Wrinkle in Time and the upcoming Artemis Fowl aren’t in the mold, either. I’ve been tired of hearing “conventional wisdom” as an excuse for not making movies that need to be made, and I think a Star Wars movie – one about a beloved character with a nostalgic Original Trilogy vibe no less – flopping just shows that it’s all bunk. It brings me back to one of my favorite quotes ever, by one William Goldman:
“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
As for the future, well, if you read the more professional writings on the situation, future Star Wars spin-offs aren’t really going anywhere. Disney’s simply going to re-think the release strategy. If it’s true that they wouldn’t let Kennedy and Lucasfilm schedule Solo for December of this year, then they’re very much responsible for Solo‘s fallout and I’m glad that they are taking steps to ensure a box office loss doesn’t happen again. Smart, like companies should be. After Episode IX ends the master storyline as we know it, Star Wars can flower and explore all the crevasses of its universe, there’s so much to tell, and so much ground to cover. Star Wars need not follow an MCU-type model, but tell stories outside of the Skywalker saga. It’s a universe vast in planets, creatures, all kinds of cool stuff. This, I believe, is what Disney bought the franchise for. The classic makes way for the new. I’m excited to see what the Game of Thrones producers, Rian Johnson, Jon Favreau (he’s not doing a feature, but a big-budget TV series that’ll debut on Disney’s streaming service), et al. do with the universe at their fingertips.
Anyways, I feel that Solo is a very solid, good film and ultimately did not deserve to be a box office flop. For me, Solo bares the only mistake the controversial Kennedy made. Other than that, I feel she has done a great job and is looking to take this franchise to exciting areas. I’m excited to hear more at the upcoming Star Wars Celebration…
