Solo: A Star Wars Story | Five Years Later
Why the #MakeSolo2Happen movement should refocus their energy toward another Lucasfilm project.
Five years ago, the weekend box office numbers were in for Lucasfilm’s second anthology film, Solo: A Star Wars Story. The news was not great: $83.3M for the three-day Memorial weekend. It would be the first Star Wars film to be a box office bomb with $393.2M worldwide.
Solo: A Star Wars Story was always a hard sell. While Han Solo was (and still is) a popular character, he was never a character that pulled enough interest for a solo film. The appeal of Han Solo was the mystery surrounding him, including the Kessel Run he bragged about in A New Hope. Another appeal was his chemistry and romance with Princess Leia. So the film showing what happened during the Kessel Run and his romance with another brunette might not have been the story people sought.
From the ashes of Solo, Disney pivoted from the “film a year” model. Five years later, Star Wars is close to becoming a streaming brand, yet there has been a small but mighty movement of fans who want a sequel to the film. However, streaming might be the next best step for a “Solo” project.
The Curious Case of Release the Snyder Cut Movement
Let’s start at the obvious- the Make Solo 2 camp is smaller than the Internet would have you believe and will not be enough to make a box office success for a sequel. It needs to get people who do not regularly watch Star Wars into the theaters, and the first film couldn’t even do that. Nothing in these five years has indicated that results wouldn’t be identical.
Now let’s look at what happened when another studio bought into a similar campaign. Less everyone forgets the “Release the Snyder Cut” campaign that was successful. For years, Snyder fans relentlessly hounded Warner Brothers for Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League. When some horrible behind-the-scenes information came out about Joss Whedon and his treatment of cast members Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, the movement picked up steam.
To everyone’s amazement, Warner Brothers spent 70M to finish Snyder’s cut and release it exclusively on HBO Max, which was a sound business decision for distribution. So many people seemed to want this, so naturally, Warner Brothers thought it would translate to subscribers. There were mixed results: while viewership numbers during the week of release were high, only 34% finished the film per Samba, and HBO Max saw a rise in only 2.7M subscribers during the entire first quarter. For context, HBO Max’s goal was to hit 120–150M subscribers by 2025, putting them at 44.2M in 2021. While it is a lot of pressure to put on one DC film, the DC brand is considered a high-value IP for Warner Brothers, so there will always be more pressure on that part to deliver, just like Star Wars for Disney.
Warner Brothers spent the budget of another film with little to show for and additional headaches from SnyderVerse fans. Headaches they are still dealing with today. The cut also justified Ray Fisher’s accusations against Whedon as it was clear that Whedon had cut much of his character development.
And the Star Wars fandom can be just as irksome. It is not worth it for Disney, and they would be better off investing the money in an already-announced project.
Make Solo 2 Should Become Make Lando Series Happen
I have been pretty consistent in my belief that the Lando series will not get to production, from the lack of interest in the character (his toys NEVER sell) to the limited marketability of Donald Glover. Despite this, Lucasfilm insists that the series is still in pre-production, even though the director Justin Simien’s focus has been on The Haunted Mansion, coming out later this year, which can be a secret blessing for the Lando series. If The Haunted Mansion gets good reviews and is a box office success, that could boost momentum for Lando. Culture Machine, Simien’s production company, was also a casualty of the writer’s strike. Paramount+ suspended its deal with the studio (a deal that secures finances for smaller studios to ideate on content for major studios). There is no guarantee that that contract will be renewed as studios often use strikes to eliminate first-look agreements with smaller studios.
On a side note, it is sad that Culture Machines’ success (a hit show on Netflix, a podcast, and an upcoming major feature film) is not enough to ensure the studio’s survival, but here we are. Hopefully, they do, but if Paramount does not pick its contract back up with Culture Machine, that could speed ideation on the Lando series (though there is little information on Simien’s obligations with Disney).
Lando could be one step in helping to keep Culture Machine moving. And, all the characters fans want in a Solo 2 film can be in the series. Alden Ehrenreich can return as Han, and Emilia Clarke can be Qi’ra (she has already joined the MCU streaming family with Secret Invasion). Combining those three characters within a series would instantly elevate the show while appeasing most of the Make Solo 2 Happen crowd.
Lucasfilm could even be upfront that the series would be a continuation of Solo, and this is what you will get. Han and Qi’ra could return, and Lucasfilm could incorporate the Crimson Dawn and Maul into the storyline, giving the series legs for multiple seasons.
The series would also fall outside the Favreau/Filoni/Famuyiwa MandoVerse leading to Dave Filoni’s film. This would give a director/writer more creative freedom to play with these characters as it would not necessarily have to build towards a larger event. We can just explore how these characters’ lives diverge before the events of A New Hope and possibly even beyond. The material now exists for Qi’ra post A New Hope in the comics (her character factors heavily in War with the Bounty Hunters, Bounty Hunters, and parts of Doctor Aphra).
Speaking of Doctor Aphra, this could be a great time to introduce the popular comic character into live-action that could act as an introduction before her own series (why that hasn’t happened yet is beyond me). But let us not get ahead of ourselves.
The Lando series has so much potential to become more than just filling in blanks for a character that seems to hold little interest in the zeitgeist and to avoid the same mistakes that Solo: A Star Wars Story made. There has been so much time, money, and effort spent on getting Solo 2 made, and I fear it is all for naught. If the #MakeSolo2Happen hashtag had been the #MaketheLandoSeriesHappen, the show, which can incorporate many of the elements that fans want in a Solo 2 film, might have already started production.
Originally published at https://creditsandcanon.com on May 30, 2023.
