People who have been paying close attention to the Star Wars franchise will know that besides the upcoming Episode IX, there are a number of spin-offs that are getting made as well. The next one that will be released will be Solo: A Star Wars Story on May 25 of 2018, which as its name suggests, will be centered around the earlier exploits of Han Solo and Chewbacca. However, it is no secret that the production for the movie has run into a series of problems, so much so that there are now reports claiming that Disney is expecting it to bomb at the box office.
In short, the reports claim that Solo: A Star Wars Story is unsalvageable in spite of the effort that is being made to make it worth watching. Said reports claim that the lead Alden Ehrenreich is incapable of providing the level of performance that Lucasfilm executives expect. Furthermore, said reports claim that the script for the movie isn’t just bad but so bad that it is unworkable even for someone like the current director Ron Howard. Combined with the mixed reaction to The Last Jedi, the person behind the reports claims that Disney is now concerned enough that it is preparing to write it off as a failure.
Is This Believable?
The reports are no more and no less than that, reports. As a result, it would be unwise to put too much faith in them until there is more information that interested individuals can use to secure a fully-informed understanding of what is happening. However, based on what is known so far, the reports are not wholly unbelievable.
After all, Solo: A Star Wars Story has been plagued with problems for a while. For example, there was how its previous directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had to be swapped out for its current director Ron Howard, which happened because the duo reportedly didn’t just add comedic elements to the movie but actually turned it into a comedy set in space. Something that wasn’t apparently to Lucasfilm executives until they had the chance to watch what they had made as a movie rather than as isolated segments of footage. Unfortunately, the problems with the movie seem to have been extensive, as shown by the sheer amount of refilming that is being carried out under Ron Howard. In fact, Michael K. Williams had to be swapped out for Paul Bettany because of scheduling conflicts, meaning that the production could not wait for him to become available again after his other commitments if they wanted to meet the release date of May of 2018.
Further Considerations
Summed up, there are reasons to suspect that the reports could well be true, though they are still far from being confirmed at this point in time. However, if they are true, it will be interesting to see whether the hypothetical failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story will have a negative impact on the other spin-offs that have been announced for the Star Wars franchise so far. On the one hand, it seems probable that Disney will make changes to prevent something similar from happening again in the future; on the other hand, Rogue One will successful enough to show that there is a receptive market for such spin-offs under the right circumstances.
