Kevin Smith knows a thing or two about movies.
Throughout his long and decorated career, he’s been involved in practically every part of the filmmaking process, writing and producing projects like Clerks and Dogma, all the while directing episodes of The Flash over on The CW.
More recently, though, Smith has doubled down on movie commentary, what with the likes of Hollywood Babble-On, Spoilers and his long-running Fat Man on Batman podcast. The latest episode (h/t ComicBook.com) just so happens to contain his thoughts on two of the biggest films of the moment: Deadpool 2 and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
The latter hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, leading many to write off Ron Howard’s Star Wars spinoff as a box office flop. Nevertheless, Kevin Smith has now defended the Lucasfilm Anthology pic as “fun fan service.”
I saw it, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. I wrote on Twitter that I thought it was fun fan service, man. I thought there are great moments. I would have written the Han meets Chewie scene the way they did, and not because I’m like, ‘My version was better.’ I’m not that clever. I thought that was a very clever way to f***ing do it and stuff. I liked everything that referenced or tied into the f***ing other movies. At one point they referenced Bosk, and I was like ‘AAAAAAAAHHHH! I have that figure, still!’
Things also get a little crazy for Solo soon after the surprise appearance of Darth Maul, who so famously took on Qui-Gon Jinn and the young Obi-Wan Kenobi during The Phantom Menace. And though his cameo emerged from left-field, Kevin Smith was overjoyed by the welcome return of Maul, who typically held a role on both Rebels and Clone Wars throughout the years.
Darth Maul, first I was doing backward mental math, because I was going, ‘Wait a second. Clearly, they’re not referring to the cartoons, because no movies would ever do that.’ So I was like, ‘This must be a mistake because,’ because in my head I’m like, ‘Darth Maul was in Phantom Menace, and f***ing Anakin Skywalker was just a little boy. Are they saying that f***ing Han Solo was older than Anakin?’ And then I read afterward, ‘No man, we’re f***ing copping to the fact that in the cartoons he’s been back for a while,” so much so that the guy who voices Darth Maul in the cartoons was the guy who voiced him in the movie. They didn’t use Peter Serafinowicz. They used the guy who’s been doing him in Rebels and Clone Wars, I guess prior to that.
In closing, Smith added:
So that to me was like, ‘Good for them!’ Why not accept extended universe and the animated shows that they’ve done because they’ve built the Star Wars universe and, to a lot of people, those stories are just as important as f***ing Luke and Leia and Han and stuff.
Having dipped 65 percent in its second weekend, things aren’t looking too good for Solo: A Star Wars Story, and the movie calendar will only continue to get more crowded as the summer season takes hold. Where does this leave Lucasfilm’s Star Wars franchise? Well, we can’t imagine Solo‘s failures will have too much of a bearing on the juggernaut franchise, though Disney won’t be scrambling to release two Star Wars movies within the space of five months anytime soon…
