There are few franchises that manage to repair their own history as well as Star Wars. The more than 40-year-old series has had multiple blockbusters fail to win fan approval after their premiers, only to garner love and adoration from the same fan base years later. After five years, Solo: A Star Wars Story has joined The Phantom Menace in the Star Wars Hall of Redemption.
Released in 2018 — just six months after the largely reviled Star Wars: The Last Jedi hit theatres — Solo was largely passed over by fans. Rumors swirled for months ahead of its release, from rewrites and reshoots, to the original directors being replaced by Ron Howard, even Alden Ehrenreich’s need for an acting coach pushed fans to believe that Solo would disappoint them as heavily as its predecessor.
Outside of Star Wars, Disney’s other main blockbuster property, Marvel Studios, released one of the biggest blockbuster events of the last decade a mere month before. Marvel’s Infinity War was the movie event of a lifetime for many fans, but throw on a heaping helping of terrible marketing, and Solo was introduced to the world during the perfect storm of lost confidence, disinterest, and Disney fatigue.
Despite it all, Solo still has a very devoted set of fans, all of whom are desperate to see a second installment. Since 2019, The Resistance Broadcast (TRB) — a weekly podcast for all things Star Wars — has been pushing the hashtag, #MakeSolo2Happen. The page has just under 5000 followers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have influence. Proceeding the film’s fifth anniversary, TRB is doing everything it can to bring awareness to its cause.
But does Solo really require a sequel? I think for many Star Wars fans, there wasn’t a need for Solo at all. It was a decent, albeit forgettable movie that had no reason to exist. That’s not to say that Star Wars shouldn’t explore new avenues —like seedy criminal underbellies— in its future storylines.
Rogue One’s popularity proved that fans were looking for something outside of the Jedi-centric box, and that — while Lightsaber battles were certainly a draw for many — heaps of fans wanted something a little more grounded than the abundance of Skywalkers and their family drama. Han Solo’s perpetual position as a zaddy figure in Star Wars made his backstory the most appealing and the most likely to get butts into theatre seats.
But just because you can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
Solo had plenty of elements that should have worked. It was visually stunning, explored the origin of an iconic hero, had a brilliantly-acted villain, and nodded to decades worth of Star Wars lore. Alden Ehrenreich’s Han was able to stand in the shadow of Harrison Ford without being totally eclipsed. Solo was fun in a way that not many Star Wars entries can boast of, easily breaking molds that came before —which could be a residual effect from fans’ complaints about The Force Awakens, the upshot of which was that the film was stuck in the past.
For me, it goes back to Disney’s egregious use of reconning. If the House of Mouse had never disposed of so much lore, it wouldn’t have felt the need to fill it in — or, rather, it wouldn’t have had the space to. Disney’s return to the canon of yesteryear shows that there is a certain amount of revision that has taken place after several botched rollouts over the years. The Mandalorian season three has leaned heavily on Legends content long since tossed aside by Disney executives, and that isn’t a bad thing. Rather than arbitrarily filling in the information, Disney should be focusing on doing exactly what it did with Rogue One, and fleshing out new aspects of an already well-loved franchise.
We never needed a backstory for Han Solo; everything we needed to understand that misanthrope happened during the original trilogy. It’s the same reason fans were devastated by his return and demise in the sequels, which relied on him being in the exact same spot he was introduced in years before. Han couldn’t have a meaningful story in his solo outing because we already knew where he was going to end up, and who he would be there with. By consistently restarting his character arc, Han loses all the things that made him interesting to begin with. If Solo ever gets a sequel, it will be just as empty as the first.
We already know how, why, and where Han Solo winds up, and unless Disney is really going to pull out the stops, many fans don’t care how he got there.
