Years from now, people will still talk in hushed tones about the failure of Solo: A Star Wars Story. How could Disney manage to make a flop in the most loved movie franchise ever? Was it fan backlash to The Last Jedi? Were audiences just a bit Star Wars‘d out? Did nobody actually care about the adventures of a young Han Solo? I suspect the answer is a combination of all that, but now we have our first little peek at the movie Solo could have been with this uh, snowball fight scene from the Blu-ray trailer.
Well, sort of. You see, this isn’t actually from Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s deleted scenes. Those will probably remain on the cutting room floor until the heat death of the universe. No, this is was shot by Ron Howard and then cut from the movie for being “too funny.” That fits in perfectly with everything we’ve heard about Disney and Lucasfilm’s misgivings about what Miller and Lord were doing, too. Namely, treating the film as a screwball comedy in the manner of their other work.
Word is that this scene arose when Woody Harrelson was improvising on set and tossed a snowball at Chewbacca. This quickly devolved into an all-out snowball war, which sounds entertaining as hell – so naturally, it had to be removed.
Other scenes on the Blu-ray include an expansion of the Proxima’s Den scene, with a longer foot chase on Corellia, a fleshing out of Han’s time in the Imperial Academy, more of the WWI-influenced Battle of Mimban and a few more bits of character development for Paul Bettany’s Dryden Vos.
Unfortunately, we’ll never know whether the Lord and Miller cut could have saved Solo: A Star Wars Story. Perhaps the whole enterprise was doomed from the outset once they’d decided that releasing the film in May, competing with Deadpool and Infinity War, was a good idea. Regardless of whether it’d have been more profitable, I think it’s safe to agree that a more comedic version would have at least been a more interesting movie than the dull Star-Wars-by-numbers guff we ended up with, wouldn’t you say?
