There are just six weeks left until fans can ease their butts into multiplex seats and check out what Disney, Lucasfilm and Ron Howard have served up in Solo: A Star Wars Story. And now, thanks to the website for the Cannes Film Festival, we’ve got an idea of the pic’s runtime. Spoilers: it comes in at a tidy 2 hours and 15 minutes.
This puts it pretty much square in the middle of average length for a Star Wars movie. The Force Awakens came in at precisely the same place, with Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace just a minute longer at 2 hours and 16 minutes, and Rogue One a couple of minutes shorter at 2 hours and 13 minutes. This seems to be the sweet spot for the franchise, with the only real outlier being The Last Jedi‘s comparatively corpulent 2 hours and 32 minutes.
Admittedly, we were hearing earlier this year that Solo was clocking in at 2 hours and 23 minutes, but given that Ron Howard has only recently confirmed that he’s finished editing the film, I suspect the Cannes listing contains the true runtime.
Whatever the length, there’s going to be an awful lot of attention paid to reactions from that premiere. I won’t go into the film’s troubled production history now, but it’s safe to say it hasn’t exactly had the smoothest journey into theaters. In addition, The Last Jedi was greeted with a mixed reception, with Star Wars diehards (who had problems ranging from technical nitpicking to plain old misogyny) apparently swearing off the franchise. Will this upcoming Anthology film be good enough to draw them back in, if indeed they ever truly meant that they were kicking their lightsaber habit?
We’ll find out very soon, as Solo: A Star Wars Story receives its Cannes premiere on May 15th, and opens wide just over a week later on May 25th.
