The postmortems have been flying fast and furious after Solo: A Star Wars Story earned, at most, two-thirds of what Disney expected it would make in its opening couple of days. Let’s go through some of these excuses, shall we?
Item: Star Wars fans were upset because Solo switched directors in midstream. “When you have fans that are that religiously enthusiastic about the ‘Star Wars’ property, any change can cause a shift in the force,” box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Variety. Oh, for God’s sake. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directors who were replaced, aren’t known for their work on Star Wars movies—they made The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street. Films switch out directors very rarely and it’s never a good sign, but how many people actually know or care about such things? Not many. I’d bet every fanboy went to see Solo this weekend anyway. The problem is that non-fanboys didn’t.
Item: Moviegoers had just gone to the multiplex a couple of times—you can’t expect them to go again! “There’s a question of frequency, and how many times people will go to the movies,” Disney distribution head Dave Hollis told the Hollywood Reporter. “Is this too much and too soon for a third time in a five-week period?” This is, of course, patently ridiculous. People went to see the other two movies Hollis is alluding to—The Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2—because they were excited to do so, and judging from repeat business and Cinemascore numbers, they were happy with their decisions. If they had been excited to see Solo they would have shown up again.
Item: There are just too many Star Wars movies. “Solo comes a mere five months after The Last Jedi,” said Dergarabedian, echoing a point made in many other articles—Disney should have spaced out the movies more. And now it will do so, since the next one isn’t coming out for another year. This, too, is patently ridiculous. The Marvel movie Black Panther preceded the Marvel movie Infinity War by just 10 weeks. Black Panther made $800 million and Infinity War is at $627 million. Now the semi-Marvel movie Deadpool 2 has already passed the $200 million mark—and it came out just three weeks after Infinity War.
So let me explain why Solo bombed.
It’s the fourth Star Wars film to be released since 2015. The first, The Force Awakens, marked the return of the franchise to movie theaters a decade after the ghastly Revenge of the Sith. So everybody had to see it, and everybody did. The Force Awakens sold about 110 million tickets in the United States, the most since Titanic in 1997. The following year saw the release of Rogue One—which told a story ancillary to the central Star Wars plot. The audience fell off dramatically; Rogue One grossed about $400 million less domestically than The Force Awakens. Much of that dropoff was glibly assigned to the fact that it wasn’t a direct sequel. Then the direct sequel, The Last Jedi, came out late last year. It made $90 million more domestically than Rogue One—but $300 million less than The Force Awakens. Now Solo will be lucky to make half what Rogue One made.
Weirdly, every one of these movies centers on an orphaned young hero from nowhere, with nothing, who becomes a player in a major interplanetary game. Rey from The Force Awakens is a scavenger; Jyn of Rogue One is part of a rebel gang. The uniquely uninspired idea behind Solo is that he’s basically Dickens’s Artful Dodger, growing up in a slum stealing things for a local crime boss. Does that strike you as Han Solo’s back story? Doesn’t he seem more like the louche son of an upper-middle-class family who became a small-time smuggler because he found bourgeois life too dull?
There’s no bad boy to Alden Ehrenreich’s young Han; he’s a boy scout who is determined to save the love of his life. All he does is sacrifice things and help people. But the Han we know and love from the original Star Wars movies is someone who sticks his neck out for the first time when he shows up in the last act to help blow up the Death Star and transforms his life as a result. Solo should be a movie about what made him so cynical yet charming in the first place. It isn’t. It isn’t really about much of anything, actually.
The downward trajectory from The Force Awakens should have told Disney something about how much the audience was actually enjoying these movies. I suspect it did; there was a reason Disney replaced the Solo directors midstream, after all. The miracle of Marvel’s astonishing success is that its movies really deliver, and in unexpected ways. The disappointment of the recent Star Wars movies is that—with the major exception of the thrilling return of Harrison Ford in The Force Awakens—they haven’t delivered. And if the next one generates the same sort of “meh” emotion in audiences, that will be the end of the franchise.
Until someone comes along with a better idea.
