MOVIE NEWS – The Star Wars spin-off film was released in 2018. Acclaimed filmmaker Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13) has responded to fan requests for a sequel to the Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Star Wars has moved to TV screens in recent years, with the franchise expanding exclusively in series form since the days of Skywalker. But after Disney bought Lucasfilm a decade ago, they got into the swing of expanding into the cinema, with the new trilogy coming every two years and a separate Star Wars story in the intervening years. The first of these was Rogue One, which became the most popular film of the Disney era by introducing previously unknown characters.

Then in 2018 came Solo, the biggest flop in the franchise’s history.

With a budget of around $300 million and a new actor (Alden Ehrenreich), the film, which depicted Han Solo’s youth, grossed only around $393 million worldwide, a particularly big failure given that even the new trilogy, which was also much maligned by fans, managed to cross the $1 billion mark in every case.

But Solo was not directed by a rookie filmmaker: Lucasfilm had hired Ron Howard, who had directed Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind, to direct the film, which was also supposed to be continued. However, Howard said back in 2020 that he wasn’t going to make a second instalment anytime soon, and in a recent interview he revealed that there had been no developments on Solo 2 since then.

“As far as I know, the only people talking about a sequel to Solo right now are the fans. I don’t think Lucasfilm is making it a priority as far as I can tell,” the director, who signed on to helm this year’s The Thirteen, told NME. “But we’ve introduced some great characters, and at Lucasfilm they love the fans and they really look out for them, so never say never. But as far as I know, there are no concrete plans right now to expand the story or bring back certain characters.”

As for Solo, Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy recently said a few words about the Obi-Wan Kenobi series as a negative example before its premiere, saying that they realized it was not a good idea to use a new actor to play a character previously made successful by a specific actor (Harrison Ford in the case of Han Solo). (Although, it could be countered by saying that the original Obi-Wan was not played by Ewan McGregor.)

Source: NME