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An atrocious sci-fi action bomb that got trashed for a very good reason makes a play for cult status

It even shares a title with another commercial disaster of epic proportions.

solo-1996
via Sony

Two titles don’t necessarily constitute a trend, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting when you remember that two action-packed sci-fi movies named Solo both flopped at the box office more than 20 years apart.

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While everyone knows about the infamously tortured Star Wars spinoff that struggled through a nightmarish shoot only to wind up as the lowest-grossing live-action effort in the franchise’s lengthy history, only the most cultured of B-tier genre enthusiasts will remember the 1996 feature of the same name starring Mario Van Peebles.

There’s a very good reason for that, too, seeing as Solo landed with a deafening thud at the box office to barely scrape past $5 million in ticket sales from a $19 million budget, while a Rotten Tomatoes score of just eight percent is hardly the most glowing of recommendations to entice modern crowds to give the futuristic shoot ’em up a shot.

solo-1996
via Sony

And yet, proving that rose-tinted glasses grow thicker by the day, a Reddit thread has been trying re-paint Solo as an underrated gem, and not an unmitigated disaster. The fact the film still only holds a 26 percent audience approval rating on the aforementioned aggregation site after racking up over 5000 votes seems to make it perfectly clear that it’s a fairly niche sentiment, though.

Van Peebles’ militarized cybernetic weapon is sent to take out a band of rebels, but ends up sympathizing with their cause and taking up arms against their enemies. Of course, his creators don’t take too kindly to that, forcing him into a bullet-riddled battle with the people responsible for his existence – as well as an upgraded android that makes him look like the Tin Man by comparison.

If a film was widely-panned and tanked hard, then maybe it’s simply not very good, although Solo evidently has at least a handful of supporters.