With the announcement that Logan director James Mangold plans to helm a Boba Fett spinoff film, fans of the famed bounty hunter will be grasping at any scraps of information they can find about it this far off release. Fortunately, we may already have a little context on the cult character’s first big screen appearance since Attack of the Clones thanks to a few small giveaways in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Be warned, though, there are some minor spoilers from here on about the new Han Solo outing.
While Boba himself is nowhere to be found in the film, it does contain multiple allusions to people acquainted with the man. For one, Thandie Newton’s character Val tells Han’s mentor Tobias Beckett that he should have hired someone called ‘Bossk’ for the job, instead of Solo. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, Bossk was the reptilian bounty hunter who appears alongside Fett in The Empire Strikes Back as one of the mercenaries hired by Darth Vader to track down the Millennium Falcon.
Then, there’s the part where Lando thanks Beckett for killing Aurra Sing, another bounty hunter who took Fett under her wing in The Clone Wars after the death of his father Jango. Lastly, Solo ends with Han and Chewie flying the Falcon to Tatooine to work for Boba’s eventual employer, Jabba the Hutt.
Through these few meagre references, the movie quietly reintroduces some of the inhabitants of Boba’s world, while also suggesting that he and Solo ran in similar circles years before they clashed in the events of the Original Trilogy. It’s worth noting, too, that Alden Ehrenreich has a three-movie contract as the heroic smuggler, so a role in Boba’s film maybe isn’t too implausible.
That being said, for the upcoming spinoff, James Mangold still has something of a blank canvas to work with. Since much of the Expanded Universe literature about the bounty hunter clone’s further adventures has been officially labelled non-canon (including a well-intentioned retcon of his slightly embarrassing death in Return of the Jedi), Fett remains a fairly mysterious character for all intents and purposes. And with the adult Boba Fett receiving only limited screen time and few lines in the Original Trilogy, it’ll be interesting to see how this quietly threatening figure holds up in a feature length starring role.