Ah, 2018. The year Star Wars fans were dealt a cryofreezing blow of reality. It was only a few years earlier that Disney bought Lucasfilm along with the rights to the franchise, and things were great. We got The Force Awakens and then Rogue One, and things looked like they were going to be incredible. Then we got Solo: A Star Wars and it bombed so hard everything changed.
Over on r/boxoffice, someone asked “Now that we’ve had some distance, why do you think Solo performed so poorly? Bob Iger a once gave his explanation. But what’s yours?”
Iger’s explanation, by the way, was that Star Wars fatigue led to the flop. He also said Disney released the movie too soon after The Last Jedi and that the reception “gave us pause” and that the company would be more careful with Star Wars releases in the future.
For the record, Solo grossed $392 million worldwide, but it cost at least $330 million to produce. Ouch. For comparison purposes, Rogue One grossed more than $1 billion. On the thread, we got numerous reasons as to why things played out the way they did.
One commenter claimed that the reason was “a troubled production” and that “people don’t care about Han Solo, they care about Harrison Ford playing Han Solo.”
A lot of people brought up the “golden dice,” which was something that felt forced and done for merchandising purposes but didn’t really add much to the film.
“It was very weird how they suddenly tunnel visioned on those dice. Who gives a sh*t about them?” Someone said.
More dice qualms: “…the same golden dice that were a very, VERY minor prop in the original movies. But for some reason they felt like they needed to explain their origin… like come on, stop over explaining things it’s just weird.”
There’s also the fact that in The Last Jedi Luke gives the dice to Leia, which was called “Weird-as-f*ck schizo writing, that’s why you need a coherent vision for your franchise before doing any movies.”
Another commenter said, “There is already a movie about a young Han Solo. It’s called A New Hope.” A little sarcastic but a good point nonetheless.
Someone else said people were underwhelmed with The Last Jedi, not that it was “bad or anything, just a bit boring.”
Honestly, people seem to just be sick of origin stories: “I am so tired of ‘Let’s have an origin movie for X character and explain the backstory for every little detail we saw of them in this one isolated period of the original movie’.”
There was also an interesting parallel to the recent money magnet Barbie. It’s the idea of something being special versus something being played out.
“This is my takeaway from Barbie. Audiences want event cinema–they want something that feels special to attend. Studios confused that with audiences wanting big franchises, because event cinema usually is big franchise stuff. But then the more they build up that franchise, pumping out more and more films/TV shows/etc., the less special any given movie feels … and then the audiences lose interest.”
Let’s also not forget that they killed off Han Solo (not a spoiler it’s been forever) in the also just okay Force Awakens. How are you going to kill off a character and then do an origin story? Just feels like poor planning.
Someone else pointed out the timing of the movie coming out, and referenced an A- Cinemascore. There was a lot of competition, too.
“It’s a stupid decision putting that film in the summer like that. Deadpool 2 2nd weekend, Infinity War still going strong, and Last Jedi just finished its run a month ago. It was Bob Iger’s decision, against Kennedy’s wishes. This film got an A- Cinemascore, it could’ve legged out over the holiday to at least 600mil.”
Of course, we don’t know this to be the case and armchair post-game analysis is much easier than actually having to be Iger and make decisions that have hundreds of millions of dollars in consequences.
It looks like there were definitely some things going against it (timing, fatigue, Solo’s death etc.) that negatively affected the film. If it was released at a different time, things could’ve been different, but there’s no way to know. All we have now is the fact that Solo ate a huge one at the box office and changed the trajectory of Star Wars content forever, for better.
Disney is much more cautious with its Star Wars content and we’ve gotten some real bangers over the years, including The Mandalorian and Andor, although to be fair those weren’t movies.
It’s be interesting to see how the upcoming tentpole movies perform. Solo is currently streaming on Disney Plus if you’re interested.