It would be fair to suggest that Solo: A Star Wars Story leaned heavily into fan service from the first minute right to the last, even if much of it went down like a lead balloon.
Alden Ehrenreich acquitted himself well in the title role despite facing the insurmountable task of stepping into Harrison Ford’s shoes, although we definitely didn’t need a cringe-inducing scene excruciatingly detailing how the smuggler got his name, or the constant references to this lucky dice, because they were in a couple of shots of A New Hope.
It was an admirable attempt to expand the Star Wars mythology, especially given the production troubles that saw Phil Lord and Christopher Miller fired by Kathleen Kennedy, with Ron Howard drafted in as a last-minute replacement to steer the project over the finish line.
Despite rumors to the contrary, it sounds as if James Mangold was never developing a Boba Fett Anthology movie, but at least the bounty hunter is back on our screens in a matter of days when his Disney Plus series arrives. However, even though Kennedy and Simon Kingberg denied the Logan director was working on a standalone feature, Solo writer Jonathan Kasdan revealed to The New York Times that he was told Boba “was always off-limits because he was in development elsewhere”, so it sounds as though plans for something have been afoot for a while.