The Force is Not Strong With Solo: A Star Wars Story
The Force Awakens and Rogue One have washed away the awful memories George Lucas’s prequel trilogy; however, there appears to an undercurrent of unrest in the Star Wars universe. In addition to the string of high profile departures from the forthcoming sequels and some strong negative reactions from hardcore Star Wars fans to The Last Jedi, there is evidence to suggest things are not well behind the scenes of Disney’s Star Wars Universe. Now, we are hearing things could get even worse. A source close to the production of Solo: A Star Wars Story has revealed the company is bracing itself for Solo: A Star Wars Story to absolutely bomb.
A source close to the film’s production has informed ScreenGeek the following:
“Disney is bracing themselves for the Han Solo movie to bomb. They were worried about it before all The Last Jedi controversy, but now they’re essentially writing Solo off. The lead actor, Alden Ehrenreich, can’t act, and they had a dialogue coach on hand for all of his scenes. On top of that, the script is unworkable. It’s going to be a car crash.”
As the article indicates, part of this information was already somewhat backed up by a story that circulated online back in June about the production team having reportedly brought in an acting coach in for lead actor Alden Ehrenreich.
The Hollywood Reporter stated that Lucasfilm executives had insisted on the measure when footage was shown to them of Eichenreich playing the iconic smuggler, and it fell far short of the standard they had been expecting.
Not to mention, the movie has already had some very visible issues, having lost directors and actors during its journey to the big screen. And it’s not alone, with director Colin Treverrow having also been removed from the production of Episode IX. The vague reasoning provided by Lucasfilm for his removal, along with that of Phil Miller and Chris Lord from Solo is that the vision of all three directors was incompatible with that of the parent company. Which seems slightly unusual given the two very different interpretations of the Star Wars canon that both Gareth Edwards and Rian Johnson were recently allowed to deliver.
This would seem to be only one part of the problem as new director Ron Howard is also having to contend with some other very fundamental issues. It was expected that Ron Howard would need to tweak some of the existing material, but the extent to which he has needed to re-shoot the footage meant that Michael K Williams had to be dropped from the movie, with Paul Bettany brought on board to replace him.
This is a fairly unorthodox move, and last week Bettany disclosed in an interview that Howard had actually been forced to do a lot more filming that he had initially wanted to. This would seem to bear out that the material he had been left to work with was proving more difficult to adapt than he had first thought.
A trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story is expected within the next week, and the movie is due for release on May 25th, 2018.
Should we be concerned? Tell us in the comments below.