New Info on the Han Solo STAR WARS Spinoff Movie

Entertainment Weekly continued its week of Star Wars reveals on Thursday with a few new scoops about the upcoming Han Solo spinoff movie. We learned in July that Lucasfilm had hired The Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller to helm the film, which will open on May 25, 2018.

Lucasfilm and Kathleen Kennedy want to make sure there's a reason for a Han Solo spinoff to exist:

“Those are exactly the questions we’re asking,” Kennedy says. “There’s got to be a reason for [the stand-alone film] to be. And obviously the thing that Star Wars has always done so well is it doesn’t spend a lot of time [explaining] the stories that have come before. We don’t want to do that either. We don’t want to spend time going back and answering a lot of questions that, quite frankly, I don’t think people want answered.”

Lord and Miller were hired to bring humor to the Han Solo spinoff:

“You can imagine, given who we’ve chosen to come in and direct, it should be very entertaining and funny,” Kennedy says. “Han Solo is the character inside Star Wars that everybody knows has a wit and sense of humor. So that’s what this should be.”

George Lucas was already planning on making Star Wars Anthology movies before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney:

Plans for the standalone movies, known officially as “anthology” films, began long before Lucasfilm was purchased by The Walt Disney Co. in 2012. Although he is now retired from the Star Wars storytelling business, Lucas gave his blessing to exploring individual characters in one-off films.

“It was one of the first things he sat down to talk to me about: What would those movies be?” says Kennedy, who took over as head of the company in summer of 2012, just months before the Disney sale. “That’s where we discussed not only reigniting the saga, but talking about the standalone, what has now become the anthology films.”

How old will Han Solo be in his spinoff?

Another question is how young they should go with young Han Solo. In the Star Wars prequels, Lucas began by presenting Darth Vader as a mischievous, pod-racing child. They won’t be venturing that far back with Solo.

“He’ll definitely be probably in the high teens, low 20s,” Kennedy says. “We’re not introducing you to a 10-year-old Han Solo.”

One point the EW article brings up is the task of dealing with two versions of Han Solo existing in pop culture at the same time, one in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the other in the Anthology movie. (SPOILER AHEAD) Well, if you've been paying attention to the rumors surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens, that won't be an issue. Launching a Han Solo origin film just a few years after the character meets his end in The Force Awakens is the perfect way to keep him alive.