Review of Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) by G Richard B — 29 May 2018

With a 400 million dollar budget, Disney would have had to get box-office returns of over 1.2 billion dollars for Solo to be considered a success, but opening weekend did not live up to expectations. Everyone is trying to figure out why Solo is so "meh." It has awesome actors, the best director money can buy, a rollicking good script, and surprise tie-ins to the core franchise. It also provides a satisfying backstory for the popular character. Still, everyone comes away feeling handled, and a little more disillusioned about the whole Star Wars movement.

If polled a third the way through the film, I'll bet critics would have rated Solo as high as The Force Awakens (which got 93% RT), but then the Solo story started adding things irrelevant to our curiosity. It stopped being a backstory, and turned into a spin-off.

Big mistake. We don't want a spin-off. We're curious about how Han got to where we found him in A New Hope. Solo's origins is a dead story, in the past, a tale with an ending we already know, prompting us to look back to its roots, not forward to a series.

Disney's greed blinded it to what it could realistically sell. We're not going to get emotionally invested in a love-interest absent from later core franchise films enough to want sequels of a prequel. Ehrenreich says he's committed to at least 3 Solo episodes, but fans are not biting. Trying to string us along for another two films, instead of wrapping the Solo backstory up neatly, ruined what would have otherwise been a hit.