Bringing Force back to Star Wars films
After Solo fails to reach $150M in first weekend, Disney may need ideas
Solo: A Star Wars Story, released last weekend, was the first movie in the cannon focusing on the beloved Han Solo. It was first of the rebooted movies to come out in the competitive spring-summer season. And it was the first Star Wars movie since the massive $220-million (U.S.) opening of Star Wars: The
Last Jedi five months ago. But with only $85 million in domestic box-office receipts in the Friday-to-Sunday period, the Disney/Lucasfilm release achieved some less desirable firsts. It was the first of the four contemporary reboots to open below $150 million. And it was the first of the seven modern live-action movies, going back to George Lucas’s films of the late 1990s and early 2000s, to open that low, period (after adjusting for inflation.)
The Alden Ehrenreich-starring spinoff did not even rate as the highest opening of the month; that honour belongs to Deadpool 2, which thwacked Solo with $125.5-million last weekend. It’s impossible to know whether this is a blip or the beginning of a downward slide for the Star Wars brand. What is clear: Disney needs to ensure it is just a blip. The company, which owns Lucasfilm, relies on Star Wars revenue both to fill its coffers and to gild its shiny Wall Street reputation — global box-office hauls such as the $1.33 billion for Last Jedi have helped keep the company’s stock price over $100 per share for much of the past year.
A slew of movies are already being planned, including a story in the main canon coming in December 2019 from The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams; an Obi-Wan Kenobi spinoff from Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry; and a Boba Fett spinoff from Logan director James Mangold.
Here are three paths to a potential Star Wars redemption: Tell edgier stories Part of the issue with Solo, according to critics and fan sites, is the lack of risk taken by the film. To shake it up, the franchise needs writers and direc- tors willing to take more story chances. Lucasfilm need look only at its corporate sibling in Marvel, which faced similar concerns until 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which went for a more irreverent tone.
Solo began its life by taking risks, hiring Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the meta jokesters behind The Lego Movie and the Jump Street series. But they clashed with Lucasfilm executives, including company chief Kathleen Kennedy, leading to the hiring of old-school Hollywood director Ron Howard. Fewer films Five months is not a long time for Star Wars to be away. Certainly it’s not the year that stretched between the previous three movies, or the 10 years between the last of the George Lucas movies and The Force Awakens in 2015. With Marvel, that seems to help; releases in quick succession enhance one another. But with Star Wars, novelty and absence may be the key to the game. Disney could do better by going back to the 12-month spacing or even longer. This sounds good to fans, but not to Wall Street or Disney financial executives. Star Wars films are such juggernauts that Disney wants to cash in whenever it can. And waiting that long doesn’t help in that bid. Avoid the late spring May is just too crowded. Disney certainly saw its numbers eaten into by Deadpool 2, whose second weekend of release took in $43 million. And more big releases await in the weeks ahead, cutting into its total. Yes, studios like this time of year, when overall movie-going is high. And they like a holiday weekend: an additional $18 million came in for Solo on Memorial Day. But every day around Christmas, when all three of the previous Star Wars movies came out, is a mini-holiday. It could stick to that period.
Why it’s tricky: Avoiding May or June would be nice. But there are only so many periods on the calendar. And if Disney wants more than one movie per year (again, see above), it needs to look beyond December. It could, of course, pull a Black Panther and go in February. But that puts the releases in even quicker succession.