FORCE OF HABIT
Studios used to bank on Star Wars, but Solo’s stumble puts it at crossroads
NEW YORK The reaches of the galaxy far, far away might not be quite as vast as previously thought.
In a box-office blip that echoed through the multiplexes, Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t fare well last weekend, amassing an estimated $103 million in ticket sales from Thursday night to Monday. (All figures in U.S. dollars.)
Most movies dream of such openings, but the standard for Star Wars is different.
Solo, which switched directors mid-production, cost more than $250 million to make, and it was expected to debut with around $150 million. The opening marked the worst debut in the franchise’s history and Disney’s stock slid 2.5 per cent in trading Tuesday.
No one yet needs to run panicked through the streets yelling “Save the Wookies!” But for the first time since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05 billion, the profit potential within George Lucas’s space saga no longer appears limitless.
The disappointing arrival of Solo only intensified the questions bubbling around one of the movies’ biggest properties. Is there a filmmaker beside J.J. Abrams that can win over both diehards and new fans? How slavish should sequels and spinoffs be to the originals? Is there anyone in China who cares a lick about lightsabers?
“I think they knew they had a problem a long time ago,” said Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “What, 75 per cent of the directors are fired and don’t finish the film? You’ve got internal problems.”
Those problems came to a head on Solo, where filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were replaced during shooting by Ron Howard, who steered the film in a less irreverent comic direction that stayed closer to the script co-written by Lawrence Kasdan, the veteran Star Wars scribe of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
Once envisioned as a westernstyle prequel romp, Solo became an existential battle over the tone of Star Wars, as Lucasfilm struggled to find a balance between old and new.
It’s only going to get more complicated. Up next is Episode IX, which Abrams has taken the helm on after Colin Trevorrow was jettisoned. But after that film, a fleet of sequels and spinoffs are planned.
Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson is developing another trilogy in the main line of films. Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff will write and produce a separate batch of Star Wars films. Jon Favreau is writing and executive producing a live-action series for Disney’s upcoming streaming platform. James Mangold will write and a direct a Boba Fett film. And Disney will next year add Star Wars villages to its theme parks.
The litany of releases has, for some, diluted the power of Star Wars. Solo followed The Last Jedi by just five months, leading some to wonder if moviegoers are showing signs of Star Wars fatigue.
“It feels a little premature to talk about fatigue,” said Dave Hollis, distribution chief for Disney.
“We’re also planning our releases for Star Wars movies in the same rooms where we’re planning movies for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And we had Thor, Black Panther and Infinity War in November, February and May, and they were all wildly successful.”
But whether Star Wars can be Marvel-ified remains unclear. While Star Wars remains a mammoth industry, it all feeds primarily off that original trilogy of films.
And its international footprint is also missing one very big toe. China, where Lucas’s first movies weren’t released, has shown scant interest in new Star Wars instalments. The Last Jedi survived only a week in Chinese theatres. Solo did even worse, opening with just $10.1 million in the world’s second largest moviegoing market.
Bock believes Lucasfilm needs to get more creative with Star Wars, trust filmmakers to experiment, try an R-rated film and do whatever it takes to boost popularity in China.
“If that means hiring Dwayne Johnson for the next one, then that’s what you do,” says Bock. “He’s the franchise fixer.”
But the best solution might be even simpler. A full half — and, arguably, the clearly weaker half — of the Star Wars canon follows events leading up to A New Hope.
Lucasfilm could start with this: Look to the future, and give up the prequel.