From Collider:

It may be a while before we see any more movies like Solo: A Star Wars Story out of Lucasfilm. Sources with knowledge of the situation tell Collider that Lucasfilm has decided to put plans for more A Star Wars Story spinoff movies on hold, instead opting to focus their attention on Star Wars: Episode IX and what the next trilogy of Star Wars films will be after that film. Sources tell us that the previously rumored Obi-Wan movie was in active development, but those who were working on the film are no longer involved. It was recently reported that Logan filmmaker James Mangold was in early talks to write and direct the Boba Fett film, but that was before Solo’s release.

This news comes in the wake of the disappointing launch of Solo, which was only Lucasfilm’s second A Star Wars Story spinoff, but which received mixed-positive reviews and fell short of box office expectations. The film scored $84.4 million on opening weekend and has grossed $192.8 million domestically (and $339.5 million worldwide) in four weeks, which is nothing to scoff at but is far, far lower than the performance of other Star Wars movies at this benchmark. For comparison’s sake, Rogue One opened to $155 million and had grossed $424 million domestic by Week 4. To put it simply, while Solo did fine by blockbuster standards, it wasn’t the “event” that Lucasfilm expected out of a brand new Star Wars movie.

We’ve only had two anthology movies. One I consider to be the best of the new movies, anthology or not, and the other was Solo. There’s lots of reasons why Solo kinda sucked and we outlined them in our review. If Boba Fett and Obi-Wan were going to be more of the same, I’m glad they’re being put on hold.

As far as the stuff that’s still in development? Episode IX will close out the current trilogy and with J.J. Abrams back in the director’s chair, it has a chance to redeem itself after the mess that Rian Johnson left behind with The Last Jedi. And speaking of Rian, his new trilogy? Not really looking forward to it. The other new trilogy by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff? Not looking forward to that either. They ruined Game of Thrones with cliché plot devices, so they’ll probably stick to unoriginal story-telling with Star Wars. The live-action series by Jon Favreau? That might be the only one I am really looking forward to. The animated series? I never finished a Star Wars animated series I started to watch. I doubt Star Wars: Resistance is going to fare any better.

And despite my tone, I am not Mr. Grumpypants at all. It’s just that with the state of Star Wars right now, there’s little to be excited about.

5 COMMENTS

  1. I think the Anthology thing could be good, but it needs to be broken away from the release cycle that they were trying to keep and allowed to develop. More than that, though, I think they need to take the lesson of Rogue One and use it to flesh out new ground on a story that’s nebulous or just an aside, rather than trying to backfill a major character (like Han Solo), or even a marginal one like Star War’s Paris Hilton in Boba Fett (where fans will be particularly touchy).

    Rogue One worked because it could plug in at the edges where most people never thought about what was happening. Solo failed because it went somewhere that really didn’t need to be traveled for the rest of the story to work, and more than that, made some things later feel a bit wrong in doing it.

  2. Solo was great. Disney so far have not made a bad SW film, honestly people need to go back and actually watch the prequels to realise this. It was the weakest of the Disney films, but bad? No, definitely not.

    But quite frankly FBTB’s taste in movies is awful. Stating that Batman Vs Superman was better than a Nolan Batman film?

    • If you’re talking about my comment in this story: https://www.fbtb.net/comics/movies/2018/03/11/a-tale-of-two-studios/ I can only assume you’re purposefully missing my point. BvS was hot garbage wrapped in a tire fire and covered in more hot garbage… but Dark Knight Rises was a terrible follow-up to what were the two best Batman movies and two of the best comic book movies ever made. It relied on plot elements that were just as stupid as the whole “Martha” thing and lacked any good moments for characters (BvS at least had Wonder Woman, Irons as Alfred, and Amy Adams as Lois).

      I reviewed BvS twice for this site, and my opinions (hating it) are stated in a whole mess of words. And the whole “watch it three times” was basically me saying I’d rather watch BvS and switch off my brain than watch Dark Knight Rises again. I’m more than willing to throw on Batman Begins and Dark Knight, though, but in truth I won’t watch either of them.

      Now, that aside… we have different opinions of this movie than you do. Opinions that are shared by plenty of other people. We think Solo is bad, you think it’s good. So what? That’s how opinions work. If you are going to get all twisted up just because we think something different, go read some other site.

      As for the prequels… they’re better than Solo was. They aren’t good, but they took more risks and did more things with what they had than Solo did. It was stock, predictable, and paint-by-numbers… and that’s why I didn’t like it, and why I think it was bad. No amount of viewing other movies I’ve seen multiple times is going to change that.

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