Remember Alden Ehrenreich? He played a young Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story. I’m refreshing your memory because A) he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth after the movie’s release and B) that was only two years ago and yet it feels like a decade.
The larger point being made here is that the film kind of did the opposite for Ehrenreich’s career of what he thought it would. Kind of like Brandon Routh after Superman Returns. Solo received decent reviews upon its release in May of 2018, but the movie is by far the lowest-grossing Star Wars pic, having earned less than $400 million. Oh, and that number isn’t domestic. It’s worldwide.
In the end, the film cost Disney nearly $80 million thanks in large part to a ballooning budget caused by the changing of directors and reshoots. But despite all of this, there’s been a recent campaign for a sequel to get made.
Ehrenreich has been making the media rounds promoting his new Peacock show, Brave New World, and naturally, Star Wars has come up a few times. While he’s unsure about a sequel ever getting made, if it did happen, he would be interested in exploring the character we see at the end of the first movie.
“I would. It would have to be the right version of it,” Ehrenreich shared with the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “What’s cool and kind of free, in a way, is the real fun of [Han Solo], my favorite part of that character, is something that kicks in at the end of the movie. It’s when he becomes that guy at the end, that’s the guy we love. So getting to that, and going from there is interesting, so we’ll see. But I think now they’re being so inventive with how they’re using Star Wars and putting out stories in a different way that maybe I could see some out of the box interesting iteration of it somewhere. We’ll see, who knows?”
He seems to be alluding to the possibility of a continuation on Disney Plus. The Mandalorian was a smash hit and an Obi-Wan show with Ewan McGregor is in the works. A smaller scale follow up would make sense, then, especially when looking at the box office results. Ehrenreich signed a multi-picture deal (par for the course in franchises), too, so he would still be under contract should they decide to make it.
Star Wars on the big screen is currently on a losing streak. The Last Jedi was a massive success, but the divisiveness of that film clearly affected Solo and The Rise of Skywalker, which landed with a thud. As such, the small screen seems to be the correct route for Solo: A Star Wars Story moving forward.