If April’s Star Wars Celebration belongs to The Last Jedi – a first-look teaser/trailer is expected, along with a few other trinkets – then it looks as though Disney will shift the focus over to Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Han Solo anthology film in time for D23 in July.
Sources close to Star Wars News Net claim the Mouse House will officially unveil the title of its second standalone movie at Disney’s D23 expo. Anaheim will play host to the annual showcase over the weekend of July 14th, and though a mid-summer announcement is a lot sooner than many would expect, it’s important to remember that Lord and Miller’s Han Solo origin story is, at the of writing, penciled in for May 2018. That leaves only five months between the Alden Ehrenreich-fronted spinoff and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which means, providing everything goes according to plan, the Star Wars news will begin arriving thick and fast as we move further into 2017.
Could a title announcement be one such tidbit? It’s certainly possible, given Disney tends to jump-start its promotional campaign a year in advance – The Force Awakens is the exception to the rule, of course, considering it was tasked with generating interest in a franchise that lay dormant at Lucasfilm for close to a decade.
Per Twitter:
We are hearing that the title for the #HanSolo film will be revealed during D23 in July (14-16). The event will be much bigger this year. https://t.co/Lo1aRCwjhX
— SWNN (@StarWarsNewsNet) February 22, 2017
Joining Ehrenreich in the Millennium Falcon – quite literally, as the cast photo above shows – are Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones), Donald Glover, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca. Westworld‘s Thandie Newton is also involved in the spinoff film, even if she doesn’t feature up above. Filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller are behind the camera, and they’ll be directing from a script penned by franchise stalwart Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jon.
Smuggler. Scoundrel. Hero? Disney’s second standalone Star Wars Story focuses on the great Han Solo, and it’ll be with us on May 25th, 2018.