Disney and Lucasfilm would like to put Solo: A Star Wars Story behind them. The spinoff was a production nightmare, generated hundreds of thousands of words of bad press for the Mouse House and Lucasfilm, received tepid reviews and, most importantly, it flopped at the box office.
A rapid course correction was needed, with the spinoff movies Boba Fett and Obi-Wan getting repurposed as Disney Plus shows and the company shelving their plan to release a new Star Wars film each year.
But Solo still gets some love. There’s a long-running crusade on social media to #MakeSolo2Happen, pushing for either a full sequel or a Disney+ show. Now there’s a debate on r/starwars simply asking if anyone would be interested in seeing the story continue. The simplest answers are “Yes, because it’s Star Wars” and “Give me Star Wars and I will watch”. Fair enough.
But others point to the still-unresolved plot elements, specifically the late reveal of Darth Maul and his control of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate. This story has links with The Clone Wars/Rebels, with fans rightly saying it’d be a key chapter in Maul’s overall story.
But there is some criticism, with user TheLazySith arguing that A New Hope built up Han Solo as a character who’d had a ton of amazing adventures, with Solo spoiling that by turning him into “a guy who had been on one cool adventure by making all that stuff that the OT alluded to happen all at once”.
For now, at least, there are no obvious signs of life in Solo: A Star Wars Story and I don’t expect there to be anytime soon. If its plot is going to be continued, I’d look to the comics or possibly an animated show. Still, full credit to those fans for keeping the flame burning.