CINEMA: The fired Star Wars solo directors didn’t want to make a fan service film.

While Star Wars Solo is not a bad film, in terms of box office, it is con­sid­ered one of the weak­est films in the Star Wars fran­chise. After a trou­bled pro­duc­tion, the film mas­sive­ly under­per­formed and derailed a num­ber of oth­er planned projects, includ­ing the Obi-Wan Keno­bi film which has since been rethought as the next Ewan McGre­gor TV series. In a new inter­view, direc­tors Phil Lord and Chris Miller explained how their desire to ensure that Solo was not just a fan ser­vice film ulti­mate­ly led to them being replaced by Ron Howard on the project.

Although Solo was gen­er­al­ly well received by crit­ics, fans did not turn out in the vol­ume expect­ed when the film arrived in cin­e­mas on 25 May and this made the film a finan­cial flop due to the increased bud­get cost of reshoots. At the time, the change in direc­tors was attrib­uted to cre­ative dif­fer­ences, and it seems that these came down to Lucas­Film want­i­ng to release a reg­u­lar sci-fi action film with comedic moments as opposed to the vision Lord and Miller had in mind for a “riski­er” ver­sion of the Star Wars icon. Speak­ing to The Playlist, the pair explained:

Phil Lord: “If you give the audi­ence exact­ly what they expect and a bunch of ‘just fanser­vice’, they’re going to end up dis­ap­point­ed, they’re going to say, ‘Yeah, this is stuff I’ve seen before. The trick is to under­stand what they don’t quite realise they want yet and every idea you add into the stew is some­thing that you go, “Oh, that would be a good thing to see that I’ve seen before and it’s not what you expect because I think peo­ple are real­ly savvy now and so you have to stay ahead of them and I feel like that’s our job.

Chris Miller: “You can’t play with fear. So I don’t real­ly under­stand the fear of a fan base. We don’t think of it that way. There are peo­ple, I guess, who try to play the mar­ket and fol­low a for­mu­la. They try to serve the quar­ter­ly rev­enue of a big com­pa­ny, but a com­pa­ny does­n’t make a movie or write a song, those things are made by human beings and we always try to serve the human beings who make the movie and the human beings who attend the movie, always remem­ber what you put out there, that’s only half of it.

The oth­er half is that there is a per­son in a cin­e­ma and you put sound and light on their face and they are mak­ing the film in their brain. So you have to under­stand that as a rela­tion­ship and a con­ver­sa­tion, put your­self in that per­son­’s shoes.