Ron Howard has taken to Twitter to express his disappointment at the under-performance of his latest film Solo: A Star Wars Story.
His comments came in response to a fan, who cited the theory that many fans were not seeing the movie due to the divisive nature of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and were thus “missing out and punishing a good film.”
Ron Howard responded, “I’m proud of #SoloAStarWarsStory and the cast & crew worked hard to give fans a fun new addition. As a director I feel badly when people who I believe (and exit polls show) will very likely enjoy a movie… don’t see it on a big screen w/ great sound.”
Solo opened on May 25, and has proven to be rather unsuccessful at the box office. At the time of this writing is has made $313.4 million worldwide, which sounds impressive, except that it had a $250 million budget, making it the most expensive Star Wars movie so far. (Keep in mind that most movies need to at least double their budget to earn a profit.) In comparison, The Last Jedi made $1.3 billion, scoring a $417.5 million profit for Disney and Lucasfilm.
Despite that, The Last Jedi proved quite divisive, with many feeling that it moved too far away from the typical Star Wars model. As Howard notes, however, Solo has, despite its financial failure, been deemed good by pretty much all of the critics and general audience members who saw it.
“Good” but not “great,” which may be part of the problem. Many have opined that Solo seems “unnecessary,” and while enjoyable, mostly just hit the beats that one would expect for a Han Solo origin. In a way, this is not a surprise―the Anthology films are intended to be “side stories” to the bigger “episodes” in the trilogies. In that regard Rogue One, which was much more successful, may have set the bar too high for films like Solo to live up to.
It is also worth noting that it had stiff competition from Deadpool 2, which came out a week before, and even the month-old Avengers: Infinity War. Whatever the case, Howard’s fans probably agree that it at least deserved more success than it got.
