Solo: A Star Wars Story might have some pretty decent reviews from fans and critics, but the Star Wars spinoff movie didn't do particularly well at the box office during its release. Sure, the film might have made a considerable sum of $300 million during its theatrical release, but the number is overwhelmingly low when compared to the billions that Star Wars films have been earning the past few years.
Speaking in an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Solo: A Star Wars Story director Ron Howard talks about the outcome of the film, defending the Star Wars spinoff and how proud he is of the movie despite the poor box office numbers the film received.
"I feel very good about the way it turned out. I love the way it played to audiences, which I witnessed and was a part of. So all of that I'm able to feel good about. Sure, I wish it would've done [better] and lived up to the box office and so forth, so that's disappointing," the filmmaker explained.
According to Howard, maybe one of the problems with the movie was its release. Maybe fans thought the idea of a Han Solo movie was just to nostalgic and they didn't want to revisit an origin story. The director also blames Solo's box office flop on trolls, saying that Solo's timing was ruined by Star Wars haters.
"And some trolling, definitely some trolling. Some actual aggressive... It was pretty interesting. Not so much, a little bit the Twitter feed, yes, but it was especially noticeable prior to the release of the movie. Several of the algorithms, whether it was Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes," the director explained, "there was an inordinate push down on the 'want to see' and on the fan voting. And when you look at it, it's like 3, 4, 5 -- or whatever the rating is, I forget what the rating is on Rotten Tomatoes, whether it's a scale of 1-5 or 1-10 -- but pretty high, and then a series of 0s or .5s or 1s."
Trolls definitely had to do something with Solo's failings, however, most industry experts blame the film's poor numbers on Disney's advertising – the company didn't want the film to come into conflict with the release of Avengers: Infinity War. Hopefully, more spinoffs will do better.
Lucasfilm's next release, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, premieres December 20, 2019.
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