Solo: A Star Wars Story co-writer Jonathan Kasdan believes a sequel to the spinoff could be made if it's for a smaller budget. After kicking off their Disney era with a trio of films that collectively grossed $4 billion at the worldwide box office, Lucasfilm hit their first snag this past summer when Solo premiered. Even though Ron Howard's prequel was generally well-received by critics and audiences, it struggled to gain any traction commercially. With an opening weekend lower than Justice League, Solo tanked and became the first Star Wars movie to lose money.
There's hope that the film could break even with the home media release, but Solo performed well below expectations. Its low total (only $392.9 million worldwide) essentially squashed any realistic chances of a sequel - and quite possibly the future of the Star Wars story line of films. Still, Kasdan isn't giving up on another Solo movie just yet, and thinks he knows how it could get off the ground.
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On Twitter, Kasdan shared a lengthy thread containing various behind-the-scenes factoids about the film. He touched on the chances of a sequel during this post, indicating that a smaller budget could be the way to go:
"To be honest, I think the challenge has much more to do with the foreign box office than the U.S. Personally, I think there are great Star Wars movies to be made that don't need to cost quite so much. Hopefully that will be the trend in the years to come, and maybe, just maybe that trend will allow us, one way or another, to tell more stories with Alden, Joonas, Emilia, and Donald. With those actors and Ron Howard, I would jump at the opportunity."
The irony here, of course, is that Solo originally did have a smaller budget - by Star Wars standards. Production costs skyrocketed past the $250 million mark, making Solo a more expensive endeavor than The Force Awakens. Lucasfilm woefully mismanaged Solo, essentially reshooting the entire movie after Howard took over for the fired Phil Lord & Chris Miller. If those infamous creative differences were identified before the cameras started rolling and the film was completed under normal circumstances, things could have turned out differently. If Solo came in at its initial price tag of $125 million, then it would have turned a minor profit at the box office. It still probably wouldn't have been enough to guarantee a sequel, but the situation wouldn't be as dire.
It's unlikely Lucasfilm ever revisits the Solo sub-series (something Kasdan acknowledges), and that may be for the best. While mediums like books and comics can be used to further depict young Han's misadventures before A New Hope, the films would benefit from moving on and looking to new horizons. Both Rian Johnson's trilogy and David Benioff & D.B. Weiss' series are said to take place outside the traditional Skywalker saga, opening the doors for new characters and worlds to take center stage. By the looks of things, Episode IX is going to be the last hurrah for the classic tale we've been following for 40 years, and other exciting possibilities are in the future.
More: How Solo: A Star Wars Story Was Setting Up A Sequel
Source: Jonathan Kasdan
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