Ron Howard Explains Why He Thinks 'Solo: A Star Wars Story' Wasn't as Successful as Planned

Though the upcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has generated substantial buzz, with enthusiasm building towards its release in December, there is still some lingering attention on a less successful entry in the franchise: Solo: A Star Wars Story. Last year, Solo became the first Star Wars film to be a box office bomb--and this week, director Ron Howard offered his thoughts on why it may have failed.

According to ScreenRant, Howard gave three reasons for why Solo underperformed during an appearance on the podcast Happy Sad Confused. In the first place, he said, the film had a less-than-ideal release date, opening on Memorial Day weekend against the immensely popular Avengers: Infinity War and Deadpool 2. Additionally, he said that online trolls artificially lowered the “Want to See” scores of the film on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Most substantially, however, he said that the story itself may have been the problem.

Unlike The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi, Solo was not billed as an “event” film and did not provide a extension of the mainline story’s events. It also focused on the existing backstory of familiar characters, as opposed to the massively successful Rogue One, which featured a new cast of characters.

In the meantime, Lucasfilm has pushed back the release of the next Star Wars film following The Rise of Skywalker to 2022, and has directed its efforts away from building small franchises around existing characters, according to ScreenRant.

For our part, we’re interested to see how Solo’s performance will continue to shape the Star Wars franchise and its release calendar. We might even give the film another watch, just to see if its poor performance was deserved.