Star Wars' Han Solo Spinoff Directors Quit In the Middle of Shooting (theverge.com)

hondo77 writes: Due to "different creative visions," Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are no longer directing the Han Solo movie, despite filming having started in January. The film is still scheduled to be released in May 2018. "Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are talented filmmakers who have assembled an incredible cast and crew, but it's become clear that we had different creative visions on this film, and we've decided to part ways. A new director will be announced soon," Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, said in a statement. The Han Solo spinoff is set to star Alden Ehrenreich as a young Han Solo, with Woody Harrelson as his mentor, Donald Glover as a young Lando Calrissian, and unspecified roles for Emilia Clarke and Thandia Newton.

Comments

Not a good sign

[skam240]

Wasn't a fan of the force awakens (ending on what was basically a third death star run ruined the movie for me. Sure it's better than 1-3 but that should never, ever be a benchmark for Star Wars.). Sure, Rogue One managed to have an original ending and it was a movie I even enjoyed but given the recent history of Star Wars movies I don't have high hopes at all for the Han movie given this move.

Re:Not a good sign

[RobinH]

I'm not a big fan of The Force Awakens as a movie, and I definitely think the directing/acting in episodes 1 thru 3 was terrible (save for Anakin's mother). However, my kids love episode 1 with young Anakin and Jar-Jar, and my daughter loves episode 7 with a new female hero. She's watched the entire clone wars animated series, and what I particularly like about the whole Star Wars franchise is that it has this very childish quality to get kids interested, but there's a lot of hooks into real life history and politics. It's a good starting point for many discussions.

For instance, there's this whole Clone Wars arc about Mandalore being a (mostly) pacifist society who stayed neutral in the war. At other points they're dealing with refugees from the war. When I was a kid I found out that storm troopers were a real thing in Nazi Germany, and that prompted me to go and learn more about it. Of course there's the whole idea that Palpatine created a climate of fear in the Republic so he could convince the senate to grant him emergency powers, which he then uses to turn the government into a dictatorship. Padme's line, "So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause" is chilling. The fact that these important ideas are discussed in a kids' movie is a really great tool for me, as a parent, to start interesting discussions with my kids.

I also like how it introduces this (mostly Eastern) idea that you need to be mindful of your feelings and not let them control you. I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you. This idea that somehow whatever your feelings make you do is good because emotion = good is just opposite of my experience in general. I want my kids to be self-aware. Notice when you're angry. Accept it but don't let it control you, or you'll regret it later.

As a father, I really get the idea that Lucas created Star Wars for his kids, and I can excuse most of the flaws because as much as those of us who grew up with episodes 4 thru 6 hate on the prequels, kids really do like them.

Re:Not a good sign

[jellomizer]

Normally for a hit movie with staying power you need a good plot and characters you can relate with.
Ep. 1,2,3 had neither it was all special effects
Ep. 4,5,6 had ok plots but lovable characters
Ep. 7, 3.75 had humdrum plots, and relatable characters
The new Star Wars movies are fine. But not exceptional as they one were, but still better than the prequels

I think the problem is they are trying to fill gaps in the story that we had filled in our imagination. As a kid I always saw the move to Darth Vader as a slow tragic fall from an older wiser person who was a real hero however as age sets in he makes compromises for the greater good, until it took him too far. Not teenage angst.

Re:Not a good sign

[AmiMoJo]

Anakin's turn the dark side has to be one of the worst bits of character development in cinematic history. He goes from good guy to murdering kids in the space of a few minutes... In order to save his own wife and child. Even if they had a competent actor, the way it was written was impossible to pull off.

Re:Not a good sign

[RobinH]

I find modern thinking, and I hate to say this, but particularly from women, is that you should embrace your feelings and let them control you.

That's not quite right. The idea is that you should express your feelings in order to process them. The main difference between Eastern and Western philosophies here is that in the East you do the processing internally, in the West you do it with your friends or on daytime TV.

Yes, and in Star Wars you grab your light sabre and mow down a village of sand people or a room full of younglings. :) Your phrasing of the idea is more correct than mine, but I don't buy the logic that if you don't express it, then you can't process it. I think you can be aware of your feelings and "process" them without telling them to someone else. It's called mindfulness. I see a lot of people expressing their feelings all over facebook, and I'm not sure they're better off for it. Telling a friend about your feelings who then goes and tells someone else is unfortunately common, as is someone reading someone else's diary. I see some colleagues expressing their feelings over email in a very inappropriate manner. I think people who can learn to avoid inappropriate expression of their feelings do better as adults. Expressing your feelings often results in giving someone else something to use against you later.

Encouraging people to express their emotions is sometimes a way of encouraging them to share weaknesses with you. My wife is a big proponent of "expressing to process" but then I overheard a discussion she had with a friend. The friend said that she'd been talking to a man, that he'd gotten very emotional and started tearing up, and then she'd felt very uncomfortable, and then both women agreed it just wasn't socially acceptable for men to do that. That it was "really weird." So here's a person who watched a man express his emotion, and then related that story to another woman in a way that made him seem weak. Wasn't he supposed to express his emotion so he could process it? What if he'd expressed an even more socially inappropriate emotion like anger or lust? Would someone record video of it now and stream it live to shame them? That's why I don't buy it.

Re:Not a good sign

[squiggleslash]

I thought TFA was an awesome movie, and I'm tired of the whining about it. It was easily one of the top three - it was definitely better than the Ewoks movie. Yes, it had traits in common with the other OT movies - and thank goodness it did, because that's what makes it a Star Wars movie, and not Star Trek with Wookies.

There was nothing about ANH that declared or implied those who got the Death Star plans had died. Perhaps you're confusing ANH with RoTJ ("many Bothans died to...")? The second half of Rogue One was something I've not seen from Hollywood in a long, long, time, it took risks and the result was an emotional punch in the gut that was also exciting to watch.

I doubt R1's quality has much bearing on the Han Solo movie, simply because it's largely different people, but thus far I think Disney's done a surprisingly great job with the franchise. I hope they continue.

Re:Not a good sign

[Anonymous Coward]

George Lucas did a shoddy job alright, but the expanded Universe does eventually make it all a bit less terrible because if you think of Anakin Skywalker as a young soldier forced into years of war and suffering from PTSD it begins to make more sense.

It's a shame Lucas wasted 3 films telling us about the childhood and early life of Anakin Skywalker when what we really wanted was his fall and turning into Darth Vader.

Should have shot first.

[religionofpeas]

Star Wars' Han Solo spinoff directors quit in the middle of shooting

They should have shot first, and then quit.

Enough with backstories.

[jellomizer]

Although I think they should let Star Wars universe die (As well as the Star Trek Universe) as they are a fictional universe of a different age and the new storylines are hacked into the universe rules.
But if they are going to continue they should just move forward. The backstory will only lead us to conflict with our preconceived notions of the person. Han Solo for me while had some adventures before they were mostly just petty crimes and doing the odd jobs, getting involved with some bad people and trying to get money.
Now this could be an interesting story, but let's do it with an other person someone we don't know and watch them evolve. Not someone that we can observe like looking in the old photo album.

Re:Both Lucas and Disney fucked it up:

[TheRaven64]

The problem with Star Wars for the last couple of decades has been that the Timothy Zahn books and several of the LucasArts games have had far better stories than anything that the franchise has ever had on the big screen. Mind you, the extended universe has its own prequel trilogy in the form of anything written by Kevin J Anderson.

Re:Both Lucas and Disney fucked it up:

[Opportunist]

Sorry, but that shit is actually owned by them. And yes, it sucks to invest your time into learning the lore of something only to see it thrown away by the next bozo coming in and saying "don't like that, let's do something completely different!" and does "all wrong".

The lesson to learn here is simple: Don't invest into something that isn't yours. Hard to do, I admit, but in the end, every moment spent learning about a universe you cannot make your own if you are fed up with the official one is a wasted one.

And yes, I'm fully aware that these hardcore fans that spent time and money to learn about the world, to amass amounts of merchandise, to recreate their favorite characters, create faithful costumes and so on, those are the ones that kept the franchise alive while their owners were pretty much abandoning them, milking them for all they're worth all the while and living off those fans that keep it alive and vibrant, drawing in new potential fans. I'm fully aware of that.

But studios will never learn if they don't learn the hard way. So yes, let them keep it, let them use it as they see fit and stop investing your time, money and energy into it. Wait until a studio learns that those things are not given freely but have to be earned.

Creative differences

[rmdingler]

Though they formerly collaborated on 21 Jump Street & a Lego movie, Lord and Miller sounds more like a high end Mall clothing outlet for teens than the directors of the Han Solo movie.

Rumors being reported suggest their attempt to interject revisionism into the Solo character were not appreciated by Lawrence Kasdan.

Kasdan is the screenwriter behind The Empire Strike Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this movie (with his son, Jon).

Re:Both Lucas and Disney fucked it up:

[Paradise Pete]

What is my point with all this? That it is really time for people to band together on creating non-commercially owned replacements for these universes.

Or, ya know, just forget about it and do something else.

I wonder if it was anything like this...

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

Mark Hamill apparently completely disagreed with how Luke Skywalker was written in The Last Jedi. Seems to me that a lot of the newer chefs in the kitchen think they can improve the original, actually universally loved, characters and stories. I wonder if that was at play here.

If you want to tell a Star Wars story that really diverges from the past, that's totally fine. Get the studios to actually give you a semi-blank canvas that is set in that universe. Everyone will be better off for it.

It's not necessarily bad news

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

The story is that the directors had problems with Kathleen Kennedy, who runs LucasFilms and is their boss, from day one. Basically they couldn't get along with the CEO and she fired them. Kennedy has a pretty good track record in the industry and picking a fight with her was not a great plan. Plus, remember news leaked out that Rogue One had re-shoots and lots of people concluded that the only possible outcome was a disastrous movie that would fail spectacularly. Rogue One made half a billion at the box office. I thought it was pretty good. These guys' claim to fame is they made 3 comedy movies that turned a profit. Losing them with most of the shooting done is not a tragedy and the final result may still be pretty good and probably more in line with what the bosses expect than what they were planning on doing themselves.

When Recycling goes Too Far

[geekmux]

Spinoff Directors Quit In the Middle of Shooting

I can only hope the difference in creative vision went something like this:

"You know what, fuck this sequel/prequel/spinoff bullshit. I've had enough of it. Every damn thing coming out these days is nothing more than a shitty recycle of an older movie that tries to justify itself with a half billion dollars worth of 21st century special effects, or the 17th movie in a drawn-out storyline that should have died long ago. Give me an original storyline with a new concept for once."

Here's your 2023 summer movie lineup to prove a point:

Resident Evil: Gotta Catch 'Em All, Part 2

Fast and Furious: Lunar Drift

Pirates of the Caribbean: Hanna Montana's Revenge

Transformers: Rise of the Transgender

Star Trek: Teen Spock and the Vulcanettes

Sharknado Mayhem 4D: Movie Theater Wetsuit Edition.

Re:When Recycling goes Too Far

[Hognoxious]

Somewhere in Hollywood, at this very second, someone is looking at your list and saying "You know, that one might work".

Predictable can be fine - sometimes

[sjbe]

I disagree on the Rogue One ending though. Once it occured to me that they were really going to make the end of Rogue One match the start of A New Hope to the letter the end became much less interesting. Halfway through the end scene it was clear that all involved were doomed. Of course the transmissing HAD to happen. But Darth Vader HAD to find out. The two main characters HAD to die etc. Not very interesting.

Knowing where a movie is going ahead of time does not by itself make it less interesting. In virtually all superhero movies you know the main character is going to live and the ending will probably be a happy one. Most of the time the story is rather predictable too. Doesn't make it uninteresting as long as they make the journey getting there fun. To use the classic example, we all knew the Titanic was going to sink before anyone walked into a theater.

I was really hopefull afther The Force Awakens, since it was for me a great 'setting the scene' movie.

I suppose they had to get back to baseline after the prequels. Really it was just a reboot and the movie was for all practical purposes nearly a scene for scene remake/update of A New Hope. It was done well enough but this was ground that Star Wars has covered several times now which was disappointing to me at least. Predictable doesn't need to mean identical. The Force Awakens was something of a love letter to A New Hope and that's fine but I have to admit I wasn't expecting a remake.

Re:Both Lucas and Disney fucked it up:

[AmiMoJo]

I'd definitely watch GNU Wars. The evil Darth Vim getting his ass kicked by the furry little Emacs, Richard Starman and his GNU mind tricks...

Super hero movies

[sjbe]

I don't think "superhero" movies are a good example. They're the epitome of high-budget junk with no original plot or quality of story. - just action.

What do you think Star Wars is if it isn't a super hero movie? Jedi are nearly the epitome of super heroes. Furthermore I completely disagree that super hero movies inherently lack original plots or good stories. Sturgeon's law applies to any genre of movie you care to mention. Some of the stories that are coming out of the comic books these days are absolutely awesome stories and only a narrow minded snob would think otherwise. You could argue that the story could have been realized better but the stories themselves are often great.

They sell well to kids wanting to watch their favourite marketing device, but you'll find very few superhero films on any critics "must watch" top films.

I can name quite a few superhero movies that are must see cultural touch stones. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back are two of them.