Every movie has so many moving parts and requires the collaboration of so many people that it’s honestly a miracle that these forms of entertainment get made. That said, few movies are quite the miracle as Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film was such chaos that it ended up leading to a change in directors in the middle of production, though star Alden Ehrenreich seems to have a fairly pragmatic view of the whole experience.
Ehrenreich who is part of the cast of the recent box office hit Weapons, recently spoke with Collider, and on the topic of stressful productions, he said that all movies are stressful in one way or another. It sounds like the stress of making Solo might have even been beneficial to one degree or another, as it could be channeled into the stress he needed to portray as a character. The actor said…
Making a movie is stressful no matter what. Your job as an actor, in a way, is to use the energy that's happening [around you]. And sometimes that energy involves stress, but characters are under stress. There are very few characters who are just having a ball. So it's contributive sometimes. As long as it's an environment where people feel safe.
One has to imagine there was no lack of stress on the set of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Originally set to be directed by the duo of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the movie was ultimately finished by Ron Howard, who came in after Lord and Miller were unceremoniously removed from the project. It’s still far from clear exactly what the issue was beyond a general feeling that the movie Lord and Miller were making was not the movie Lucasfilm wanted Solo to be.
Ultimately, Solo: A Star Wars Story would be released to mediocre reviews and an equally mediocre box office. It’s the only Star Wars movie of the Disney era not to break the $1 billion mark at the global box office, and combined with its almost certainly high costs due to all the behind-the-scenes issues, it made the movie a money loser for Lucasfilm and Disney.
That’s not to say that there aren’t people who love the film. I think it’s actually a lot of fun. There have been efforts to make Solo 2 happen on social media, though it seems unlikely at this point that we’ll see young Han on screen again. When asked about potentially returning. Alden Ehrenreich didn’t close the door entirely, but made it clear he wouldn’t return for just any reason, saying…
It would have to really, really be the right version of it.
I, for one, would certainly love to see Ehrenreich’s Han Solo again, and I would love to see it happen under a situation where everybody is on the same page. We certainly haven’t seen the character under the best possible conditions, and if we did, it really could be great.
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