Everyone knows Han Solo shot first. Here’s everything else to know about the upcoming movie Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Start Wars fans face a two-year gap between the just released Star Wars: The Last Jedi and late 2019’s Episode IX, the final chapter of the trilogy. But take heart! Han Solo, everyone’s favorite shoot-first smuggler and all-around rogue, is getting his very own movie in 2018. Solo: A Star Wars Story will explore Han’s life in the years leading up to his fateful encounter with Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi in a Mos Eisley cantina.
The film is the second “anthology” movie planned for the sci-fi franchise, following 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Two-time Academy Award winner Ron Howard took the directing reins after the exit of original filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the film stars Hail, Caesar! and Beautiful Creatures actor Alden Ehrenreich in the role of a young Han Solo. It will chronicle the character’s early adventures and the origins of his friendship with Chewbacca, his Wookiee co-pilot and partner.
The young Han Solo movie is currently scheduled to hit theaters May 25,2018. Here’s everything we know about it so far.
A familiar name is returning to the Star Wars family: Veteran composer John Williams will pen the theme for the new film, Variety just revealed .
“The present plan is that I’m writing a theme for Han Solo, and John Powell is going to write the score, which he’ll do brilliantly,” Williams says.
Oscar-nominated composer John Powell will take up the baton to score Solo: A Star Wars Story, Lucasfilm has announced in July 2017. Best known for his work on the Jason Bourne franchise and the score he created for the 2010 animated feature How To Train Your Dragon that earned him an Academy Award nomination, Powell is just the third composer to score a live-action Star Wars movie. He joins an elite group that includes veteran, five-time Academy Award winner John Williams, who scored all eight of the episodic films in the series, and Michael Giacchino, who won an Academy Award for scoring 2009’s Up and scored last year’s Star Wars anthology film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Powell has received praise for his innovative use of live percussion — particularly the Indian Conga drum — in several films, beginning with 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy .
Ron Howard dropped a few Millennium Falcon-size news bombs on Twitter on Tuesday, October 17, about the upcoming Han Solo film. The director revealed the film has recently ended production — and just as important, Howard finally revealed the name of the film: Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Now that production has wrapped and the name is picked, the next thing to wait for is the film’s first trailer. Last year, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s first trailer was released in August 2016, four months before its December 2016 release date. If Solo follows the same trend, we should be getting our first look into Han Solo’s backstory by the end of January 2018.
On Tuesday, September 26, continuing his recent trend of teasing fans via Twitter, director Ron Howard shared a photo of some mysterious markings, carved into a stone tablet a la hieroglyphs. Howard captioned the tweet, “Can anybody translate for me? # McQuarrie # UntitledHanSoloMovie” in an overt reference to concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, who worked extensively on the original trilogy.
Entertainment Weekly cast an educated eye on the symbols and realized that we’ve seen them before — a few times. Similar iconography is visible in some of McQuarrie’s artwork (especially in the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster) as well as in an episode of the Star Wars: Rebels animated series, in the Temple of Lothal. Given the fact that both instances occur in temples, we predict that the symbols are somehow related to the Jedi Order.
Howard has kept the Han Solo movie teases and hints coming over the last few months. The director posted an intriguing set photo in September, with a caption that gave a few more details than his “spicey” post (see below). If anything, we’re only more curious. The image is foggy and reveals very little, and his caption was informative yet somehow still equally vague.
“Shooting a scene about desperate and dangerous times in the Galaxy,” he wrote.
With the Han Solo movie’s plot still a mystery, we can only guess at what, specifically, these “desperate and dangerous” times will entail.
Every fan of Star Wars knows that Han Solo’s claim to fame is making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, and now it appears that we might finally get to see him perform that particular feat.
Howard revealed a photo (via Twitter) from the set of the film on Wednesday, September 20 with the caption “Spicey?” The image appears to show the entrance to a mine, leading many fans to suspect that it’s the entrance to the spice mines of Kessel — one end of the famous hyperspace route used by smugglers to make illegal deliveries of spice from the mines to customers.
The veracity of Solo’s claim has long been the subject of contention among both fans and those writing Star Wars history, as the canon has occasionally differed on whether the famous smuggler really accomplished such a feat in the Millennium Falcon. Now it seems like fans might finally learn the truth.
According to That Hashtag Show, everyone’s favorite Darth (sorry, Maul fans) will make an appearance in the Han Solo prequel.
A source “close to the production” revealed that someone was on the film’s set wearing the unmistakable Darth Vader armor and cloak; we don’t know who, though, as Spencer Wilding — who portrayed the Sith Lord in the ending scene of Rogue One — vehemently denied any association with the movie. Given that Vader’s mask probably isn’t going to come off (we don’t really expect a substantial role for Vader), we don’t really care who wears the dark helmet.
