Lucasfilm’s outgoing boss Kathleen Kennedy has admitted that she somewhat regrets the studio making the Star Wars spin-off Solo: A Star Wars Story.
The spin-off is part of the Star Wars Anthology film series and follows a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) meeting future copilot Chewbacca, with whom he joins a heist within the criminal underworld, where he encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian. Donald Glover, Emilia Clarke and Woody Harrelson were also a part of the film, which was set ten years before the events of the first entry in the Star Wars series.
Solo: A Star Wars Story arrived just two-and-a-half years after The Force Awakens, in which Han Solo was killed.
Kennedy was interviewed by Deadline as she prepared to hand over the reins of the company and was asked if she had any regrets creatively speaking about her time at Lucasfilm.
“No, I don’t really have any regrets. Well, maybe a bit of regret about Solo: A Star Wars Story. I brought Larry Kasdan in on, and we were so excited about that idea,” she admitted. “And then when you’re into something and you realize fundamentally, conceptually, you cannot replace Han Solo, at least right now.”
When the outlet acknowledged that filling Harrison Ford’s shows would be difficult, she said: “As wonderful as Alden Ehrenreich was, and he really was good, and is a wonderful actor, we put him in an impossible situation. And once you’re in it and once you’re committed, you’ve got to carry on. I think I have a bit of regret about that, but not about the moviemaking and filmmaking. I don’t have regrets about that. I just think that conceptually, we did it too soon.”
Solo: A Star Wars Story performed worse than anticipated at the box office, making a loss of just under $77 million and classifying as a box office bomb.
In other Star Wars news, the creator of the forthcoming game Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic has denied rumours that it won’t be released until 2030.