A Wall Street stock analyst says “Solo: A Star Wars Story” stumbled at the box office because Walt Disney Studios didn’t present a credible replacement to the Hans Solo character, immortalized by Harrison Ford in the early “Star War” movies.
This most interesting film critic of “Solo” is Doug Creutz, who is a veteran media analyst at investment house Cowen & Co., and feels it was “poor marketing” not to better sell actor Alden Ehrenreich as the new Solo. That’s according to a Deadline.com story by Dade Hayes.
“Solo,” which premiered domestically May 25, cost a hefty $250 million to make, its original director was pushed out after filming started and is now underperforming at the box office — about a third below expectations. There’s talk of “Star Wars fatigue” as this 10th live-action movie of the series stumbles; “Solo” is the fourth “Star Wars” movie since 2015 as Disney ramps up this sci-fi film franchise.
In the Deadline story, other reasons cited for “Solo’s” underperformance are due to the crowded release calendar and the increase output of “Star Wars” movies. Meanwhile, reactions from Deadline readers making comments run the gamut, including defending the Disney marketing campaign as good.
One strand of readers feels that Disneyówhich bought the franchise in 2012óis inserting politically-correct elements that irk die-hard fans who want a more traditional approach. The Deadline story has 86 readers commenting — typically the max is a dozen.
Elsewhere, a regular movie critic blames the creative construction of the movie itself, in what again also focuses on the Solo character. Film critic John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard feels that the new Solo character is blandly heroic in the movie without any arc of development. He says that the Solo portrayal is at odds with Harrison’s earlier Solo character who is a rascal and self-centered, but nonetheless likeable. But the goody-goody, backward-focused story didn’t fit the character we knew before:
Writes Podhoretz: “There’s no bad boy to Alden Ehrenreich’s young Han; he’s a boy scout who is determined to save the love of his life. All he does is sacrifice things and help people. But the Han we know and love from the original ‘Star Wars’ movies is someone who sticks his neck out for the first time when he shows up in the last act to help blow up the Death Star and transforms his life as a result. ‘Solo’ should be a movie about what made him so cynical yet charming in the first place. It isn’t.”
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