As much as it’s impossible to escape all the Star Wars news on the internet nowadays, it’s important to remember that most it barely qualifies as news. It may be “of interest” that Cover Girl is putting out Star Wars makeup, but if the internet ran on presses, that would have been no reason to stop them.
So we sure do appreciate that Entertainment Weekly‘s new Star Wars issue features actual information about the upcoming films, and not just recycled enthusiasm, obsessive-compulsive detail-mongering and promises that this time it will be cool. Yesterday we learned some actual information about The Force Awakens‘ villain, Kylo Ren, and today we’re learning more about producer Kathleen Kennedy’s approach to the second Star Wars solo movie, which is (fittingly enough) all about Han Solo.
Related: J.J. Abrams Reveals News About ‘The Force Awakens’ Villain, Kylo Ren
The upcoming Han Solo movie is off to a solid start already, with acclaimed directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The LEGO Movie) at the helm, working from a script written by original trilogy writer Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jon Kasdan. But there’s still a lot of potential for this to suck. After all, remember when the last prequels came out, and pumped the Star Wars canon full of useless revelations and detail? (Midichlorians, ugh.)
“There’s got to be a reason for [the stand-alone film] to be,“ says Kathleen Kennedy, when asked how much of Han Solo’s past will remain a mystery. “And obviously the thing that Star Wars has always done so well is it doesn’t spend a lot of time [explaining] the stories that have come before. We don’t want to do that either. We don’t want to spend time going back and answering a lot of questions that, quite frankly, I don’t think people want answered.”
It was but the first statement from Kennedy which seemed designed to distance this new “Anthology” film in the Star Wars franchise from the (somewhat less popular) prequel trilogy. Her second statement informs us that she knows The Phantom Menace approach, which reintroduced Darth Vader as a wide-eyed kid yelling “Yippee!”, was not exactly what the fans wanted to see.
According to Kennedy, whomever they cast as the new Han Solo only be about 30% younger than Harrison Ford was when he shot the original Star Wars. “He’ll definitely be probably in the high teens, low 20s,“ says Kennedy. “We’re not introducing you to a 10-year-old Han Solo.”
Thank the maker for that. Kennedy is being diplomatic here, but we sure do appreciate her veiled inferences that she knows what we didn’t like about Episodes I-III, and that she doesn’t plan to repeat the same mistakes.
Image via Lucasfilm
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
