By Kerey McKenna.
Han Solo always believed that he could do it all by himself and carry the day on pure bravado. Could he carry a movie?
No.
It looks like despite the hype and the Star Wars brand name, the Solo origin movie had a rough opening weekend.
Reviews are in, and they are mixed, including mine. The movie made money, but not Marvel movie money. In case any Disney employees are reading this and their job depends on explaining to the higher ups why they thought a Han Solo origin movie was going to do well, maybe this little history review will help remind everybody why Solo seemed like a decent bet.
Licensing Agreements: More Powerful Than You Could Possibly Imagine
It’s no exaggeration to say that when Star Wars premiered in 1977, it didn’t so much break the mold as create a new one: blockbuster as cultural phenomenon. But perhaps even more significantly, it created fortunes in merchandising beyond the dreams of avarice, or as Mel Brooks called it in Spaceballs, "Moichandizing." THE SEARCH FOR MORE MONEY.
Pre-Star Wars, knick-knacks like toys and memorabilia were considered a nice way to turn a little extra profit leading up to a movie’s premiere or the Christmas Shopping Season. However, Star Wars mania drove demand for Star Wars merchandise year round, year after year. Kenner Toys, seeking to fatten the Golden Goose of their licensing agreement for action figures and vehicles, started creating new characters and vehicles to sell. When Marvel, which had the comic book rights to the original trilogy, ran out of shooting script to adapt into pen and ink, they ordered their writers and artists to start making new content to continue the adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han. Having cannily negotiated for merchandising rights of his creation, George Lucas was willing to let his license holders start expanding the Star Wars saga with new content. With the exception of the laughable 1970’s-style variety show Star Wars Holiday Special, which was intended to be a narrative bridge between Star Wars and the upcoming Empire Strikes Back, the hard core fans, general public, and nascent collectibles speculators’ market welcomed anything with the Star Wars brand on it.
After seemingly concluding his big screen saga with 1983’s Return of the Jedi, Lucas appeared to have no interest in continuing the series on film and went about tending the Star Wars merchandising empire. With only some TV projects in the mid-80’s aimed at younger fans, (two animated series, Star Wars:Droids and Star Wars: Ewoks, and two made-for-TV live action movies centered on the Ewoks, Ewok Adventures and Battle For Endor), adult fans gravitated to novels, comics, and video games that were set in…
THE STAR WARS EXPANDED UNIVERSE
"After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story—however many films it took to tell—was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell. Instead, they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today, it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga."–George Lucas, introduction to the 1996 reprinting of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
From these humble beginnings sprang an entire literary universe of prose novels and later comics set in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Over the years Lucas and his publishing partners set up a stable of creative talent to tell more Star Wars, sometimes about the main cast, sometimes about the supporting cast, sometimes just a walk-on appearance, and ultimately about some original characters. Under Lucas and his paid continuity guardians, creative teams were given license to weave narratives around the existing three movies and the further adventures of the main cast and their offspring.
Without the guarantee of new movies, the Star Wars saga now thrived in a seemingly self-sufficient ecosystem of prose, comics, and video games. Even when the infamous prequels dropped, the Expanded Universe not directly under Lucas’ control continued to turn out work that kept fans engaged. For example the animated series The Clone Wars: As a weekly serial, it was limited by a TV budget, but it had more screen time than the movies in which to unfold a more epic war story that arguably used Lucas’s characters better (yes, even JarJar Binks) than Episodes I, II and III.
Given the argle-bargle about subsequent Star Wars projects, whether they were helmed by Lucas or Disney, I think many fans would have been happier if no new big screen projects were created. They would say that they wished the Han Solo origin trilogy could have been brought to life. Or that they want to see the adventures of the Jedi Academy and that one kid Han and Leia had that turned to the Dark Side. And maybe the story of unknown and unsung spies working to bring down the Death Star in Dark Forces would make a good movie someday.
They would have said that, and some may even still believe that their favorite piece of authorized fiction would have made a better Disney Star Wars movie, but...
The new Star Wars movies are the Expanded Universe writ large
The new Disney overlords of the franchise may have declared their intentions to create a new Expanded Universe, but it’s a cash crop planted in the remnants of the previous harvest. Invariably a generation of creators raised on the original Star Wars Expanded Universe (now dubbed “Legends”) have already started taking characters and plots from the old works and putting them into the new. And back on the big screen, both entries in the “Star Wars Story” movies, Rogue One and Solo, are authorized fiction novels blown up into feature films. Between the two of them they pretty much encompass how an Expanded Universe property usually played out, either a group of wholly new characters providing a new point of view and elaborating back story for previously established events (Rogue One) or giving characters we met in previous movies origin stories and more adventures (Solo). The whole endeavor has the same freedoms and constraints as the novelizations did. Because Star Wars doesn’t deal in time travel (yet), there isn’t the setup that was used in the JJ Abrams Star Trek reboot films that “it’s a new timeline so characters don’t have their plot armor.” Any new projects can doodle in the margins of Star Wars canon but they can’t erase the whole texts.
Rogue One and Solo aren’t direct adaptations of any particular pieces of Expanded Universe prose but rather are distillations of the whole experiment. There were novels based around the fighting men and women of the galactic civil war and the espionage that was required to thwart the Death Star. Before Solo there was a trilogy of novels fleshing out the adventures of young Han and how he met Chewbacca and acquired the Falcon.
So if prose, comics and video games were keeping the saga alive and thriving before, and even after the prequels, than it stood to reason that audiences would adore these distillations of the expanded universe right?
“Your overconfidence is your weakness” - Luke Skywalker, Return of the Jedi
Expanded universe novels have made number one on the New York Times bestseller list (even during times when no new movie was anticipated). The post 2000 Star Wars TV shows (Clone Wars (2003), The Clone Wars (2008), and Rebels 2014) ran for a combined fourteen years. So for Disney, flush with the success of its Marvel films, doubling down on another nerdy shared universe seemed like a safe bet.
However, with Solo stumbling on the starting block, it looks like Disney may have to keep some things in mind going forward, the first being that while the Expanded Universe did maintain and expand the value of the brand, it often did it as a niche product for invested fans, not with the all-demographic mass appeal of the original movies. They may also be coming up against the event fatigue I wrote about previously in the context of comic book universes. Audiences may not be ready to have each Star Wars movie come so close to the last. It took Marvel Studios films a bit of time to build up that kind of momentum and audience goodwill.
Whether Disney will hit its stride with the Star Wars films or ease off and greenlight fewer movies, we will just have to wait and see.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
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