Han Solo is about to be spun off. No, this isn’t during some Star Wars action sequence. It is his own film. The iconic character, made famous by Harrison Ford, is set to go before cameras in late January or February of next year. Co-directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord have just recently completed the grueling task of casting Han Solo. Alden Ehrenreich will step into the role of Han Solo. Though casting news broke in May, this is the first that Lucas Film has acknowledged casting.
Ehrenreich was tested alongside Chewbacca and the Falcon to make sure he could fill the iconic shoes of Harrison Ford. “I’ve never screen tested with a Wookie. It was amazing,” said Ehrenreich.
Co-directors Miller and Lord were duly impressed with Ehrenreich. The directors, meanwhile, are hard at work on the new script with veteran screenwriter Lawrence Kasden and his son in London. Both Miller and Lord have relocated to London to begin pre-production work as well as flesh out the script with the Kasdens. Director Lord had this to say about his lead character, “”He doesn’t want to do anything that he’s told, and if he’s told not to do something, he only wants to do it more. He’s very sarcastic and yet unreasonably optimistic. He’s basically a cynical guy with the biggest heart in the galaxy and one of the most iconic characters of all time.”
The Han Solo film remains a highly anticipated piece of the upcoming Star Wars canon. Set to drop in 2018, the film will inevitably have the weight of the success of Rogue One, the next in the flagship’s canon, pressing down on it as well as the expectations of an entire fandom to do justice to a beloved character. It is especially relevant considering Han Solo’s demise. The filmmakers need to buy back the good faith of their fans and need to do it in short order. Han Solo remains one of the truly beloved characters not only in Star Wars lore.
