Thursday, May 10, 2018

The Solo Movie That Almost Was...

Solo: A Star Wars Story is getting ready to open to record audiences.  It's early tickets sales have already beat Black Panther early ticket sales.  This is pretty impressive since it Solo had been riddled with worrisome stories detailing problems behind the scenes.  The biggest one of these emerged when the then-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were let go after four months of shooting.  I mean, this was huge!  It was unprecedented for this to happen that far into production.  Disney and Lucasfilm hired Oscar-winning director Ron Howard to take over and he got started right away.  Reshoots were numerous and almost doubled the movies original budget, but it's looking like it will pay off in a big way.  The movie's trailer has the whole Star Wars universe buzzing with excitement.  But why did the original directors get fired in the first place?

Early rumors started to leak out that the directors, Lord and Miller, were fired for trying to turn the movie into a comedy.  Not like an Airplane or Top Secret type of comedy, but a Guardians of the Galaxy type of comedy.  In fact, Lord and Miller actually wanted to make just that, a Guardians type movie.  It seems that those rumors were true.  Kathleen Kennedy had to step in and take control of things when she realized that it wasn't going in the right direction for a Star Wars movie.  I am curious why it took two whole years for her (and everyone else involved) to change course.  For whatever reason it was, at least it happened.  Now we'll get the Star Wars movie we deserve.

Look, don't get me wrong.  I liked Guardians of the Galaxy a lot, but when you are involved with a movie series where the first movie set the standard for "outer-space" movies, why would you try to copy something from just a few years ago?  In fact, Guardians used Star Wars as a model for Star Lord.  Chris Pratt based his portrayal of Peter Quill on Han Solo and Marty McFly.  If Miller and Lord had their way and made the movie that they wanted to, I'm fairly certain that it would have gotten destroyed by Star Wars fans.  While Star Wars movies have comedy in them, they aren't comedies.  Not saying Guardians is a comedy, but there are a lot more funny parts to that movie than all of the Star Wars movie funny parts put together.

With May 25th fast approaching, we'll be able to see if the change was for the better...or for the worse.  

I told you that I would let you know what was wrong with the picture from my last post. In that picture from Avengers: Infinity War it shows the Hulk running into battle with everyone...but Hulk was a no-show for that fight.  Bruce Banner was there in the Hulk Buster Iron Man suit.  The directors made a clip using the Hulk for movie trailers to throw fans off what was going to happen, a misdirect.  Jacob, you were right!

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