Here's How Much Disney Will Lose On Solo: A Star Wars Story
In case you haven't heard, Solo is sooo not doing well at the box office.
In what is surely a surprise to even the movie's biggest detractors, Solo, the second Star Wars Story to come out of Disney's revived Star Wars franchise, is on track to officially lose money.
The financial disappointment is a first for the venerable blockbuster franchise. According to a breakdown by The Hollywood Reporter, the underperforming Solo is set to lose at least $50 million for Disney by the time the curtain closes on the sci-fi space adventure.
According to the report, the $50 million number is optimistic, with some industry sources indicating the real damage could be more in the range of $80 million or more.
There's likely no one reason why Solo is doing so poorly, relative to expectations, which originally anticipated a record-setting release. There are, however, plenty of potential reasons.
Many fans loudly swore off the Star Wars franchise following December's The Last Jedi. While we're vaguely skeptical as to how long that stance will stick, the sting from that movie is still very much in recent memory.
The close proximity between the release dates of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Solo is also likely a contributing factor as to why no one was eager to see the latter movie in theaters. In a series first, the Alden Ehrenreich-starring standalone adventure arrived only five months after Rian Johnson's controversial entry touched down.
Though Star Wars movies up until now have felt like unmissable events to general audiences, something about Solo made the spinoff feel quite skippable.
That could have something to do with the storied behind-the-scenes drama around the late-game replacement of original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, cautioning moviegoers to be wary of a potential disturbance in the Force.
It could also have to do with the original sin of the movie itself, checking a list of boxes in Han Solo's backstory that audiences, turns out, didn't feel like they really needed to see.
Finally, Solo arrived at the tail end of a robust spring release schedule, hitting theaters only a month after Avengers: Infinity War bulldozed the box office, and only one week after Deadpool 2 showed up to do his thing.
Premiering in May for the first time since Revenge of the Sith in 2005, the latest Star Wars movie faced competition from other beloved blockbusters, coming up short in the matchup. The last three movies in the series — The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi — all premiered in the prestige-movie month of December, to much success.
Looks like there really was something to those doom-and-gloom reports that dogged the movie all through development. Really makes one wonder how Disney and Lucasfilm are feeling about those Obi-Wan and Boba Fett spinoffs now, doesn't it?
Solo: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now.