It sounds like the Han Solo movie didn’t have reshoots in a conventional sense. Instead, the latest rumblings are to believed, the entire movie as simply re-done by Ron Howard. Rumors have surfaced that when Ron Howard took over directorial duties on the Star Wars spin-off film, he pretty much re-shot the whole movie from scratch.
On Monday, a Star Wars fan podcast called The Resistance Broadcast published a segment in which they claimed insider reports suggest that Howard re-shot “nearly all” of the film for “twice the budget.” This rumor was [then reported]9https://screenrant.com/han-solo-ron-howard-reshoots-budget/) by numerous outlets on Tuesday. To be clear, this isn’t substantiated by any statements from Ron Howard, Lucasfilm, or any o the actors involved. Still, considering the controversy over the firing of original directors, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, conventional wisdom suggests there is more than a grain of Tatooine sand’s worth of truth in al of this.
For one thing, Howard has been pretty consistent about tweeting out photos from the set, almost as though he wasn’t really approaching the film as an after-the-fact collaboration with Miller and Lord, but instead, his own movie. Contrast this with Rogue One: even after Tony Gilroy was brought in to supervise reshoots, Gareth Edwards was still very much the person credited as the director of the movie. To this day, the general public doesn’t know exactly how much of Rogue One was Gilroy and how much was Edwards, but most agree the ending, including Darth Vader’s massacre, was the biggest addition.
But, the Rogue One precedent might not apply to Solo. Seemingly, Miller and Lord are persona non-grata at this point, and it remains to be seen if they’ll be credited as co-directors when Solo is released. And if Ron Howard did reshoot the vast majority of the movie, that means there’s a phantom standalone Star Wars movie we’ll never see.
If true, the bizzaro version Solo would rapidly become the hottest item on an imaginary Star Wars black market. Just thinking about such an alternate cut of the movie feels like it could also be the plot of Solo. Because the one thing too dangerous for Han Solo has to smuggle would obviously be an alternate biography of himself.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is still slated to be released on May 25, 2018.
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