Ron Howard blames “aggressive trolling” for Solo’s poor box office

The Star Wars cinematic universe is preparing to go on an extended vacation. After December’s The Rise of Skywalker, Disney is making like Darth Vader freezing Han Solo in carbonite and putting all Star Wars movies on hold until 2020 when former Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss show off their talents in that galaxy far, far away.

This scaling back of Star Wars films could reasonably be attributed to fan fatigue at having a new movie every year, and of course, the fact that Solo: A Star Wars Story aired just six months after The Last Jedi — a film that was the most divisive in the franchise — didn’t help either.

And here’s the thing: Solo wasn’t a bad movie. In my opinion, it was a fun story mixed with exciting action that ended on a great twist leaving room for sequels. So what gives? Why did Han Solo’s origin story do so poorly at the box office?

Well, according to director Ron Howard — who was brought in to take over a mess left behind by the original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) — it was “aggressive trolling” that did the movie in.

“I wish it could have lived up to the box office expectations,” Howard told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “That’s disappointing. Why didn’t it? Maybe that’s the release [date], maybe it was too nostalgic, maybe pushback from the previous movie…some trolling, definitely.”

"It was especially noticeable in several algorithms such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. There was an inordinate push down on the ‘Want to see’ and on the fan voting. There was a series of 0s and 1s on there…I didn’t take it personally."

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Solo earned nearly $400 million worldwide on a budget of $275 million. And, while that might appear to be a successful film at any other production company, this is Disney we’re talking about here, whose last stand-alone Star Wars film — Rogue One — tipped the scales at just over $1 billion. Also, Rotten Tomatoes has changed the way audiences can affect a film’s score even before it hits the theaters ever since the brigading that took place on Captain Marvel (over $1 billion worldwide box office haul).

Moving on, here’s some key art for Respawn/EA’s new Star Wars video game — Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order.

Neat. Finally, straight from a source for fansite Star Wars News Net (a site that usually gets rumors about Star Wars right on the nose), claims to have seen how director J.J. Abrams plans on bringing Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa onto the big screen in The Rise of Skywalker. According to the source, “They are combining clips” from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in order to have Fisher in the film.

Abrams won’t be using a digital double like what was used for Leia in Rogue One: A Star Wars story, but there will be some digital work done to Fisher’s facial features in order to age her up a bit from The Last Jedi.

Yeah, good luck not having nightmares about that image tonight. The uncanny valley is a scary place, folks.

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h/t Deadline