Your final edition of The Week in Star Wars for 2017 has the latest on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, some troubling news about Solo: A Star Wars Story and more…
This edition of The Week in Star Wars is dedicated to the memory of Carrie Fisher. We miss you, princess.
Let’s kick things off this week with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which has crossed $800 million worldwide and is on track to earn over $1 billion. Whether it will make as much as Star Wars: The Force Awakens seems very unlikely, but it will probably earn more than Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and become 2017’s highest grossing movie (which currently belongs to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). It’s box office success means that Disney have already earned back their $4 billion investment…
…In terms of interviews this week, Rian Johnson spoke with IGN about Supreme Leader Snoke and Captain Phasma here, the ending of the movie here, and John Boyega spoke about the divisive reaction via Twitter here…
…More importantly though is Mark Hamill who has been very critical of the movie in the last few months. Last week he said in an interview that this wasn’t his Luke Skywalker, but has since revealed he regrets his criticisms. “I regret voicing my doubts & insecurities in public,” he said via Twitter. “Creative differences are a common element of any project but usually remain private. All I wanted was to make good movie. I got more than that- @rianjohnson made an all-time GREAT one!” He has since posted on Twitter to say, presumably because a lot of people thought the opposite, that Disney did not pay him to say that…
…In this week’s op-eds, George Chrysostomou asks why fans want perfect characters in Star Wars films, and Anghus Houvouras has some questions about Finn…
…Looking ahead to May’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (which got some fake concept art released that was so good many people believed it), and a new rumoured description of the trailer landed online. Read it here…
…But the big news came from an article by ScreenGeek, whose sources told them that Disney are getting ready for Solo: A Star Wars Story to bomb at the box office and be a “car crash”. According to the site, “[Disney] were worried about it before all The Last Jedi controversy, but now they’re essentially writing Solo off. The lead actor, Alden Ehrenreich, can’t act, and they had a dialogue coach on hand for all of his scenes. On top of that, the script is unworkable.” The dialogue coach rumour originally came from The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year after Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired, but the script being unworkable is a new one. We’ll see what happens early next year…
…And we’ll end this final edition of The Week in Star Wars with some sad news, as it was announced earlier this week that Alfie Curtis, best known as A New Hope’s Dr Cornelius Evazan, passed away at the age of 87. The Force will be with you, always.
That’s all for this week – may the Force be with you and a happy new year.
Luke Owen is the former Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth, a presenter for WrestleTalk, and the author of Lights, Camera, GAME OVER!: How Video Game Movies Get Made. You can follow him on Twitter @ThisisLukeOwen.