Wild Speculation: Phil Lord and Chris Miller Are No Longer Directing the Han Solo Spin Off Movie

Welcome to “Wild Speculation” a segment here where we take a recent news story and speculate wildly on what it could mean. Today’s story, Directing duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who were directing the still untitled Han Solo spinoff film for Lucasfilm, announced yesterday that they were leaving the project. Officially that is all we know so far. Now, onto the wild speculation.

First of all I want to say something about the idea of Phil Lord and Chris Miller directing this Han Solo movie in the first place. To date the pair have directed four movies together (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street) which have all been out and out comedies of one form or another. While not full out parodies, each of these four movies has leaned very heavily into outlandish comedy in it’s own unique way. And while Star Wars movies have always been fun movies with plenty of humor, especially when it came to the character of Han Solo, it’s nowhere near the level of over the topness that Lord and Miller have put into each of their previous projects. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed each of the movies these two guys had directed. Four movies into their directing career, these guys are batting 1000, which is pretty impressive, but still it took me off guard when it was announced that they would be working on Star Wars. I wondered at the time how would their approach to filmmaking gel with this new Star Wars universe that Lucasfilm was trying to build. Turns out, not so well.

Variety is reporting that Lord and Miller did not just leave the project, but were in fact fired by producer Kathleen Kennedy, who is in charge of building the Star Wars franchise.  More or less they’re saying that Lord and Miller never really gelled with Kennedy in a cohesive vision for the movie, both in style and substance. While no specific examples were mentioned there are plenty of rumors flying about the internet as to what exactly went down with the most popular one being that Lord and Miller were eager to have a loose set with plenty of room for the actors to improvise while Kennedy wanted them to stick much more strictly to the script. Now while this is a rumor, it’s one that’s easy to believe. Looking at other Lord and Miller projects, it’s easy to see how they might be the kind of directors who thrive on a free and open set where everyone is given plenty of room to play and find new things.

Meanwhile, from Kennedy’s perspective, this is a potential nightmare. Remember, the idea for Star Wars is that going forward, everything is Cannon, Every movie, TV show, book, video game, comic, postage stamp, it all counts. Everything is an equally valid part of the Star Wars story. Trying to keep everything in line is difficult enough already, can you imagine the idea of some tidbit or fact becoming cannon and impacting all future Star Wars projects because some actor back in 2016 thought it was funny? This is a situation where I can easily see both sides. Lord and Miller were obviously hired to do a job, and this is the best way they know to do this job. You shouldn’t hire Lord and Miller if you don’t want a Lord and Miller production. But Kennedy isn’t just thinking about getting one good movie out. She’s been tasked with continuing arguably the most important pop culture phenomenon in history, and has to look beyond this one movie for the future of Star Wars.

When you hear a story like this one, you can’t help but think back to where we were a little over a year ago hearing about all the problems that were plaguing the production of Rogue One. Now, while Rogue One turned out fine (much more than fine in my opinion) at the time is was looking like it might be a disaster. There were reported problems with the script, the sequences weren’t up to snuff, and major reshoots were being rescheduled. Now we probably won’t know exactly what happened in the making of Rogue One for many, many years. We’ll have to wait for some special edition release to get the documentary on the trials of that film, but one criticism we heard at the time sounds very similar to one that has been put out against the Han Solo movie. Simply that after looking at what had been shot so far, Kennedy and other members of Lucasfilm felt that it simply wasn’t Star Wars. For Rogue One other writers were brought in, to help give the movie that “Star Wars feel” that it needs to fit in with the rest of the universe, and I’m betting that something similar may have happened on the Han Solo film.

But this is where it gets tricky. Gareth Edwards (the director of Rogue One) had only directed one major studio film before being hired to direct a Star Wars movie. Lord and Miller have directed four. In addition to their directing work, Lord and Miller have been heavily involved in the productions of several other movies and TV shows dating back over the past fifteen years at this point. This means that while Edwards was a relative newcomer to the major studio system when he was directing, Lord and Miller probably feel much more established. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that this was a situation where Edwards decided to play ball with the newly brought in creatives to work on his movie, where as Lord and Miller did not.

So where does this leave the Han Solo movie? Well according to reports the release date of the movie remains unchanged. That’s honestly a little scary. No matter how you feel about this story, there’s no way around the fact that losing the director of a movie this late into production is a major deal. Then the question comes as to what the new director will have to do with the have completed film that he’s suddenly in charge of. Supposedly, there are about three weeks of principal photography left on the shoot, which means that no matter who is brought on to replace them, Lord and Miller will have been responsible for directing the majority of the movie barring any reshoots. (It should be noted that there will most likely be reshoots announced later this year, but even so, it doesn’t seem likely that there will be enough of the movie reshot to remove whatever impact Lord and Miller had on the project during their time there)

Disney at one point said that there will be a new Star Wars movie every year from now on. You and I will not live to see the end of Star Wars because there will be no end. It will continue on forever. But this means that eventually, at some point, there will be a bad Star Wars movie. It seems like that Sword of Damocles is hanging over the head of Kennedy and the whole of Lucasfilm. All the reports about Rogue One reshoots were making fans nervous and now it looks like the Han Solo movie is in trouble as well. (This report also opened up the floodgates to a whole new batch of rumors of other potential issues with the production of the Han Solo movie, but that’s for a different article.) To make matters worse, D23 Expo (Disney’s own Comic-Con like event for making major announcements) is next month and  the Han Solo movie was supposed to be a major part of that. For now we can only watch and wait to see who will be hired to complete the movie and what Lucasfilm’s next step will be.

Someday, when we’re all old and gray, and watching the Special Ultimate Anniversary edition of this movie on HoloCube or however we’ll watch movies in the future, we’ll finally get to see the behind the scenes documentary that breaks down exactly what went on behind the scenes.