Box Office Report: Solo

Joel: We have to talk about the Box Office results of Solo: A Star Wars Story. At this point there’s really no way around it. For the past two weeks Solo’s box office success, or lack of box office success has been the biggest story in Hollywood. But as it always is with these kind of things, it’s not always as cut and dry as any quick news bite would have you believe. Box office results have a funny way of always being more complicated that you would expect, so let's take a moment and really try and peel back all the hyperbole surrounding this and see what really might be happening with the latest Star Wars movie.

The facts are these. In the past two weeks Solo has made around $150 million domestically. It made just over $100 million on its opening weekend and just under $30 million in the second weekend. Worldwide, the movie pulled in a little over $264 million over the first two weeks. Now, there is no question that these are not numbers we normally see when talking about a Star Wars movie. By this point in their release both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi had pulled in over twice the box office of where Solo currently sits, and while Rogue One, the only other Star Wars spinoff movie to date, didn’t pull the same numbers as Episodes VII and VIII, it’s first two weeks of release still brought in about $100 million more than what Solo made over the same time period. Add to the fact that some reports are suggesting that Solo is the most expensive Star Wars movie to date, and you see plenty of analysis articles saying that Solo is the first true flop for the Star Wars franchise.

So is, Solo: A Star Wars Story a flop? As always when talking about box office reports, the answer isn’t quite as simple as that. First of all, while Solo did probably cost more than any other Star Wars movie to date most reports have it’s price tag at somewhere around $250 million. That means that world wide Solo has made it’s money back at this point. Sure it’s always hard to tell exactly how much a movie cost thanks to creative Hollywood accounting, and you usually have to factor in additional money for marketing costs, etc. but on the other hand, we’re only talking about the first two weeks of a movie’s release. That doesn’t include DVD/Blu Ray sales, and any money being made off of toys and other tie in products. While Solo isn’t blowing past the production budget number like the previous Star Wars movies, it’s safe to say that Disney still won’t be losing money on this movie.

But at the same time, you can’t exactly call Solo a success if you’re comparing it to the other Star Wars movies that Disney has released so far. Even if you ignore Episodes VII and VIII and focus on comparing Solo to Rogue One since it’s the only other spinoff movie to date, there’s no creative way to say that Solo’s box office return is even in the same ballpark as Rogue One’s and yes, while this is still only the first couple of weeks in Solo’s release, The Incredibles 2 and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are both going to be out over the next few weeks. Solo’s time at the box office without competition has run its course. Solo’s time at the box office will only get harder for the movie from this point going forward. So, while it’s easy to say that Solo will make its money back and then some, for a Star Wars movie it really looks like a lot of money is being left on the table here. While you might not be able to call the movie an out and out flop, you can be assured that from Disney’s point of view something didn’t go right here.

Which leads us to speculate what lessons Disney will take away from the Solo release, and how it will impact the Star Wars franchise going forward from here. There are three different aspects of Solo’s release that will likely be considered by the top levels of the Disney empire. But before we get into the three things, there is one thing we have to address that is most assuredly not being considered. The less than stellar box office of Solo is not a direct result of fans not liking The Last Jedi. Plenty of people who didn’t like The Last Jedi have been pointing to Solo’s low numbers as proof that Disney is now facing the consequences of making a bad Episode VIII. This just plain isn’t the case for several reasons. First of all, while the portion of people who disliked The Last Jedi has been very vocal about it, they just aren’t the majority of Star Wars fans that they present themselves as. Response to The Last Jedi is a worst, strongly divided, with just as many or more people passionately defending and praising the movie. And remember, despite very loud complaints about the movie, The Last Jedi was still the highest grossing movie of the year beating the second place movie by over $100 million. There is no way that internet backlash of the movie moved the needle this much. If the franchise was able to survive the backlash of The Phantom Menace which was much more universal in its day then Solo’s box office woes are not the result of Episode VIII. So if it’s not a Last Jedi fallout, what factors are worth considering when thinking about the Solo box office?

First of all, was this a movie that Star Wars fans really wanted to see? Is it possible that the anticipation and excitement for a Han Solo focused prequel movie was misconstrued? It’s been revealed that Alden Ehrenreich has been contracted to play Han Solo for at least three movies and Solo gives us plenty of time between the end of this movie and Han showing up in Mos Eisley in A New Hope. Now we have to question if these movies are going to be made at all. It’s possible that Disney no longer sees Young Han Solo as a viable mini-franchise in the mega franchise that is Star Wars. No matter how you feel about the quality of the movie Disney at this point has to reevaluate if they think Han Solo is a series that they want to support going forward.

The second thing to consider is the release date. Since Disney first started releasing Star Wars movies in 2015, they have always been released in December, around Christmas time. This is the first time that a Disney Star Wars movie is being released in the summer. It’s suspected that this release window was to help ensure that Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns wouldn't get lost in the holiday movies. However, when Solo was scheduled for an early May release, it suddenly wasn’t the biggest fish on the calendar anymore. Pretty much any Marvel movie in a major player at the box office at this point, but this year, Marvel was releasing their biggest movie to date with Avengers: Infinity War. You have, within a few weeks of each other Disney’s two biggest mega franchises releasing movies that can help but be in competition with one another. But what we ended up having was a Star Wars movie that featured only a few familiar characters and all of those familiar characters being played by new actors. On the other hand, you have a movie that is the culmination of ten years of storytelling by Marvel in a movie that looks and feels like the biggest crossover event and the biggest mega event in cinematic history. Any movie would struggle to compete with that, even Star Wars, and in this case Star Wars had what can really be described as some DLC content for their already existing products. Now, none of this is to say that Disney plans of releasing fewer Star Wars or Marvel movies in any calendar year, but they will probably take a closer look at how things are spaced out in the calendar. It wouldn't be a surprise if it was decided that moving forward, Star Wars was a December franchise for Disney to have more room in the summer for superhero movies.

The third, and most likely reason of all however is simply one of advertising. A few months before the movie came out there we're all these articles about how Solo was coming out soon at at the time there had been no trailer, no teaser, no footage of the movie at all and really no promo shots even. Some suggested that this was because they wanted to get The Last Jedi out of the way before focusing the marketing team on Solo (an issue that would likely be solved if the schedule adjustments in the previous paragraph go through), but the big suggestion was that due to the removal of the original directors, there was nothing good to show and the movie was scrambling to be finished in time. The suggestion was that the lack of promotion would hurt the movie because it was suggesting that the movie itself was not good or in some way broken, but the real answer is much more simple than that. For the average consumer, the lack of promotion wasn’t an indication that the movie was going to be bad, because with the lack of promotion, they weren’t even aware that the movie existed. To again compare this movie to Rogue One, the first trailer for Rogue One was released 247 days before the movie’s release where the first trailer for Solo came out just 108 days before the release date. The “hype window” for Solo was a fraction of what it was for any other Star Wars movie and this is probably what hurt it at the box office. You have to remember that as much as you hate seeing the same trailer for the thousandth time it’s done that way because your thousandth time seeing the trailer is still someone’s first time. The excitement in the buildup to this movie just wasn’t there for the general movie going audience who still make up the biggest group of ticket buyers.

So where do we go from here? (I guess we do nothing, but sit and wait. The real question should be where does Lucasfilm go from here?) Honestly as big of a deal as it feels right now, in the long history of Star Wars the unexpectedly low return of the box office for Solo will likely be a minor story. Episode IX isn’t coming out for a year and a half which is plenty of time to build hype for the movie. There will likely be several milestones, from a title announcement to the first still image released, to the teaser trailer, to a big trailer premiere at the Star Wars Celebration Convention in April next year. The only thing this box office return might have really had an effect on is the future of more solo Solo movies but even that might still be a possibility. While people are quick to point out that Solo was a $250 million+ movie, the budget was largely overblown by the director changeup and the necessity for new director Ron Howard to be able to reshoot a lot of already completed scenes. A sequel could easily cost $70 to $100 million less and still come out looking just as good. It’s possible that positive buzz about the movie will be enough to convince Lucasfilm to try again, especially if a second movie could be more Lando focused as the majority of the buzz is praising Donald Glover’s performance and calling for a Lando standalone movie. And at the end of the day, even if Solo’s box office is a disappointment for Disney, you have to remember that at least a part of that is because they already took in so much money from Avengers: Infinity War the previous month, so it’s hard to feel too worried for them.