With Josh Trank's Star Wars movie pushed back as Lucasfilm look for a new director, 2018 will now see the release of Phil Lord and Chris Miller's untitled Star Wars Anthology movie focusing on Han Solo. Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) is writing the screenplay with his son, and the project has been very much a mystery. Until now that is. While Kathleen Kennedy wouldn't reveal any plot details, she did confirm that they're still some time away from casting an actor to play the beloved character and promised that they're setting out to explore ket moments of his past. "There’s got to be a reason for [the stand-alone film] to be," she says. "And obviously the thing that Star Wars has always done so well is it doesn’t spend a lot of time [explaining] the stories that have come before. We don’t want to do that either. We don’t want to spend time going back and answering a lot of questions that, quite frankly, I don’t think people want answered."
Now that the Expanded Universe no longer exists, Han Solo's past is once again unknown. As a result, it's going to be up to this movie to balance revealing that with telling part of his history which actually matters. "I think the key here is that we are identifying an event or events in Han Solo’s life that gives you some idea of who he is and why he is the character we have all known to love. You can imagine, given who we’ve chosen to come in and direct, it should be very entertaining and funny. Han Solo is the character inside Star Wars that everybody knows has a wit and sense of humor. So that’s what this should be." It's all sounding good so far then, but just how young is this young Han Solo going to be? Are we going to be spending time with him as a child or teenager? He wasn't that old when we met him in A New Hope after all. Thankfully, this Star Wars Anthology movie isn't going to be aimed at the Young Adult crowd! "He’ll definitely be probably in the high teens, low 20s. We’re not introducing you to a 10-year-old Han Solo."
Going back to the 2018 movie which was originally going to be helmed by Trank though and Kennedy promises that it is still happening. She wouldn't reveal what it's about (Boba Fett has been rumoured), but did say that it will likely now be released in 2020 instead after Star Wars Episode IX hits. "It’s still one of the stories that we absolutely want to tell. There is a lot of innovative technology in and around what it is we’re doing with that story, so for a lot of reasons, we were comfortable postponing that. But we’re definitely still developing it." What do you guys think?