The Death of the Mid-Range Movie and What it Meant for a Star Wars Expanded Universe On Screen

This Memorial Day it will be five years since the release of Solo--the Star Wars film offering the story of the "making of" the iconic character.

The film, of course, was a financial catastrophe for Disney--with a production budget approaching $300 million implying the necessity of billion dollar-plus success, and the movie not quite making it to $400 million.

Interestingly audiences did not hate the film. Its Rotten Tomatoes' score of 63 percent is not spectacular, but not terrible, either, and actually better than what some other, higher-grossing, Star Wars movies got.* Instead of the movie being particularly poor what strikes me is that a Solo prequel is simply not the sort of story of which billion dollar hits are made. Rather than the cosmic-galactic good vs. evil, Jedi vs. Sith, Rebels vs. Empire struggles of Episodes I-IX it offered a smaller-scale, more personal story--a piece of space noir fit for the Expanded Universe, and the smaller, more hardcore audience that would have been up for it, rather than the main line epics that bring in the wider audience.

Matching the scale of the production to potential audience would have called for a mid-range movie that would have been a hit on mid-range terms, but that was out of the question, the mid-range pretty much squeezed out of theaters--while making mid-range Star Wars movies could have seemed to run the risk of making the bigger franchise look "mid-range." But the studio's "leadership" were insistent on taking such a tack as they tried to convert Star Wars into a Marvel-style hit machine--and predictably failed in a way that significantly contributed to their bigger effort stalling out. Indeed, five years on the sole Star Wars movie to make it to the screen was the close of the then-already troubled main line trilogy, while Star Wars has been relegated to the small screen--series' for the streaming service. It is not so easy to judge how Lucasfilm has done in the medium as it would be to judge by the grosses of theatrical releases, but the fact that the studio is telling the company to prioritize its Star Wars series' even as it generally retreats from other content (even canceling an Indiana Jones show, it seems) suggests it has found something worth sticking with here--a streaming equivalent of the Arrowverse that is an easier object than a theatrical equivalent of the MCU.

* The score for The Last Jedi stands at a very weak 42 percent--and if one chalks it up to "trolls" it is unclear why they held off attacking Solo so brutally when they seem to have turned against the franchise and the studio as a whole.