After quickly emerging as the front-runner to take over the young Han Solo movie following the firing of original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Ron Howard has been confirmed just a day later as the new director of record. As expected, Disney/LucasFilm wasted no time getting someone in to mop up their mess. Howard will meet with the principal cast and then go through the rough edit to see what he’s got to work with before getting on with finishing up the last few weeks of production, and then those reshoots later this summer. Below is a dramatization of his first day on set:
Howard is not the kind of filmmaker I’m interested in seeing make a Han Solo movie, and while I could very easily see the appeal of a Lord & Miller movie, I can’t see the appeal of Ron Howard’s Han Solo. (It’s going to be interesting to see how the credits on this movie shake out.) But he is a very capable—and conventional—filmmaker, so this will be fine. Not great, greatness exited with Lord & Miller, but it will be fine, and it’s clear that taking a shot at something fresh and potentially great scared the sh*t out of Kathleen Kennedy and the LucasFilm team. So we’ll settle for fine and pretend like that’s what we wanted all along.
