Solo: A Star Wars Story Co-Writer Still Hopes to Make a Sequel

Time will tell if Solo: A Star Wars Story ever gets a follow-up, but if Lucasfilm ever decides to go back down that road, co-writer Lawrence Kasdan will be waiting. Along with Jonathan Kasdan, Kasdan co-wrote the screenplay for Solo which was released in 2018 by director Ron Howard. There were many Star Wars fans who embraced the film, but not quite enough went out to see it in theaters upon its release, as Solo performed far below Lucasfilm’s expectations.

In the years since, many fans have called for the studio to give Solo another shot by greenlighting a sequel. Recently, some rumors had surfaced that the Solo story would be expanded with a sequel series on Disney+. Now, it appears that these rumors are bogus, as Kasdan says as much in a new Inverse interview. But in debunking the rumors of the Disney+ series, Kasdan still chooses to keep hope alive for Solo 2, as the writer makes it clear he wants the film to get made.

“No there’s not any talk of that. I’ve never been particularly drawn to expanding [Solo] into a show. But, I do talk to Jon [Kasdan] and Ron [Howard] a lot about what went right and what went wrong with the Solo experience. I would be more interested in doing another movie, not a TV series.”

If Kasdan continues to speak with his co-writer and the film’s director about Solo, that seems to suggest the filmmakers have retained their interest in doing a sequel. Of course, what matters most is if Lucasfilm will actually give the go-ahead to Solo 2, as they’ll need to pony up the budget to get the movie made. Going in that direction seems to be a risk that the studio heads don’t really want to take again after the first movie fell below expectations.

Related: Star Wars: Is Jango Fett a Mandalorian?

Lucasfilm Has No Plans for Solo 2

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy seemed to shut down the possibility of Solo 2 in a May interview with Vanity Fair. At that time, Kennedy explained that the movie failing to meet studio goals had served as a lesson learned. She said that no further movies would be made featuring new actors playing the roles of established main characters in the vein of Harrison Ford’s Han Solo.

“There should be moments along the way when you learn things. Now it does seem so abundantly clear that we can’t do that,” Kennedy said.

“[Solo] didn’t do as well as other Star Wars movies, but it still did well for a movie,” Alden Ehrenreich said after the film’s release in 2018, via GamesRadar. “And so it was kind of this medium thing. But that’s not newsworthy. Even at high-level journalism, there’s an intense pressure, sometimes, it feels like, to [either] catastrophize or celebrate.”

Suggesting that negative press also affected turnout, the actor added, “And I think that’s really f—ing dangerous, especially when it pertains to the stuff that really matters, like the state of the world. An article headline that says ‘things are complicated, and there are good sides and bad sides’ isn’t getting the emotional response. And I just think we really have to take a step back, and give a lot more thought to the way our emotions are being run by the stories we’re getting inundated with.”