Why Disney Refused To Move Solo's Release Date

By James Hunt / June 21, 2018

Not only did Solo: A Star Wars Story divide audiences, but it bombed at the box-office. With a worldwide gross of $343m at the time of writing, against a budget that ballooned well over $200m, it's the first Star Wars failure of the Disney era.

There are a number of factors in why Solo's performance was worse than expected, but one many have pointed to is the movie's release date. Since Disney started making Star Wars films, all of them have been released in December and made over $1bn, with Solo the first to arrive in May. It's not unreasonable, then, to suggest that had Disney moved the spin-off back, it would've done better.

According to Star Wars News Net, that is what Lucasfilm wanted to do, in order to give Ron Howard and the marketing team more time, but Disney refused. As per their report:

"Disney had enough of their previous films’ delays and put their foot down. Our source tells us that Disney granted Lucasfilm the budget and time to make all the production changes they needed to fix anything broken with Solo, but that they had to make the May 25th release date."

The story also notes that Disney refused to give Solo any preferential treatment with regards to marketing, so the film wouldn't interfere with their plans for Avengers: Infinity War.

While the move backfired on Solo, you can see Disney's logic here. Infinity War has become one of the biggest movies of all-time, and as for December there's no guarantee Solo would've worked there, with the likes of Aquaman, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, Mortal Engines, Bumblebee, and Mary Poppins Returns all hitting that month.

Do you think Solo should've been moved back? Let us know down in the comments.

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