10 Times Hollywood Learned The Wrong Lesson From Movies

Solo: A Star Wars Story was the first Star Wars movie to bomb at the box office, which has been attributed to several reasons; the film itself being merely decent, a general lack of interest in a Han Solo origin story, the fallout of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and most of all that Harrison Ford wasn't in it.

The film's commercial failure resulted in potential Solo sequels being canned, and in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, producer Kathleen Kennedy stated that she learned one major lesson from Solo bombing: don't recast beloved legacy characters.

Kennedy all-but-threw star Alden Ehrenreich under the bus in revealing that no mainline Star Wars characters will be recast in the future as a result of Solo being rejected by mainstream audiences.

While in theory this sounds like a great way for Star Wars and other Disney-owned franchises to diversify by creating new iconic characters, ultimately it's already nudged them in a decidedly less-savory direction: deepfakes and digital de-aging.

Take Luke Skywalker's digitally assisted appearance in The Mandalorian or the de-aged Harrison Ford for parts of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Though Hollywood has quickly become fearful of recasting much-loved characters, they'll instead give them a digital makeover forever more.

Ultimately, recasting characters is fine, certainly in contrast to the industry's refusal to accept that its stars age by continually creating digital maquettes of their decades-younger selves. It's painfully boring and, at its worst, genuinely ghoulish.