7. It's A Totally Separate Film
With the Star Wars trilogies, there was always an expectation: Fluent story across multiple volumes, brilliant action, mass production and epic scale. With a spin-off, these monolithic boundaries need not apply. This film can be a labor of love in the right hands, and depending on whose hands it rests in depends on how the story pans out. A Solo story could be anything from a Scarface in Space gangster film to a Fast and Furious or Gone in Sixty Seconds style spaceship street race flick. I could even picture Han as The Transporter, fighting his way through witless baddies to save a damsel in distress, leading to his surprise and love for the feisty Leia, who can more than hold her own. That's the glory of it, the spin off can lead marvelously into A New Hope in many ways, right down to subtle hints. The fact that the entire production of the film, from director and directorial style right down to the bare bones of the script, can be something entirely new means that the Star Wars universe is finally taking a new approach theatrically, something the Expanded Universe in more than accustomed to doing. Speaking of the expanded universe...