Disney’s Star Wars Han Solo movie isn’t doing well at the box office as it’s performing the lowest of any of the Star Wars movies.
The movie didn’t even hit the $150 million mark for its second weekend of release, and it brought in less than $30 million this past weekend.
Various Hollywood trade sites, Disney execs and fans have been blaming The Avengers: Infinity War or Deadpool 2 for fans not showing up or the disappointment surrounding Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but now a Wall St. exec offers the reason is because of the failure of correctly marketing the movie.
Veteran media analyst at Cowen, Doug Creutz, wrote up a report titled, “DOES SOLO SIGNAL TROUBLE FOR STAR WARS? WE DON’T THINK SO,” which offers a reason Han Solo failed is because “Disney Needed To Sell Ehrenreich as Solo, But Didn’t.”
Creutz has a good point.
He argues “Solo‘s biggest problem was an uncharacteristically (for Disney) poor marketing campaign” and “we think the movie’s biggest problem was its marketing.”
An example given is with Rogue One in “it came out 247 days before the movie’s release, starting an extensive hype campaign for the film. The first 35 seconds of the trailer almost exclusively focuses on Felicity Jones as the protagonist Jyn Erso, selling her as a new franchise hero. The second half is dominated by the Imperial alert klaxon and Forest Whitaker’s voice over, and practically screams ‘EPIC’ at the viewer, before closing on another hero shot of Jones.”
Compared to Han Solo: “Now contrast that to the original teaser trailer for Solo, which came out just 108 days before the movie, offering a far shorter hype window. Disney’s marketing department, in our opinion, had one job: sell audiences on Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo (who we thought did a creditable job in the movie with very tough shoes to fill). The teaser, by our count, only had about 10 seconds of screen time where Ehrenreich’s face was clearly in the picture – not, in our opinion, nearly enough. In general, we felt like the Solo marketing campaign didn’t get fully up to speed until about a month before the movie came out, and that is simply too short of a window for a big franchise picture. As a side note, it’s also clear that Disney is having some issues.”
Creutz also argues against three reasons that have been brought up regarding the failure of Han Solo including: Star Wars fatigue, disappointment with Last Jedi, and worries about production problems.
Regarding Star Wars fatigue, Creutz brings up a good point in that there is no Marvel fatigue, as four Marvel-branded movies have been released in a six month time span (Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Deadpool 2).
While a lot of fans didn’t like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s argued the same applied to the George Lucas prequels, but that didn’t stop Star Wars fans from continuing to see the films.
For the reported Han Solo production problems, the point is made that more than likely a majority of fans really weren’t aware (or even cared) about the troubles surrounding the film.
The report finished with a recommendation in that Dave Filoni (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels ) should be appointed to a higher level of importance at Lucasfilm.
