Solo: A Star Wars Story has endured more strife on its way to the screen than anybody would care to tally, but this last piece might be its biggest: people are more excited about a potential spinoff for Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian than they are about the film. Solo, manhandled and mish-mashed between directors, you can take or leave. But a standalone Lando Calrissian movie? Now that’s something worth getting excited over.
Especially because Glover seems to know exactly where he’d take it. “It would be cool to see, like, Frasier in Space – like, a high-end guy in space,” the actor-rapper told Entertainment Weekly Radio. “All of these characters are very specific and they have very specific points of view, so it’s always going to be fun to see them traveling around to a planet that is the opposite of what they’re used to.”
Already, that sounds far better than Solo. A big, weird shaggy dog story – completely unshackled from the rest of the Star Wars mythology – about a band of uptight pansexual hustlers fumbling their way through the dregs of the galaxy, with no heroic motivation and no great stakes, sounds like exactly what the Star Wars universe needs right now. Star Wars is already getting staid, with old ground being churned up so often that it’s beginning to lose all definition. An idea as decisively “other” as this Lando movie would open the franchise up in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy has opened up the Marvel universe.
Especially if it was also written by Donald Glover. His is a talent so monumental he could shepherd Star Wars away from the good v bad Skywalker dynasty and push it towards a more sustainable future. He wrote Atlanta, which is tremendous. Even the mock Deadpool script he wrote when FX yanked that project from him managed to be hilarious and incredibly sad. Imagine what he could do with a canvas as large as a tentpole Disney property.
However, let’s be very clear: this will not happen. Never in a million years will Glover be able to bring his vision of Frasier in Space to fruition. You just have to see the wreckage of Solo to realise that. Disney is so profoundly jumpy about anyone tinkering with its cash cow that it obliterates all alternative thought on sight. Watching a Star Wars movie these days is like going to church: everything is dry and formal and unwaveringly drawn from scripture. You don’t go because you want to see anything new. You go because the repetition of going has become habit. For now, that’s what Star Wars wants.
A Lord and Miller Han Solo movie might not have had the polish of Ron Howard’s version. It might have strayed from canon in a variety of difficult and messy ways. It might have been slightly too niche for an audience as crushingly mainstream as the Star Wars crowd. But it would have had a livewire energy that’s been absent from the series. That energy, however, might have been divisive, and divisiveness would be death for Star Wars.
And that’s Solo, for crying out loud. That’s a down-the-line hero story. Imagine how much harder it’d be to get a film about a velvet-clad black space-pansexual across the line, let alone one based on a Kelsey Grammer sitcom. So Donald Glover might never get to make the Lando Calrissian film he wants to make. But if he’s smart, he’ll keep the idea, and three years from now we’ll all pack into cinemas to watch his copyright-independent Mando Blalrissian film. It sounds great.
