Yesterday those murky, just-confirmed prospects of several standalone Star Wars character-based films began to take on the sharpened specificity of a laser, albeit one as clumsy and random as a blaster when wielded by Ain’t It Cool News. Today those rumors are in someone else’s hands, as reports that two of those standalone films will probably, definitely focus on Boba Fett and a young Han Solo arrive from Entertainment Weekly—an elegant weapon of unsourced speculation, for a more civilized age of Internet chatter. With the by-now-redundant caution that it’s too early in the process and nothing is confirmed and ha ha, why are we even talking about this really, oh well, EW reports that both are indeed in the planning stages, though obviously things could change or be denied or our planet could be destroyed by an orbiting space station at any moment.
But assuming none of those things happen, Boba Fett’s bounty hunter romp—putting him at the center of “a rogue’s gallery of galactic scum”—would take place either between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back or between Empire and Return Of The Jedi, so either focusing on the adventures he got up to before capturing Han Solo, or that long, wacky road trip he takes to Tatooine with Solo’s carbonite-frozen body. (For example, maybe he accidentally leaves it at an intergalactic rest stop, and he has to go through a series of increasingly humiliating goose chases to recover it. Also, Zach Galifianakis is there and he’s no help at all.) And Solo’s solo tale would pick up during the time between Revenge Of The Sith and A New Hope, an “origin story” that would obviously call for a much younger actor to step into the role, with the possibility of Harrison Ford appearing “as a framing device” while he kicks back and reminisces about the good ol’ smuggling days, possibly while space-whittlin’.
As EW points out, both movies could allow for the return of other, familiar, not-dead-yet characters such as Darth Vader or Jabba The Hutt, which is something that Disney and Lucasfilm have definitely been rumored to be interested in. But again—the recent musings of Joe Johnston on Boba Fett, and Robert Rodriguez and Wes Anderson on Han Solo aside—neither exists beyond the realm of rumor at this point, just like yesterday’s Yoda report. And so it will likely proceed for a while, until eventually we’re weighing the possibility of a gritty, Ray-style biopic about Max Rebo.