Star Wars spin-offs set for Han Solo, Boba Fett origin stories
Disney exec Jay Rasulo has confirmed the spin-off movies that will appear in the summers between full-blown Star Wars Episodes will be origin stories.
There aren't enough scoundrels in your life -- but that's about to change, as two of the galaxy's most lovable rogues, Han Solo and Boba Fett, get their own origin stories told on the silver screen.
As well as three full-blown Star Wars sequels, a handful of spin-off movies are being made, and these will be origin stories for some of the series' most popular characters, Disney's chief money man Jay Rasulo has revealed in an interview with Variety.
Disney bought Star Wars storyteller Lucasfilm for a cool $4bn last year and immediately announced it was working on a glut of new Force-powered features. The House of Mouse has already hinted that the galaxy's most notorious smuggler and most feared bounty hunter will feature, but it hadn't confirmed that they would be origin stories.
Both characters' backgrounds have already been explored in the extended universe of novels and comic books, with Boba Fett's early years depicted in the prequel movies too. Whether Han Solo's Oliver Twist-like childhood or Fett's strained marriage will feature is not yet known.
Rasulo also hinted that budgets would be tighter than expected for these flicks since the box-office catastrophe of The Lone Ranger, the $225m cowboy movie that failed to excite audiences this summer. "Going forward, we will see a cap on spending on those movies," Rasulo told Variety.
Marvel -- also owned by Disney -- has experience of slightly more modest origin stories, with Captain America and Thor coming in at $140-150m, rather than the bank-busting $200m-plus of The Avengers or Iron Man 3. Both of those made handsome profits and served as enormous trailers for The Avengers too.
Episode VII, the first proper Star Wars sequel since 1983's Return of the Jedi, is due in 2015 and will be helmed by Star Trek moderniser JJ Abrams. He can only hope the 'Wars fans take more kindly to him than Trekkers, who recently voted Into Darkness the worst ever Trek film. Perhaps one new hope may come from him filming with good old-fashioned film, like the original trilogy, rather than digital.
What would you like to see in the Star Wars movies? Should they stick to the established stories already published or make up something new? Let me know in the comments, or on Facebook -- and remember that hate leads to suffering.