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Han Solo to get his own Star Wars spinoff, Disney announces

Laugh it up, fuzzball! Han Solo is getting his own movie in the Star Wars anthology series, one of the many standalone films announced by Disney.

Origins story movie is slated for a May 2018 release

CBC News ·
In this 1977 image, from left, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia, and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker are shown in a scene from Star Wars. Solo, the iconic smuggler, is going to feature in a spinoff film slated for a May 25, 2018, release, Disney announced Wednesday. (20th Century Fox Film Corporation/Associated Press)

Laugh it up, fuzzball! Han Solo is getting his own movie in the Star Wars anthology series, one of four standalone films revealed by Disney earlier this year.

The Solo spinoff, announced by the studio Wednesday, will be directed by LEGO Movie duo Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, who have pledged to honour the story of Millennium Falcon pilot appropriately.

"We promise to take risks, to give the audience a fresh experience," said the filmmakers in a joint statement, "and we pledge ourselves to be faithful stewards of these characters who mean so much to us."

Audiences will be able to judge their fidelity when the film is released on May 25, 2018.

Telling the scoundrel's story 

The story, co-written by Raiders of the Lost Ark scribe Lawrence Kasdan and his son, Jon Kasdan, centres on how young Solo "became the smuggler, thief, and scoundrel whom Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi first encountered in the cantina at Mos Eisley," explains the studio.

Whiplash star Miles Teller is among the actors fans hope might play Han Solo. (Danny Moloshok/Invision/Associated Press)
It's not clear which hot young actor will be cast as the swaggering swashbuckler, who was first played by Harrison Ford in 1977's Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, but fans are already dreaming.

Here are some names being bandied about online:

  • Taron Egerton, who played the cocky recruit in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
  • Whiplash's percussive protégé Miles Teller.
  • Fault in Our Stars heartthrob Ansel Elgort.
  • Josh Hutcherson, who starred as District 12 tribute Peeta Mallark in the Hunger Games series.
  • ​Velociraptor whisperer and Guardians of the Galaxy superhero Chris Pratt.

Series of spinoffs

Set on in the same universe as the original Star Wars saga, the four films in the anthology will expand on stories and characters tied to the core narrative.

The first, titled Rogue One, was announced earlier this year.

The Theory of Everything's Felicity Jones is set to star in the movie, which is set chronologically between the third and the fourth films in the Star Wars saga.

It follows a band of resistance fighters who unite to steal the Death Star.

 Rogue One is set for a Dec. 16, 2016, release.

With files from The Associated Press

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