Last month, a poorly worded turn of phrase from Disney CEO Bob Iger set Star Wars fans ablaze, worried that the Han Solo spinoff movie would be about the young smuggler “getting his name”. The internet panicked wildly that Han Solo’s real name suddenly wasn’t Han Solo. Everyone can calm the hell down now.
Image: Still via Youtube.
Iger actually meant it would be about Han “making a name for himself”, as in, “building his reputation as a swarthy smuggler tooling around in the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy”. But that didn’t stop endless, feverish speculation that Iger somehow clearly meant the Han Solo movie would be about Han getting the name “Han Solo”, and before he was “Han Solo” he was probably named something like Clive or Herbert.
While this was always the obvious conclusion to draw, it has also been confirmed courtesy of a new interview with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, conducted by MTV at Star Wars Celebration this past weekend:
I’m not sure that that’s entirely what Bob meant. There’s more to Han Solo’s name, but it’s not that it’s not his name. It’s obviously his name. It will always be his name!
Kennedy does leave some things open to mystery, by saying there’s more to his name than we previously knew, but it’s always been his name, as the Force intended (probably, you know how the Force works). So rest assured, the movie isn’t about some scrawny kid named Gary Smugglinton who decided he needed a much cooler name before he could do the Kessel Run.
The somehow-still-untitled Han Solo movie is expected to premiere 25 May 2018.