Join the club Paul, we have no idea either. Certainly there are various elements which led to its poor performance – a woeful lack of advertising, releasing the film just 5 months after The Last Jedi and less than a month after Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War – but despite the odds being stacked against Solo: A Star Wars Story ($388,276,334 worldwide and unlikely now to break $400 million as it comes off screens around the world) many of us believed it would comfortably take double what it has and more besides. Speaking recently to MTV, Paul Bettany – better known in these parts as Dryden Voss – broached the subject and why the movie didn’t strike gold at the box office.
“I loved the movie. I went to see the movie and I loved it. I knew some real dyed-in-the-wool nerd fans, Ryan Adams, for instance, who was like, ‘It’s so fantastic, I love it!’ and then he went to see it again. I took him to the premiere and then he went to see it again. It was confusing to me. I thought the story was so great, I thought the execution was so great, so it was surprising, to me.”
We Got This Covered are clearly not fans of the film, but Bettany once again touched on its box office performance.
“It’s also peculiar being in a movie that makes hundreds of millions of dollars and people say, ‘It’s just not enough.’ The thing with Star Wars is eventually everybody on the planet’s gonna see that movie and I really am proud of it and I loved playing Dryden Vos. I loved him. He’s delicious.”
We were certainly bowled over by the film, the characters, the music, set pieces, performances….hell, we LOVED it. Let’s hope the stars align for the next standalone, and audiences make the effort to turn up and support the franchise.
