Are You Young Enough to Play Han Solo in his New 'Star Wars' Standalone Film?

Harrison Ford poses as Han Solo in an early ‘Star Wars’ production still (20th Century Fox)

We all know that a Han Solo prequel movie is in the works — but how far back, exactly, will it go? Will we get to see baby Han try on his first tiny vest and befriend the Wookiees at daycare? Or will we meet the Millennium Falcon pilot shortly before the events of Star Wars? The answer is somewhere in between. Speaking to EW, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy assured fans that Han Solo’s stand-alone movie would document his wild youth, but not in an Anakin-Skywalker-racing-pods kind of way.

“He’ll definitely be probably in the high teens, low 20s,” Kennedy told the magazine. “We’re not introducing you to a 10-year-old Han Solo.”

That seems sensible, given that Harrison Ford was 33 years old when he began shooting Star Wars. However, it does take a few fan favorites out of the running, including Chris Pratt (who’s 36 years old), Ryan Gosling (34), and Garett Hedlund (30).

Here are a few other new things we’ve learned about the Han Solo standalone movie, which is slated for a May 2018 release. For more, go to EW.

The Han movie has been in the works at least as long as Episode VII.

Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens, turned down the opportunity to contribute to George Lucas’ prequel trilogy in the 1990s. But when asked by Lucasfilm in 2012 what he’d like to work on, he replied, “I would write a movie about Han Solo. He’s always been my favorite.” After temporarily sidelining the Han Solo movie to work on The Force Awakens, Kasdan is writing the screenplay with his son, Freaks and Geeks writer Jonathan Kasdan.

Han’s origin story will be full of laughs, not exposition.

“You can imagine, given who we’ve chosen to come in and direct, it should be very entertaining and funny,” Kennedy told EW. (The movie is being directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the men behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street.) “Han Solo is the character inside Star Wars that everybody knows has a wit and sense of humor. So that’s what this should be.”

The Force Awakens producer also stressed that Han Solo’s movie wouldn’t over-explain the mysteries of the beloved character. “We don’t want to spend time going back and answering a lot of questions that, quite frankly, I don’t think people want answered,” she said.

Han Solo will soon have some company in the Star Wars prequel universe.

The stand-alone prequels, which Lucasfilm is calling the “anthology films,” include both the Han Solo movie and the Death Star heist film Rogue One. A third anthology film, which initially had Fantastic Four’s Josh Trank attached as director, was reportedly about the origin of bounty hunter Boba Fett (which Lucasfilm has yet to confirm). Though there’s been no news on the film since Trank departed, Kennedy says that they’re still moving forward. “It’s still one of the stories that we absolutely want to tell,” she told EW. “There is a lot of innovative technology in and around what it is we’re doing with that story, so for a lot of reasons, we were comfortable postponing that. But we’re definitely still developing it.” EW speculates that the film will be slated for 2020, after the new trilogy concludes in 2019.