News that Ron Howard would take over from Phil Lord and Chris Miller as the directors of the untitled Han Solo movie was greeted with cheers and relief in the halls of Lucasfilm.
As far as this company is concerned, Howard isn’t just an Oscar-winning director, a safe pair of hands who has been behind the camera for as long as Star Wars has been a thing (quite literally; his first feature was released in 1977).
To them, he’s royalty.
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Howard played the biggest of the four leads in Lucasfilm’s first ever hit, American Graffiti, back in 1973 when it was a struggling indie shop with four employees. Without Graffiti, Star Wars simply would not exist. 20th Century Fox would never have taken a chance on George Lucas without seeing it, and Lucas would never have had the unexpected windfall that funded early development of Star Wars while the Fox board was dragging its heels. Read more…
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