The ending of Solo: A Star Wars Story sets up for more

Solo: A Star Wars Story, unlike it’s fellow Star Wars anthology film, Rogue One, leaves plenty of room for a sequel.

The real question is, are we likely to see a Solo sequel? We’d have to get into Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy’s head to know for sure.

But here’s what we do know:

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story.]

Solo’s story certainly leaves room for the possibility of a sequel

Even setting aside the fact that we know Han Solo and Chewbacca the wookiee have further adventures, Solo leaves its cast with plenty of plot threads to follow up on.

Qi’ra has just gotten a big promotion, making her a major mover-and-shaker in the criminal underbelly of the galaxy and putting her in close proximity with one of the Star Wars franchise’s most fan-beloved villains. It would be a shame to drop Darth Maul into a movie like he was a Thanos cameo and not follow up on it.

In the meantime, Han and Chewie are headed off to their first run-in with Jabba the Hutt and, considering that Solo is set at least 11 years before Star Wars: A New Hope, it’s unlikely to be their last. Or even second-to-last.

It’s hard to believe that there isn’t space to explore Lando’s rise from ship-less gambler to legitimate Baron Administrator of a mining colony, or even Chewie, who has unresolved wookiee-liberation business that could be returned to.

But is Lucasfilm actually planning a Solo sequel?

Well, Alden Ehrenreich has confirmed that he is signed on to play Han in more films. That doesn’t necessarily mean that those films will get made — sequel signing is pretty standard in big Hollywood franchises these days. Even Felicity Jones’s contract for Rogue One — a movie in which her character definitely, definitely dies — reportedly has a sequel option.

It could just mean that Lucasfilm reserves the right to have Ehrenreich or Jones appear as their characters in a minor role in some other film set in that era of the Star Wars universe.

But it does mean that Lucasfilm has the option to make more Han Solo films, likely depending on how successful this one is. It’s still only the second of the company’s “anthology” projects, both of which had somewhat rocky developments, with Rogue One undergoing major reshoots to change its ending, and Solo going through a complete director swap.

Since the hullabaloo around Ron Howard taking over Solo, Lucasfilm has announced that the long-expected third anthology film will center around the infamous bounty hunter Boba Fett, under the directorial guidance of James Mangold. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have also each signed on to helm their own Star Wars trilogies. Neither of those trilogies will focus on the adventures of the Skywalker family, according to the announcements.

But none of that completely rules out Solo getting a sequel, if it proves successful enough. After all, Han and Chewie have more than ten years of time between the end of Solo and the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope. You can fit a lot of smuggling, swindling and screwing up in that time.