Live-action Star Wars series has a $100M budget, 10 episodes

The New York Times takes a look at Disney’s upcoming streaming service and executive Ricky Strauss, who has oversight of the programming. But for our immediate purposes, there is one new nugget here: Jon Favreau’s live-action Star Wars series has a rough budget of “$100 million for 10 episodes.”

“‘Star Wars’ is a big world, and Disney’s new streaming service affords a wonderful opportunity to tell stories that stretch out over multiple chapters,” Mr. Favreau said in an email. He added of Mr. Strauss: “Marketing is about telling a story, and his background in that area allows us to collaborate and create new content.”

Information on the Favreau series is thin on the ground, but we do know he’s writing the whole season, it will feature brand-new characters, and it’s set three years after Return of the Jedi.

$10M an episode is roughly equivalent to the episode budget for past episodes of Game of Thrones. The final season of that show is now up to $15M an episode, per Variety last year. High-end TV episodes generally come out to about $5 million-$7 million an hour. The $10M price tag also puts this in the range of The Crown, which is one of Netflix’s most expensive shows.

We also get a timeline for when Disney’s new movies will stop rolling out to Netflix: March’s Captain Marvel will be the first to go to the new service, which means we can expect Solo on Netflix.

Media analysts: Solo’s main problem was marketing

Media analysts Doug Creutz and Stephen Glagola (via) thinks that Solo‘s lackluster performance at the box office comes down to the film’s marketing not being able to sell audiences on lead Alden Ehrenreich. They compare the Solo teaser trailer with Rogue One’s:

The first 35 seconds of the trailer almost exclusively focuses on Felicity Jones as the protagonist Jyn Erso, selling her as a new franchise hero. The second half is dominated by the Imperial alert klaxon and Forest Whitaker’s voice over, and practically screams ‘EPIC’ at the viewer, before closing on another hero shot of Jones.

Solo’s, on the other hand:

The teaser, by our count, only had about 10 seconds of screen time where Ehrenreich’s face was clearly in the picture – not, in our opinion, nearly enough. In general, we felt like the Solo marketing campaign didn’t get fully up to speed until about a month before the movie came out, and that is simply too short of a window for a big franchise picture.

Ehrenreich did figure much more prominently as the campaign went on, but maybe it was a case of too little, too late? They dismiss the effect of Star Wars fatigue, mixed reaction to The Last Jedi, and production worries as fairly minor concerns.

Solo novelization coming in September

The Solo novelization by Mur Lafferty is coming on September 4, Del Rey and StarWars.com announced today. There’ll also be a junior version by Joe Schreiber. A cookbook, the Millennium Falcon: Owner’s Workshop Manual and a Deluxe Smuggler’s Guide from Dan Wallace are also coming in the fall.

Lafferty has previously written two Star Wars short stories – ‘The Voice of the Empire’, a tie in to the Rogue One prequel novel Catalyst which appeared in the Insider, and ‘Not for Nothing’ for the anthology From a Certain Point of View.

New featurette highlights Solo’s scoundrels

Today, upon the occasion of the movie’s release, a new Solo featurette puts the spotlight on the scoundrels – aka most of the cast, really.

I’ll have a discussion post up this evening for anyone who wants to char or give their first impressions in a spoiler-safe place.