Report: Han Solo standalone movie goes to Tatooine

The Han Solo movie may very well visit a well-known planet, if a new photo is any indication, and it could help fans figure out the plot of the film.

Right now, much of the Star Wars focus is on The Last Jedi. It makes a lot of sense. After all, that movie is actually coming out this year, and it hasn’t recast a beloved character in a younger form (that we know of, anyway). Meanwhile, 2019’s Han Solo standalone (about which we are not bitter, and who gave you that idea?) continues moving along apace. io9, in fact, found a photo of filming, or at least what claims to be from filming.

Here’s where we get into spoiler territory.

This is the photo:

io9 guesses that this could very well be Tatooine itself. Let’s extrapolate from there, because we really don’t think Lucasfilm would send Han to a random desert planet that looks like Tatooine but isn’t actually Tatooine. Call it intuition. Let’s take a closer look at Han’s Tatooine connections.

We know from A New Hope that Han had fallen in with Jabba the Hutt, whose palace is, indeed, on Tatooine. In fact, Han had ejected some smuggling cargo to avoid an Imperial search prior to the events of the movie. It’s why he agrees to take Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker to Alderaan. He needs the money to pay off Jabba. Jabba even goes so far as to set a bounty on Han’s head — leading to Boba Fett showing up in The Empire Strikes Back, and Han’s date with carbonite. Basically, if Han didn’t work for Jabba, we probably wouldn’t have Han in the movies, robbing us of “I love you” / “I know” in both iterations, “delusions of grandeur,” and so on and so forth.

Ergo, it seems like the Han Solo movie will see him start working with Jabba. It seems unlikely that it’ll run up right to the events leading into A New Hope, though. Rogue One already pulled that trick, and doing it twice in two spinoff movies would probably smack of too much fanservice. We don’t need to see Han dumping off his cargo and exclaiming loudly that he’ll now owe Jabba money, honestly. Star Wars fans can see where things are going without that obvious of a tie.

Next: The Force Awakens had an ending change

Perhaps the last scene of the movie will be Han agreeing to start smuggling for the Hutt. That’d be close enough without getting too close, at least in this writer’s opinion.