Probably the last time I bump this thread, but I think this might interest some people. Solo's incredible failure has claimed it's victims: all of the Star Wars spin-offs.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/report-the-star-wars-story-films-are-being-put-on-hold-1826992769

It's no surprise really. The bomb that is Solo can not be overstated. It's unlikely now to cross 400 million worldwide. It means it might be outgrossed by the Tom Cruis Mummy movie which killed Universal's "Dark Universe".

I made a prediction about Solo being the movie that will kill the Disney Star Wars way back in 2016. I admit, I got a lot of it wrong. It ended up an ok film, but not a one that sold well. But still, I think I can safely say I right about that "disturbance in the force".

Also, as a sidenote, I'm rewatching Firefly right now, and pretty much my first thought after the first two episodes is that Solo is not really a Star Wars movie. It's a Firefly movie. And given how the last Firefly movie did at the box office, maybe that's why we are where we are.

So, I was going to go see the film at the beginning of the month, but my friends that I go see star wars films with were unable to agree a date because of an irritating 2 week holiday in the middle of june, and other people not being able to make the other dates. Then the one date we could make was sold out.

So we thought we'd let it calm down and book some tickets to late June, but it seems the Cinemas were wise to your prediction, they wouldn't take bookings beyond a week in advance. They seemed to know they'd need to scale down the Solo showings, and didn't want to commit screens.

Hopefully somewhere will still be showing it at end of month, so I can actually catch up with this thread (haven't read it for spoilers).

I haven't seen the movie but from what I gathered it's not all that bad but was primarily a victim of the backlash against The Last Jedi (which I haven't seen either). So it's all well and good for Disney to back off from spin-off movies but I wonder if they understand that they're going to need to be very careful with the main series movies going forward?

There's no definitive evidence of why people, in general, didn't want to watch it (and it was probably a combination of a lot of different factors), so the people with a hateboner for either The Last Jedi or Disney's Star Wars are trying to claim Solo's failure as a victory.

I for one loved The Last Jedi and didn't watch this movie precisely because it seemed like the opposite of that, i.e. just fanservice.

It was a victim of many things. Backlash was part of it, but also the strong competition, the behind-the-scenes trouble that made it sound bad to people for a while now while also inflating the budget like crazy (they basicaly reshot something like 60 or 70% of the film), and the fact that even among the fans no one was really asking for a young Han Solo movie. It turned out better than expected, but people just don't care. And these days it takes something of an "event" film to get people to go the cinema in large numbers.

It's hard to make an intriguing and suspenseful action-adventure film, when you already know the fates of the major characters. I think that's another thing that hung over the prequel trilogy. You knew Anakin would become Vader; you knew the Emperor would win and Obi-Wan would survive. You can't wonder how its going to end when you already know. That certainly didn't help. And while most movies, you have a good idea the protagonist will prevail, at least there is some shred of doubt.