Disney Exec Blames 'Avengers' And 'Deadpool 2' For Dismal 'Solo' Box Office

For most of the U.S., we spent the long weekend celebrating Memorial Day by having a BBQ, hanging out with family and friends, and just having a good time during the unofficial kick-off to summer. However, Disney wishes we all went to the movies to see “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” With weekend box office estimates that are disappointing, to say the least, Memorial Day weekend wasn’t a time of celebration at the Mouse House. It was a time to figure out what went wrong.

According to one executive over at Disney, it wasn’t that ‘Solo’ was a lackluster film or the supposed “Star Wars Fatigue” that you might hear bandied about, that caused such low box office totals. No, it was “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Deadpool 2.”

READ MORE: ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Crashes At The Box Office; Barely Hits $100 Million With 4-Day Figures

“There’s a question of frequency, and how many times people will go to the movies. Is this too much and too soon for a third time in a five-week period?” says Disney distribution chief Dave Hollis said to The Hollywood Reporter this weekend.

It’s natural to find a scapegoat for ‘Solo’ underwhelming. Hollis thinks that ‘Infinity War’ coming out April 27, combined with “Deadpool 2” coming out only two weeks ago, caused fewer people to buy an already-expensive movie ticket. Is he right? Sure, the summer movie congestion definitely affects box office totals. But as we said above, there’s a variety of factors at play with the monetary performance of ‘Solo.’

Ultimately, Hollis knows there’s more to the story, and said, “Let’s measure how we feel about this until more time passes.”

However, even with the weak domestic performance of ‘Solo,’ the real troubling part (albeit not all that surprising) is the film’s performance overseas, particularly in China. For those that aren’t box office nerds, China has become a crucial territory for studios hoping to recoup their investment.

For a film with a budget approaching $200 million (or perhaps over $300 million, in the case of ‘Solo’), you need a really strong turnout from Chinese audiences to cover costs. And in the case of ‘Solo,’ the film absolutely was a dud in that country, only earning approximately $10.1 million this weekend.

“We have a lot of work to do in trying to understand this,” says Hollis. “We are all over it and will spend a lot of time digging into why things happened the way they did in various markets. We have a year and a half before ‘Episode IX’ comes out.”

READ MORE: ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’: Let’s Talk About The Movie’s Surprise, WTF? Cameo & How It Connects To Deeper Canon

It’s obvious that ‘Episode IX’ will probably do better than the dismal ‘Solo’ totals in China. However, the truth is that the country just isn’t as in love with “Star Wars” as the rest of the world. And really, unlike the Marvel films, the only country that truly treats “Star Wars” films with any sort of event status is the US.

Another reason fans might point at the bad box office performance of ‘Solo’ is the change in directors. As we’ve talked about numerous times, Lucasfilm fired Phil Lord and Chris Miller during the tail-end of production on the film, replacing the duo with Ron Howard. According to most every report, the cause was Lord and Miller’s vision not syncing up with what the studio was looking for.

And according to ScreenCrush, this all came to a head at last year’s Star Wars Celebration, where Lord and Miller were expected to release a trailer. The report says that the directors had a trailer ready to go, but Lucasfilm nixed it. ScreenCrush says that the studio wasn’t happy with it, and as we know, the duo was fired two months later.

Now we wait for the fan uprising, calling for the “Lord and Miller Cut” of ‘Solo.’ Obviously, that will never happen, for a variety of reasons. Let’s just say this was not the best holiday weekend over at Disney.