Why Some Solo: A Star Wars Story Posters Are Missing Blasters

Recent international posters for Solo: A Star Wars Story have led many to assume that Disney is making a sweeping change to the marketing plan to remove all blasters from the movie’s marketing, but that’s a gross misunderstanding of the situation. Anyone that knows Star Wars knows about the “Han shot first” mantra that originated with George Lucas’ edits to the original trilogy during his Special Edition re-releases in the mid-90s. So it’s only fitting that Solo would receive a similar censorship controversy during its marketing lead up to the film’s release.

Guns are currently a hot topic of debate in the United States, so it’s understandable that such a change would cause some to speculate the poster changes are connected to the controversy, but the two topics are entirely disconnected, which we know for a couple of reasons. First of all, the posters arent for the United States. They’re posters for Brazil. Brazil has had its own recent national debate over firearms, but that’s not even the reason their posters look different. Screen Rant has spoken with Disney about the posters in question and they’ve verified that the posters are specific to Brazil, and they are likely that way because Brazil is trying to push a more family-friendly image for Solo (or “Han Solo” as it’s marketed there) in that region. The posters aren’t distributed in the US, and the change has nothing to do with the gun issues in the US.

Second, the “changes” to the posters aren’t actually changing anything. The controversy is mostly based on the comparison of two sets of posters (example above) that appear identical other than the fact that one set features the characters with guns and the other doesn’t. Not only were these posters released at about the same time, but the posters in question are the first Solo posters for Brazil, meaning it’s impossible for them to have been “changed” as there were no previous Brazillian posters to change from. The only reason people think they were changed is because they’re comparing them to the Spanish posters, where the characters all still have blasters. The casual eye may not be able to differentiate between Spanish and Portuguese, but it’s clear they’re different languages as one movie is titled Han Solo: Una Historia de Star Wars and the other is Han Solo: Uma História de Star Wars. Other words are also different, such as the Spanish “cines” and the Portuguese “cinemas.”

The controversy could be easily cleared up if the release of marketing materials was more standardized across Disney, so the timeline of which posters came first could be more clear, but most regions have their own dedicated offices that make these decisions, so there’s rarely coordination in how assets like this are changed and when they’re released outside of more major launches. As far as the United States go, the official posters are still the original batch with the character name overlays, and each character has a blaster visible in their hand in that set.

The other poster confusion is the assumption that these new posters were made in response to claims that Disney copied the design from the album covers from The Legacy of Funk and The Legacy of Jazz by Sony music, but the artist’s original post on Facebook has since been deleted, and all official Lucasfilm and Disney sites still list the posters as the official posters for the movie. While the inspiration from the Sony albums seems to be very clear, the work itself was done by a 3rd party vendor, not Disney/Lucasfilm, so the similarity is likely one they weren’t aware of at the time, and the deletion of the Facebook post appears to indicate the matter has been settled behind closed doors.

Otherwise, Solo’s marketing is continuing as normal. The movie is set to hit theaters in just a couple of months, and the next trailer is expected to arrive in a few weeks, most likely being attached to Infinity War.

Ssource: screenrant.com