Star Wars

So much of Han Solo’s appeal is due to Harrison Ford’s portrayal of the legendary smuggler. It’s an iconic character elevated by an iconic performance. But it almost didn’t happen. Early in the development of Star Wars, Han Solo was a big, green-skinned alien Jedi with gills and no nose. Once George Lucas decided he wanted a human character, he actually almost cast Billy Dee Williams in the part, before reconsidering him for Lando Calrissian. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which catches up with the captain of the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo!

While he only has only four lines of dialogue and you never see his face, Boba Fett has gone on to become one of the most popular characters in Star Wars lore. But, it turns out his iconic design was actually just taken from a rejected sketch for Darth Vader. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which checks out your favorite bounty hunter with Boba Fett!

There were a lot of exciting toys announced yesterday during the epic 18-hour Star Wars Force Friday reveals, but none as exciting as the BB-8 toy from Sphero. We’ve been gushing about BB-8 since Star Wars Celebration and counting down the days until we could own one. And now that the day is here, it is perhaps even more fun than we imagined.

We’re still a few months away from the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but Rian Johnson is already hard at work prepping Episode 8. While it remains unclear how much of The Force Awakens cast will return for the sequel, there will be some new additions to the lineup as Johnson and Lucasfilm have already begun looking at actors for leading roles.

In the tradition of ScreenCrush series like You Think You Know Movies, You Think You Know TV, and Post Credits comes a brand new YouTube series: Top Five! Each week (or so; we’ve got a lot of other stuff going on), ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer will count down a particular topic from the world of movies (and probably write these introductory posts in the third person).

As both Comic-Con and D23 went by without a new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer we were left to wonder when exactly we’d see the next footage from the upcoming. Well, get ready. That time is now. “Have you felt it?”

We’ve known for a long time that Star Wars: The Force Awakens would screen in IMAX theaters because director J.J. Abrams filmed one key sequence with IMAX cameras. But now, we’ve learned the full extent of Disney and Lucasfilm’s plans for large format presentation and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a studio that has the most popular movie franchise on the planet and the power to do whatever it wants with it. The new Star Wars movie has booked pretty much every IMAX screen in the world for four weeks. Everyone with the desire to see this movie on the biggest movie screens in the world now has plenty of time to do so.

It should come as no surprise that fancy new limited editions of the original six Star Wars movies are hitting Blu-ray later this year. Did you think Disney and Lucasfilm weren’t going to do everything in their power to wring every last penny out of this devoted fan base? After all, everything about Star Wars: The Force Awakens has us weak in the knees. We have never been more vulnerable to large corporations exploiting our love. And now we know what love looks like: a series of very cool steelbook Blu-rays, complete with new art.

Harrison Ford might be a superhero. This, according to Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams, who was on set for Ford’s unfortunate accident last year, when a hydraulic door broke his leg. (As Abrams’ describes it in the clip above, his ankle was at a, gulp, 90-degree angle to the rest of his body. Ew.) Thankfully, Ford was okay. Then he later got into a plane crash and was mostly okay after that too. Because, again, Harrison Ford is a superhero.

In an interview with VICE, Ahmed Best, best known as the man who appeared in three less-than-enthusiastically received Star Wars prequels as the less-than-beloved Jar Jar Binks, says that while he was the one who ended up winning the role, there was a far more famous superstar who really wanted to play everyone’s ninth-favorite Gungan. And that man was Michael Jackson.