Solo Spoilers in this post.
When we first see Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back he’s cool. He looks cool, he sounds cool and the guy is being told by Darth Vader, the baddest of bad-asses in the Galaxy to not disintegrate people.
He makes us wonder who this character is. He tracks down the Millennium Falcon and takes the carbonite encased Solo to Jabba the Hutt, only to get hit in his rocket pack by Solo and fall into the Sarlacc Pit. Bye bye Boba.
There were stories written in the Expanded Universe about his survival and return, but the fans wanted more.
And thank the maker (George Lucas) who re-introduced the character in Attack of the Clones and fleshed out more of his back-story in the Clone Wars but the best and most notorious Bounty Hunter in the galaxy gets owned by a guy who can’t see and gets a lucky shot in. Poor show.
Phasma has been the biggest grease in terms of characters in the Sequel trilogy. When she was described as The Force Awakens’ Boba Fett no one thought it meant less screen time as Fett got in the Original Trilogy. In fact across two films she still has less.
Phasma was all over the promotional material for TFA and when we see her in the film she stands around and talks and deactivates a shield. I’m sorry but why the fanfare?
Then in the run up to The Last Jedi we got a comic mini-series and a novel about her backstory. Great, more Phasma, surely all this promotion for the character means she’ll have more to… oh, two scenes. Less dialogue than before but there is that fight scene which is great, but the deleted scene version was better. The character is a huge disappointment and if they don’t give us a great pay-off for the character in Episode IX then it’s a waste of a great actress and great character potential.
And in Solo: A Star Wars Story we get Enfys Nest. Through the promotional material I really struggled to get invested in any way. The character has a great costume and comes across as mysterious but if history has told me anything it’s to not be invested in those kinds of characters.
When the merchandise started to come out Enfys was on a lot of stuff, then a clip from the film, featuring the character was released. All I could think was how disappointing the character would be.
Then I saw the film and was pleasantly surprised.
Granted, she didn’t have a lot of screen time the character was had something to do and had a purpose other than killing or hunting the heroes. She even takes off her mask and talks about the larger politics of the galaxy and even tried to recruit Han and Chewie into the newly forming Rebellion. Finally the cool costume and huge merchandise presence has paid off and I really hope we see more of the character in the future.
When characters are pushed heavily during the marketing, fans have expectations. Look at Constable Zuvio. Loads of his figures continue to like the shelves because he wasn’t in the Force Awakens. The same goes for Phasma for two films. Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed Delilah S. Dawson’s origin novel about Phasma but to have it be a part of the initial push of marketing for The Last Jedi made the fandom get excited to see the character get some more screen-time. Has Lucasfilm learned from the Phasma disappointment? Only time and more films with more cool looking characters will tell.
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