Via Inverse.com:
Now that we know Donald Glover will star as Lando Calrissian opposite Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo in the as-yet untitled 2018 Star Wars standalone movie, it seems like we could possibly stop calling this project “The Han Solo movie” and start calling it “The Lando movie.” Or at the very least, we can start thinking of it less as a movie about just Han, and more of movie about a bunch of sexy space criminals who are totally unconcerned with restoring peace and justice to the galaxy.
Han and Lando being the focus of an entire movie conjures up images of an Ocean’s 11-style heist movie in space, mixed with an Indiana Jones swagger. If Rogue One is the gritty war movie of the Star Wars cinematic tableau, then this Han/Lando joint will likely be the one with the most boozing and card-playing (Jedis need not apply). If you’re interested in figuring out potential plots, the wealth of Han Solo backstory material is a good place to start, but Lando Calrissian’s adventures in both comic books and novels also might give us clues as to what will be going on in this movie.
What is Lando doing when the movie takes place?
According to Lawerence Kasdan, this film will take place about “ten years” before A New Hope. In the approved “real” Star Wars canon, the last time we saw Lando was in the Rebels episode “The Siege of Lothal,” which is about four years before A New Hope. At this point, Lando is a straight-up criminal and he’s definitely not flying the Millennium Falcon anymore. In the in-canon Marvel Comics miniseries Lando, we see Lando and his cyborg buddy Lobot teaming up to steal a very special Imperial starship. This seems to take place during the three years gap after A New Hope and before The Empire Strikes Back. Other than giving us fun character details, neither of these in-canon stories tells us much, since they take place so much later than this new movie.
If this is really a decade before A New Hope, then the Lando we’ll see could be up-to similar things that Lando is doing the old 1983 novels by L. Neil Smith. In the first of these novels, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando is almost exclusively a gambler and treasure hunter. And though he doesn’t meet Han Solo in these books, the old timeline had him cross paths with Han in the A.C. Crispin novel Rebel Dawn. There, we learn this gambler learned to pilot from Han himself.
Maybe this film will show us Han teaching Lando how to fly starships. Or perhaps a new interpretation of this story will flip the narrative and make Lando the mentor this time. In real life, Donald Glover is a little older than Alden Ehrenreich (just as Billy Dee Williams is older than Harrison Ford). Maybe that slight age-gap might be enough to turn the teacher into the student.
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