Check out dozens of crazy alternate designs for Solo’s Millennium Falcon

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

In SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY, the Millennium Falcon which we've come to love over the decades wound up looking a little different than we remembered, but even those sleek new lines couldn't hide the most famous ship in the galaxy. However, the Millennium Falcon could have ended up looking almost unrecognizable. James Clyne, Lucasfilm's design supervisor on SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY, was tasked with remaking the Millennium Falcon, and his team created dozens of iterations before they finally settled on what we see in the film.

"I think the big exciting thing about doing a new Falcon was the question of, we all know what an old Millennium Falcon looks like, but what does the new Millennium Falcon look like? That was really exciting," James Clyne said in an interview with StarWars.com. "What does a clean Millennium Falcon look like? I think that was the big thing that I always wanted to see going into the movie. As a kid, I just loved it for what it was. I thought it was perfect. But when it was proposed that you would see a cleaner, newer Lando version, I couldn’t get more excited about and more scared about that prospect/ There was a certain level of sheer terror in taking this on. I mean, it’s like the most beloved thing you’ve ever seen in the Star Wars universe. It’s like somebody asking you to change the Eiffel Tower or something." Clyne admitted that they went kind of crazy in the beginning with their ideas, and you can certainly see that in some of the alternate designs for the iconic vessel.

In the end, James Clyne and his team wound up going back to Ralph McQuarrie's original sketches and paintings for the Millennium Falcon. "We are constantly pulling from every little sketch that we can possibly find," Clyne said. "And in fact one of Ralph’s earliest docking bay 94 paintings of the Falcon was a big influence because it had less detail. We just went right back to the well and looked at all the Ralph McQuarrie stuff…a lot of the early designs were pretty clean, were pretty slick." Clyne also wanted to honor the original model makers by ensuring that the new Millennium Falcon looked like it could have been built by them, even going so far as to buy some Millennium Falcon model kits and sit down for a little kit-bashing with his team, adding pieces and removing others.

To do it in a physical way, rather than a digital way, that really got us into the conversation. We’re always going to take this and put it in the computer, but as a design tool, what if we just went old school and built it from the kits? I think everybody really appreciated seeing something physical and holding it and being able to look at it as a tactile thing rather than spinning on a monitor.

The official synopsis for SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY:

Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo befriends his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and meets the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga’s most unlikely heroes.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY is now playing in theaters.