Visiting Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine has happened five times in the eight existing Star Wars movies, but Han Solo’s home planet has never been glimpsed once. But the new Han Solo standalone film might change that: the planet of Corellia may finally make its first appearance in the Star Wars canon.
As reported by the newspaper LA Provincia on March 11, the production team for the Han Solo standalone film has begun filming in the Canary Islands. Both Comicbook Movie and io9 have pointed out that La Provincia is specifically saying the island of Fuerteventura will be used as the planet Corellia in the film. It may be an assumption, but it’s not a bad one considering the subject matter of the movie. In previously established Star Wars lore, Corellia is the planet Han Solo is from. Though this is never stated outright in the films, Han does mention “big Corellian ships,” in Star Wars: A New Hope.
Corellian men: Wedge, Han, and BoShek
Throughout the various Star Wars books, comics, and video games released before The Phantom Menace, other characters were identified as being from the same planet. Wedge Antilles of Rogue Squadron was from Corellia, as was the main character of many of the Rogue Squadron books, Corran Horn. Obi-Wan and Chewbacca also chatted up another guy from Corellia in the Cantina in A New Hope, the dude with the mutton chops: BoShek.
Because Corellia has never been seen onscreen (not even in the Clone Wars or Rebels) it’s exactly like the planet Coruscant was pre-1997 before Episode One. Hardcore fans were totally aware of it but weren’t sure if the capital of the galaxy would ever be included in the real canon or not. When Coruscant appeared in the 1997 special edition of Return of the Jedi, that was seemingly that. Now that there’s a prequel film about Han Solo’s life, it stands to reason it’s time for Lucasfilm to either depict the famous planet or ignore it entirely.
In the old Expanded Universe, the Corellian system consisted of five different planets. So if the Han Solo movie team is really using the Canary Islands as a stand-in for this planet, or planetary system, they’ll have plenty of different islands to choose from. Back in 2015, Rogue One filmed several different scenes for the planet Scarif on the islands of the Maldives.
The untitled Han Solo film will hit theaters on May 25, 2018.
