The one scene that completely ruined the first ‘Star Wars’ movie
George Lucas brought his Star Wars universe to sci-fi fans for the first time in 1977 with A New Hope. The film was an instant worldwide classic which ushered in the golden age of sci-fi cinema.
While most were content with the original trilogy, creator George Lucas was less than satisfied. He even went as far as releasing a 1997 special edition in which he corrected his errors. Most of these edits were merely cosmetic, trivial details that few casual viewers would notice, but one fundamental change caused a stir among Star Wars fans in the run-up to the second trilogy.
In A New Hope, we’re introduced to Han Solo, a maverick gambler portrayed by Harrison Ford, who gets confronted at gunpoint by a green, lizard-like bounty hunter, Greedo, in the Mos Eisley cantina. The pair sit at a table as Greedo reminds Solo of the money he still owes Jabba the Hutt. Greedo tells him he has been “looking forward” to killing Solo for a long time. Solo replies, “Yes, I’ll bet you have.”
In the film’s original cut, Solo shoots Greedo dead, unprovoked in the midst of their tense conversation. However, when Lucas’ edited version of the scene appeared in 1997, Greedo was seen to take the first shot, which missed its target, eliciting a reactive shot from Solo.
What might seem a trifling adaption to the untrained eye was scrutinised by die-hard fans. An angry mob began calling Lucas out for the scene change, arguing that they enjoyed Solo’s character development from an anti-hero to a hero in the original cut. He was once a cold-blooded, selfish killer, but he changes for the better during his fight against a common evil.
The swelling controversy led to the famous protest phrase, “Han Shot First”, which Lucas wore in comical recognition of the unrest during the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008.
Lucas has been asked to comment on the contentious scene change on several occasions over the past couple of decades. He maintains that Solo was never supposed to be a cold-blooded killer and would only shoot in defence. In 2020’s The Star Wars Archives: 1999–2005, Lucas commented: “I never designed Han to be a ruthless killer. All the good guys shoot in self-defence. When I edited the scene in 1977, you couldn’t tell who does what.”
“The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t,” Lucas told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012. “It had been done in all close-ups, and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.”
In a 2015 interview with The Washington Post, Lucas further qualified his decision to alter the scene: “Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, ‘Should he be a cold-blooded killer?’ Because I was thinking mythologically—should he be a cowboy, should he be John Wayne? And I said, ‘Yeah, he should be John Wayne.’ And when you’re John Wayne, you don’t shoot people [first]—you let them have the first shot. It’s a mythological reality that we hope our society pays attention to.”
Despite Lucas’ reasoning, many fans still speculate that he changed his mind in the two decades between the original cut and the edited version. Suspicions were fuelled in 2015 when a replica of the early script for A New Hope was discovered in the University of New Brunswick library archives. In the script, dated March 15th, 1976, Solo was shown to shoot first.
Paul Blake, the British actor who played the part of Greedo, was asked to speculate in a 2016 interview with Daily News NY. “Of course, it said it all in the original script,” he said, siding with the sceptical fans. “We played in the scene in English, and at the end of the scene, it reads, ‘Han shoots the alien.’ It’s all it says, and that’s what happened. It was very painful.” He added that Greedo shooting and missing Solo also weakened his character, making him seem incompetent. He felt Greedo had more “glory” when he was “just blown away”.
Harrison Ford was also asked to comment on the matter during a Reddit AMA in 2014. “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” he retorted.
See the scene before and after Lucas’ edits below.
