Star Wars fans have been waiting for their first look at Alden Ehrenreich as the new Han Solo. Now they have it, sort of. As is frequently the case these days, merchandise is where the first look has come from. A movie fan in Arizona shared an image on social media of a cup he received through a theater loyalty program (a Solo Cup, if you will). The cup is covered in images of characters from upcoming films, but one of them is Alden Ehrenreich, looking like the famous smuggler. Check it out.
It's not honestly that surprising that the first place we see Han Solo is on the side of a movie theater soda cup. Quite often we get our first look at movie characters through toys or other merchandise. The timing of a movie's official reveals that have been dictated by a marketing plan are often not the same as the timing needed by those in charge of merchandise, which results in these sorts of things actually hitting first.
Although, part of the reason we're seeing this cup before anything official is probably because of the delays that Solo: A Star Wars Story dealt with due to their change in directors in the middle of filming. If Solo had wrapped filming on schedule it's possible we'd even have a trailer by now, and we would have seen Alden Ehrenreich in costume there. However, the entire Lucasfilm promotion plan likely had to change due to delays, meaning that the cup came out before the trailer.
If the image looks familiar, that's because you've probably seen it before. While this is absolutely an image of Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, it doesn't appear to be one he posed for in costume. His head is almost certainly photoshopped (or artistically rendered) from the cast image that was released around the time that filming on Solo: A Star Wars Story got underway. That doesn't make the image any less acceptable. Surely, whoever made the cup got the rights to use the image, and it was almost certainly supplied by an official source (either that, or they'll be a lawsuit coming shortly) but the cup needed the image before any official images of the actor would be available, and so this was done instead. Compare the smile above to the image below.
Since the image certainly came from official sources, we can assume that this is pretty close to what Alden Ehrenreich will look like when we see him in Solo: A Star Wars Story next year. It looks like we probably would expect a young Han Solo to look. There's no reason to believe the character's personal style was all that different from the original Star Wars. We'll get to see the real thing when Solo arrives in May.
