Is Han Solo in Star Wars 8? The Force Awakens producer Kathleen Kennedy says so

'All the cast members you see here tonight will be in it.'

Thursday 24 December 2015 15:21 GMT

The Star Wars cast at the London premiere (Getty)

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If you haven’t seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens yet go ahead and close this tab now, because we’re talking the biggest spoiler here.

Okay, you’ve seen it, I hope you enjoyed it too!

The most shocking moment in the movie, besides Rey’s bizarrely advanced force powers and Kylo Ren’s miraculous escape from the collapsing planet, was undoubtedly Han Solo’s death at the lightsaber of his own son, Ben (now Kylo Ren).

In the age of are-they-dead-or-aren’t-they online debates, JJ Abrams seemed to make it pretty clear that Han was done for, having him royally stabbed and plunged into an abyss.

But now The Evening Standard has got everyone confused and hysterical with an article headlined ‘Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy confirms that entire cast will return for eighth film’.

This is what she told reporters at the London premiere on Wednesday:

“There will be a handful of new cast members in Episode VIII but also all the cast members you see here tonight will be in it as well.”

Harrison Ford was there and so was the similarly-on-screen dead Max von Sydow.

Will either/both be back in 2017 then, perhaps through flashbacks?

The latter is definitely possible, as it seems strange that they got an actor as big as von Sydow to play Lor San Tekka, a character who was on-screen for all of five seconds.

Han Solo might be given a funeral befitting of such a war hero meanwhile, but would the Resistance even have been able to recover his body (thus requiring Ford)?

Most likely, Kennedy was just trying to avoid spoilers, and Ford’s time in the franchise is over, sorry.

But hey, maybe Han’s falling body was intercepted by an X-Wing, is now being resurrected with a robotic belly a la Luke’s hand and the smuggler will return to help find yet another woefully-overlooked weak spot in a death sphere’s facade?!