I don’t buy the “protest” argument at all (seems a little tin foil hat to me). If hardcore fans didn’t like TLJ, they probably know that Solo has nothing to do with it. IX’s performance will be a better indicator of the true response to VIII. I think the “boycott Soylo” group is a pretty minor demo, especially considering most of those people probably saw it anyway.
As always with SW, the fact of the matter is most of the audience is made up of casual fans at best. For them I think the main reason is that they still see Star Wars as one single franchise, whereas something like Marvel is a combination of different franchises (which is to say nothing of the fact that Solo’s performance is roughly on par with most Marvel origin movies). I do think the five month gap probably hurt it, as people aren’t used to so much SW at once, and checked out when they felt this one was skippable.
TLJ is still in the home entertainment charts. I still don’t see this big polarising divide. Meanwhile Solo probably bombed because nobody wanted a Solo movie and most people were still watching Avengers 3 or Deadpool, things that general audiences were actually craving. It’s a bad release time and they should have known better.
There’s definitely an argument to be made that they never properly conveyed why people need to see a young Han movie.
This is probably a sign to that prequels in general are a dying concept. At least with the SW prequels there was the big question of “how did Anakin become Darth Vader?” No one really needed to see Han’s origin, and it was probably a mistake from the start to have such high expectations. If they had just accepted this as “lower tier” SW and gave it a lower tier budget there’d be no problem (of course the cost of reshoots is a whole other factor that I’m not sure was really done to improve box office).
The truth is though that despite people on the internet complaining for years that “no one asked for this,” actually a lot of people (myself included) were looking forward to a smaller scale SW film that focused on something other than large scale war. If this film (and other prequel films) were just designed and/or marketed as “adventures that just happen to take place before the other ones you’ve seen,” I don’t know if there’d be that much issue. To that end, I still think they should make a Solo sequel, but on a limited budget (sub $150mil). I actually wonder if they’d ever consider putting SW spin-offs on their streaming, rather than in theaters.