'Solo' had the biggest opening ever ... for a heist movie

Han Solo has got himself in a whole bunch of money troubles again -- Earth money this time, not galactic credits.

Solo: A Star Wars Story made $101 million at the U.S. box office over the four-day Memorial Day weekend. That was far short of the $130 million Disney had projected, and the weakest opening weekend for any Star Wars live action film since 2002's Attack of the Clones.

But if you set its stellar expectations aside, Solo has already smashed box office records ... from a certain point of view.

Not only was it the strongest May movie opening since 2014, but the genre that Solo belongs in -- the heist movie -- has never seen numbers like this. Mega-hits like Inception, Fast Five and Ocean's Eleven, not to mention Oscar winners like Argo, could only dream of a $100 million opening weekend. (Numbers below courtesy of Box Office Mojo.)

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So if Solo is an unusually large #1 hit that looks set to become the biggest heist movie in history, why are we talking about it like it's a failure?

One word: budget.

Neither Lucasfilm nor Disney will confirm exactly what Solo cost to make, but Variety reported that its budget ballooned to $250 million after original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were replaced by Ron Howard, who reshot the vast majority of their footage.

(That $250 million doesn't count the cost of the movie's marketing, which may explain why Disney was relatively late to release trailers.)

If that's true, it means Solo is the most expensive Star Wars film ever -- and has little to show for it.

As anyone who's seen it can attest, even though it looks good, Solo does not look like a $250 million movie. It's a tight and relatively small-scale character-driven story whose epic moments are few and far between.

Not that there's anything wrong with that at all -- we needed a palate-cleanser in the Star Wars universe, especially coming 6 months after the epic saga movie The Last Jedi.

Sure, Howard and award-winning cinematographer Bradford Young made it look great (at least in theaters with better projectors). But their reshoots likely doubled the film's cost, and there seem to be a few moments where they could have easily trimmed the fat.

For example (very minor spoiler alert for those who haven't seen it) there's a sequence where the Millennium Falcon has to escape some kind of giant space octopus. Not only is this scene entirely unmemorable and derivative, even for those who loved Solo, it's out of character for a movie that otherwise doesn't lean on CGI-generated monsters at all.

The point is Solo clearly could have looked as good as this without a $100 million-plus cost overrun. Disney could have marketed it as a satisfying, relatively low budget heist flick rather than a must-see origin story.

Without the cost overrun, Solo might have made its budget back this weekend (especially given the $65 million it earned internationally). If that had been the case, the headlines would be very different.

So will Solo make its money back anyway? That largely depends on how it performs during its second week. But even if it tanks at the theater, we'll likely never know whether it actually cost Disney money.

That's because of the thorny question of movie-related merchandise, which in the case of Star Wars has always been substantially more lucrative than theater tickets. Clearly this movie boosts the franchise's profile. So when people buy non-Solo Star Wars schwag over the next few months, what percentage of that should Disney count as Solo-related revenue?

The franchise made an estimated $40 billion in merch sales for licensees in the 35 years prior to Lucasfilm's sale to Disney, and just $4 billion in ticket sales in the same period. That includes the entire original trilogy. So Han Solo and Chewbacca action figures could really save Solo's neck.

Either way, one thing's for sure: neither Howard nor Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy (who also presided over three Star Wars blockbusters including The Force Awakens, the all-time U.S. box office record movie) are likely to be encased in carbonite and shipped back to Tatooine if Solo comes up a few credits short.