'Solo' Novelization Reveals If Chewbacca Has Actually Eaten Humans

Has Chewbacca eaten a human? We know Han Solo's furry friend fried up some porgs in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but has Chewie ever chowed down on human flesh? It's a question longtime Star Wars fans may have been mulling over for years, but one that jumped to the forefront of many minds when Solo: A Star Wars Story came out this May. Now the official Solo novelization has provided the answer.

You may recall that when Han (Alden Ehrenreich) first meets Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) in Solo: A Star Wars Story, Han is tossed into a cage with "the beast" and the Imperial guards mention that he may be hungry, implying that Han might become the beast's next meal. Of course, the two forge a quick bond and help each other break out of their cell, but the question lingers like the scent of dead porg frying over an open fire: were those guards just messing around to scare Han, or had Chewie previously tucked a napkin into his bandolier and polished off some human meat in front of them?

Today, Lucasfilm released the official novelization of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was written by Mur Lafferty, and the author answered the question once and for all: no, Chewie doesn't eat people. Here's a quick description of the scene in question from the folks at Nerdist, who have read the new book:

The novel details how the guards threw the imprisoned Chewbacca scraps of meat every few days to keep him sustained, but he'd overheard them talking about bringing him a living snack. "He hadn't gotten that hungry. Not yet," the text explains.

Aha! So while Chewie had not polished off a human meal at that point on the timeline, it doesn't specifically say that he doesn't eat a human at any point later on in the Star Wars saga. What was he doing in that long gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens? There could be an entire new novel coming out soon about the time Chewie set up a side business as the proprietor of a chain of all-you-can-eat human buffet restaurants in that thirty year time span. And you know that as an owner of a chain like that, he had to have at least tasted some of his product. It's simple quality control! So until a piece of canonical text tells me that Chewie has never eaten a human in his entire life, I'm going to believe it's still possible. Seems like a good use of my brain power.