Imagine Entertainment founder Ron Howard was in Cannes on Friday to advance a plan with marketers to create branded entertainment.

He said investment company Raine Group, run by Joe Ravitch and Jeff Sine, had helped the firm broaden its business plan beyond making movies and TV series.

“We have occasionally done some branded-content business, but we haven’t done it as a business,” Howard said.

Howard, of course, was just tapped to be director of the latest installment in the endless “Star Wars” franchise, the as-yet-unnamed Han Solo project.

Sources told On the Money that Howard had a full slate of meetings in Cannes to get to know the advertising community and people who run successful Web businesses like Refinery29.

Howard is currently working on Season 2 of “Mars” for National Geographic, chronicling NASA’s big push to reach the Red planet.

“It was fueled by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner,” he said. The NASA project got a lot of support from the Obama administration.