Even now that the movie has been out in the open for months and is available on home video, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is still a hot topic of debate among fans of the franchise. Of course, when the dust has settled, people may ultimately look back on the conclusion to the Skywalker Saga much more favorably, but that didn’t really happen for the Prequel Trilogy.
That being said, it didn’t take long for The Last Jedi to get reappraised, with the thanks pointed in Rian Johnson’s direction even trending on Twitter at one point when The Rise of Skywalker was still in theaters facing both barrels. And that’s despite the fact that the eighth installment caused an online firestorm when it was originally released and faced the biggest backlash of any Star Wars project in history.
J.J. Abrams’ return to the franchise certainly has many detractors, but there are plenty of other folks that enjoyed the movie and paid little mind to the accusations of heavy-handed fan service and retconning so much throughout the story that The Last Jedi was made virtually redundant as a result.
One person who clearly didn’t enjoy The Rise of Skywalker though is journalist and author Dana Schwartz, who was recently hired as a staff writer on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s She-Hulk show for Disney Plus. Schwartz made a pretty unfavorable comparison between the latest Star Wars movie and the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic in a now-deleted tweet, but because nothing ever really gets deleted from the internet, you can still read her comments below.
“COVID-19 is going to be like Rise of Skywalker. It’s a nightmare. It’s going to be a struggle. But then we’re going to get to come out the other side and pretend it never happened.”
Even if you didn’t enjoy the movie, that’s an incredibly tasteless and tone-deaf opinion to post on social media for all to see. The Coronavirus pandemic has impacted every aspect of life across the world and tens of thousands of people have died as a result, and it’ll be interesting to see if Schwartz faces any repercussions from her bosses at the notoriously family-friendly Disney after comparing a global crisis to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.