The Skywalker Saga came to its conclusion not with a bang, but a rather underwhelming whimper.
At least, that’s the critical consensus on Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, a movie shackled by great expectations and a desire to pay tribute to everything that came before. Except for The Last Jedi, that is.
Yes, Episode IX certainly has its fair share of issues, and the controversy surrounding it is only getting worse after reports have begun to emerge on Twitter, Reddit and various other social media platforms that speak of a director’s cut of Rise that we’ll never see. One which might’ve pleased the fans a lot more. And if what we’re hearing is correct, it seems that J.J. Abrams isn’t too happy with Lucasfilm for what they did to his movie.
As mentioned above, whispers of an Abrams cut of the Sequel Trilogy-closer have begun to surface and speaking to our own sources, We Got This Covered can confirm that a lot of the online chatter is correct and the studio did indeed force J.J. to cut much of his vision out of The Rise of Skywalker. Among other things, he wanted to provide more of an explanation for Palpatine’s return, intended for Rose to have more screen time and even had in the flesh cameos planned for several of those voices we hear near the end of the movie speaking to Rey.
But alas, Kathleen Kennedy, and also George Lucas to some extent, stepped in and made him cut a lot of this stuff out and according to our sources – who also told us [SPOILERS] would be revealed as a traitor in the movie and that Rey is Palpatine’s [SPOILERS], not to mention that [SPOILERS] would end up training Rey, all of which ended up being true – Abrams isn’t happy with them and not pleased with the final cut of the pic.
What remains a bit unclear is how much of this stuff was shot and removed in the end and how much was left in the script and never went before cameras, but the sense we’re getting is that J.J. Abrams’ version of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is very different from what we saw in theaters. Whether it would’ve been any better than what we got, perhaps we’ll never know, but with fans already taking to Twitter to demand that Lucasfilm release the Abrams cut, it’ll certainly be interesting to see how this all develops from here.
