May the 4th – Star Wars Day – is just around the corner and to mark the occasion, Disney is releasing The Rise of Skywalker on Disney+ to stream for all subscribers. This will mean that for the first time ever, the entire Star Wars movie collection is available to watch in one place. This includes the full prequel, original and sequel trilogies, as well as Rogue One and Solo.
To celebrate, Disney+ released a new poster to showcase the entire Skywalker Saga. This is a collage of characters from across the entire franchise, with everyone from Darth Maul, General Grievous, Lando Calrissian, Poe Dameron and BB-8 all in one place. But fans have a big question: where’s Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker?
Fans of Anakin were already annoyed that a cameo in The Rise of Skywalker was reportedly left on the cutting room floor. On top of that, they weren’t happy when he was left off a recent Revenge of the Sith poster. But now, they’re upset all over again and here’s a sample of how it’s going down:
They want to pretend he doesn’t exist
— adam (@DDTMWF) May 1, 2020
I was saying the same thing anakin should have been where Luke’s face is,luke should have been front and center with palpy in place of Rey
— Josh Smith (@smitty0982) May 2, 2020
A few bad lines?
— Tech Lantern (@TL13Butter) May 2, 2020
Y’all hate Hayden that bad huh
— albreazy (@albreazy) May 1, 2020
Hoo lawdy I'm not big on the prequels but leaving out Anakin after spending decades establishing him as a separate entity from Vader? That's how you get ratios.
— justinpie.bsky.social (@justinpie) May 1, 2020
ahem… youre missing someone https://t.co/3s3QklejTH
— 𓂆 tala (@hoyeonsjungs) May 1, 2020
no anakin anywhere in sight…. um ok
— andrea | august era (@foIkloreaugust) May 1, 2020
The obvious response to all this is that Anakin Skywalker is one of the biggest presences on this poster: he’s Darth Vader. And I imagine that whoever was designing this decided that it’s best to only have one version of each character present. After all, let’s face it, you can’t have a Skywalker Saga poster without Vader and Christensen’s pre-Dark Side Anakin just isn’t iconic enough. Adam Driver has apparently suffered the same fate, as we only see the masked Kylo Ren on the poster.
Even leaving that aside, it’s understandable that Disney didn’t want to put Christensen front and center as he’s rightly considered one of the worst things about the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. Before you pick up those pitchforks, I’m sure he’s a perfectly lovely person and I know that George Lucas’ dialogue and direction wasn’t great, but at the end of the day? He sucked.