Yes, we’ve heard it all before — “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” is going to alter/expand on some of the choices made by director Rian Johnson in ‘The Last Jedi.’ But does this mean that incoming filmmaker JJ Abrams is wiping the slate clean? Or perhaps the stories are true that Lucasfilm is happy with ‘The Last Jedi’ and is keeping what Johnson did as complete canon. Well, in a new interview with Empire, Abrams makes it seem like it’s a mixture of both, with ‘The Last Jedi’ changing how ‘Rise of Skywalker’ tells its story but in an overall beneficial way.
Abrams hasn’t shied away from admitting that Rian Johnson made choices in ‘The Last Jedi’ that the filmmaker didn’t intend on happening when he finished ‘The Force Awakens.’ And though you might assume that means Abrams is going back to “fix” everything, he said that those decisions made in ‘The Last Jedi’ ended up working out for the best.
“Even some of the things that happened in ‘Episode VIII’ that at the time I thought, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting choice I would not have made,’ weirdly ended up being beneficial for this film,” Abrams revealed. “I feel like we’re doing the best we can to sort of excavate what is inevitable.”
He continued, “Some of the things I like the most wouldn’t have happened if I had to make all those decisions back when we were doing ‘VII.’ Certain things that happened in Rian’s film, and certainly all the films that preceded ‘VII,’ were all inspiration for the cocktail that became ‘Rise Of Skywalker.’”
Long story short, it appears that Abrams is a fan of the old saying, “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.” Of course, there are plenty of folks that absolutely adore Johnson’s ‘The Last Jedi’ that will be pleased to know that not everything that happened in that film will be retconned in ‘Rise of Skywalker.’ But for those hoping that Abrams would pretend ‘Last Jedi’ didn’t exist, it appears that you may be in for a rude awakening, even though the director says that it all worked out in the end.
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We’ll see what type of lemonade Abrams made when “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” arrives in theaters on December 20.