I'm going to break down this rumored "info dump" here into the thread and add my analysis on it. Take it. Leave it. While some of this is fact checking, much of this is just an opinion. (Warning: This is a super long post... two posts actually. I was bored at work.
) The quoted portion was found in the
saltierthancrait subreddit:
Since shortly after release weekend, I’ve been corresponding with someone who worked closely on the production of TROS and works for one of the major companies I cannot disclose here. I have verified the source to my satisfaction. To protect the source, I am rewording what we spoke about over the last two weeks and am submitting it to you in bullet point format I have written based on what they told me. The TLDR is that they were upset with the final product of TROS and wanted to share their perspective on how it went down and where it went wrong.
I always find it convenient that some random user is able to make contact with some insider. They vet the info to their satisfaction, but that doesn't mean a lot. Also, as suggested upthread, the idea of rewording adds an additional level of "telephone" to the equation. It ultimately warps the facts a little bit more.
The leakers for TROS had an agenda and are tied to Disney directly. My source confessed that they have an agenda as well in that they struggle with ignoring what’s been happening to someone who they think doesn’t deserve it.
A lot was leaked on TFA as well, while TLJ was for the most part leak-free. The more likely explanation is that there is a leak within Bad Robot.
JJ always treated everyone on and offset with respect so my source’s agenda is that what Disney has done to JJ and how much they screwed him over should be something people are at least aware of, whether you like him as a filmmaker or not.
JJ seems a consummate gentleman and professional. There is no doubt in my mind that he treated people with respect.
Disney was one of the studios who were in that Bad Robot bidding war last year. Disney never had much interest in BR as a company but they did in JJ because they saw WB (who JJ went with in the end) as a major threat.
That Disney was a bidder in obtaining Bad Robot, if I recall correctly, was known at the time that BR was looking into other options. But to add to this, I highly doubt that Disney wouldn't have had an interest in Bad Robot. Collaboration between the two led to two of ABC's biggest genre hits:
Alias and
Lost. Not to mention the fact that they produced
The Force Awakens together. The relationship was golden. While I can imagine perhaps there was some creative strife during
The Rise of Skywalker, I also imagine that WB offered Bad Robot something they couldn't refuse.
JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back like Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Star Wars. WB is struggling with DC and aside from Wonder Woman, DC is still seen as a bit of a joke in its current state by the GA.
A joke? I don't know about that. Underperformed and underwhelming? Sure.
WB wants Abrams for some DC projects. My source said that this generation’s Star Wars is the MCU, and Marvel’s biggest threat is a well operational DC. They want to keep DC in the limbo that they’re in right now. Abrams jumpstarting that franchise with something like a successful, audience-pleasing Superman movie makes them nervous. Their goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders.
Looking at Abrams' Wikipedia page, he currently has five TV projects that have yet to premiere:
Lisey's Story,
Little Voice and
My Glory Was I Had Such Friends for Apple TV+ and
Lovecraft Country and
Contraband for HBO. HBO is owned by WB and the two later are likely a part of that deal. Now, that does not necessarily suggest that the Warner deal doesn't have anything to do DC, and there are
rumors of both Green Lantern and Superman being offered to him, nothing official is out there. And I would think after doing some really big genre stuff, maybe JJ would like to do something else for awhile.
My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: “The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on”.
Okay. But, there was a screening for the cast and crew a week or so before the premiere. If the source was that embedded and close to Abrams, wouldn't you think they would have gone to that screening? That would have come out a little earlier than it did.
JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before. He’s the director and he wasn’t in the know about what they were doing behind his back.
Now, I understand completely that directors are contractually obligated to do interviews and hype up their films. And admittedly I haven't read/seen all of his interviews, but I've not seen anything to suggest that he was disappointed in this cut of the film. This is where things start getting conspiracy theory-ish.
Apparently, JJ felt threatened over the month leading up to the premiere.
Yup. That's a little conspiratorial.
Rian was never meant to do IX despite some rumors that he was.
I think the idea of Johnson coming back was debunked so, so, so, so,
so long ago.
JJ was brought back by Iger, not KK. Disney insisted on more fan service, less controversy.
Maryann Brandon, editor for
The Rise of Skywalker, and long time Abrams collaborator
suggests in an article from today when asked about fan service: "“Look, sure, it’s fan service, [but] if you didn’t service the fans, it would be, ‘Oh, he didn’t go along with the history of ‘Star Wars’ and what it all means.’” Ultimately to me that reads: You please one group, you're going to piss off another.
JJs original agreement when he signed on was indicating he would have way more creative control than he did on TFA. It became evident this wasn’t the case only a couple of weeks into shooting when the trouble with meddling started.
Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy.
JJ wanted to do some scenes he thought were important but Disney shut it down citing budgetary reasons.
Scenes are cut at various points throughout every film production. Not sure why this is such a huge deal.
May 2019: JJ argued that those scenes were crucial. He had to let go of one of the scenes. The other scene he insisted on was approved at first. He did reshoots and additional photography in July. The new scene was shot at BR in October.
Can we be more specific?
The “ending that will blow your mind” was a part of this. Older actors were included like Hayden, Ewan and Samuel and anyone who wasn’t animated. The force ghosts weren’t meant to be voices because they shot that footage on camera. The actors were in costumes. Rey was supposed to be surrounded by the force ghosts to serve as sort of a barrier between her and the Sith surrounding them.
Let's first of all get all of
Kevin Smith's quote. Context is kinda important:
Kevin Smith said:
There was a scuttlebutt about a set there at Pinewood. A big set that they were like ‘You have to see this, when you see this it will melt your mind.’ I was like ‘What was it?’ They're like ‘Ask J.J.’ And so I asked J.J. I was like, 'They keep telling me I should see the set.' And he goes, 'Don't.' I said 'Why?' He said, 'It's the last shot of the movie.' So I was like, 'Well, now I REALLY want to see it.' He said, 'You don't want to be spoiled. You want to be in a theater when this happens, trust me.' And then other people on the crew were like 'Bro, I wish I hadn't seen it. I'm glad I did, but it will melt your mind.'
Can we remember that Kevin Smith is first and foremost a geek? And he's also someone who's prone to hyperbole. Second, I've not watched his
one-hour review, but one quote from it is:
“I enjoyed the fuck out of myself, I’ve seen it four times. So I got to go deep and analyze stuff, some stuff I didn’t pick up on the first/second and even third viewings, so… Man, I commend J.J. [Abrams] and everybody involved, bringing that ship in for a landing. I know some people are like, ‘fuck you,’ he didn’t do it right for you. He did it right for me. I was fine. I was happy.”
I think good ol' Silent Bob was okay with the movie. So I have every reason to believe that in some form, the scene he saw still exists in the film.
My source thinks but can’t 100% confirm that this is because of China. It’s an office talk of sorts. Some VFX people claimed they got a list of approved shades of blue they could use on the Luke force ghosts. Cutting this out was when the bad blood turned into a nightmare for JJ because the movie he was making was suddenly unrecognizable to him in almost every way.
Star Wars has never done well in China. I would think that Disney would have done the market research on this one. This just doesn't ring true.
My source knows JJ well enough to know that he’s just not the yelling type but apparently in a meeting he yelled something along the lines of “Why don’t you just put ‘directed and written by Lucasfilm’ then?” My source wasn’t present for that exchange but knows some who were.
Ah, so the source is in the inner circle enough to know JJ well, but wasn't invited to the cast/crew screening and only heard about it secondhand from the sources "sources." Got it.
Disney demanded they shoot some scenes that would have things in it for merchandise. “They fly now” is one of them. It’s also JJ’s least favorite scene. At a November screening of a 2:37 cut, he cringed, groaned and laughed when the scene was on.
The merchandise thing might be one of the few things I actually could see happening. But the cringe/groan/laugh seems very specific for someone who is in the inner circle but not really. I dunno. Besides, that dialogue kinda screams JJ.
My source says that JJ was most likely not joking when he said “you’re right” in the interview where they asked him about TROS criticism.
<sigh>
Context, people! Abrams said:
“We knew starting this that any decision we made — a design decision, a musical decision, a narrative decision — would please someone and infuriate someone else. And they’re all right.”
There's no joke there. What he's saying is that you can't please everyone all the time. And with
Star Wars, it seems like you can never please everyone ever.
JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long.
Maybe. But I would think that if they did, Williams would have more than the 135 minutes of music reported by Williams'
brother back in August.
In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long.
Let's go to the videotape! Er, quote, this time from
Chris Terrio:
“I wish that we could have that, but George always said it was nine movies. That was the natural size of the saga, and so, other than a few initial discussions, we never really advanced that conversation. Of course, as a writer, it breaks your heart to leave stuff on the table that you think would have given the story more depth and nuance and to give the characters more to do. Speaking for myself and not on the part of the studio, I do wish there could have been a Part 1 and a Part 2.”
Sounds to me like this was just too big of a story that they broke. They should have simplified this during the writing process. From the get-go, they had to many masters to serve. This was an unenviable task for anyone, closing up 40 years of storytelling and having to serve way too many storylines and characters. Creating new characters was just too much and we got a few of them. Bringing back Palpatine, while apparently an edict from Kennedy, just overdid things, because its something that demands a lot of attention. This was too big of a movie and it sounds like the screenwriter knew that.
Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives”.
This is exactly the kind of conspiratorial language that fans think happen behind the scenes.
Narrator: It wasn't.
They were not on the same page when it came to creative decisions and it became obvious that Disney had an agenda in addition to wanting to please shareholders. Disney could “afford messing up IX for the sake of the bigger picture” when it came to protecting things unrelated to IX.
Oh, goodie, goodie, goodie! An agenda! I mean, are you reading this shit? Disney was okay with a subpar version of one of their biggest moneymakers. I doubt that sincerely.
The cut JJ eventually and hesitantly agreed to in early December was 2:37 minutes long. It wasn’t the cut we saw which he wouldn’t have approved of (and which is 2:22 long). Apart from the force ghosts, there were other crucial and emotional scenes missing. The cut they released looked “chopped and taped back together with weak scotch tape” (JJ's words).
Wait a minute. Now its a cut that "we" approve of. This has been pretty steadily "my source" until this point. Also,
picture lock was done no later than November 25, 2019. THAT MEANS THE FILM IS DONE!
The movie opened with Rey’s training. Her first scene with Rose was shortly after Rey damaged BB-8 during the training. Rose made a silly joke about how Poe is going to kill her for damaging BB-8. There was a moment where Rey took a minute to process what just happened when she saw that vision during training. She looked distressed and worried. The next scene was noise as the Falcon was landing and Rey runs over there. Those two women who kissed at the end were visible in this shot and they were holding hands. One of them ran towards the Falcon as it landed.
Seems like a rather superfluous scene. If it even existed. I'd have cut it too.
Kylo on Mustafar scene was 2 mins longer. There was a moment where Kylo seemed a bit dizzy and his vision was shown as blurry for a second. Almost as if time half-stopped while everyone in the background was slow-mo fighting. Kylo hears Vader's breathing, then shakes his head and time goes back to moving at a normal pace and he jumps right back into the battle (the scene from the trailer where he knocks that guy down which did end up in the movie later).
I can't see that adding two minutes to the scene. Maybe ten seconds. If it existed, probably should have stayed. Apparently though, there is some deleted stuff with Pryde and Hux from the
opening of the film. But again, this is something that was reported a little while ago, so no real new news here.
They cut some of the scenes from the lightspeed skipping segment. Some of the planets that were cut were Kashyyyk, Naboo, and Kamino.
The lightspeed skipping went on a little too long as it was. If they really did cut other planets, cool by me. It is interesting that all of these seem to be prequel planets though.
The scene where the tie fighters are chasing them through the iceberg - those corridors were inspired by a video game JJ used to play in the 90s called Rebel Assault 2 (the third level in the game with the tunnels on Endor specifically).
I thought that looked familiar! (I have no idea what this has to do with anything and it honestly while JJ could have come up with this idea, it also could have reminded the writer of these ramblings, er, conspiracy theories, er leaks, of it too.)
Jannah was confirmed to be Lando’s daughter.
Yeah, that was
hinted at by the visual dictionary and apparently will be in the novel. New news? Nope.
Rey not only healed Kylo's face scar but she killed Kylo when she healed Ben. Kylo ceased to exist when Rey healed him. My source mentioned that some people assume it was Han Solo who healed him but that isn’t true and that wasn't Han Solo. That was Leia using her own memories as well as Ben's to create a physical manifestation of his own thoughts to nudge him towards what he needed to do. That was her own way of communicating that with him. And it wasn't possible without her dying in the process. She made the ultimate sacrifice for her son and this flew over people's heads with the Disney cut.
I picked up on all that in the movie as is.
The late November cut (the last cut JJ approved of) had scenes with Rose and Rey still. JJ wanted to give her a more meaningful arc. Disney felt that that was too risky too. My source mentioned that Chris Terrio said that it was because of the Leia scenes but this is only partially true because she had four other scenes including two with Rey/Daisy that Leia was not in.
Okay, I honestly have no idea if the VFX thing is true or not but I don’t know what Terrio would gain by lying so let’s just go with it. If what the author’s source suggests is true, then perhaps the scenes worked together and removing the Leia bits caused the Rey ones not to work or be too confusing. Just a thought.
Finn wanting to tell Rey something was always meant to be force sensitivity. In the 3 hour cut, it’s explicitly stated. There was a moment when Jannah and he were running on top of that star destroyer and Finn needed to unlock or move something and he force-moved it and acted surprised when it happened. This was replaced with a CGI’d BB-8 fixing whatever he needed to fix on there.
Its not explicit but it’s spelled out enough for me.
(cont.)
