Abrams, and Kathleen Kennedy on Ending the Skywalker Saga RELATED: 'The Rise of Skywalker' Cast, J.J. But others blame this “creative hand-off” for perceived problems with the sequel trilogy, and claim that it would have been better had Abrams and/or Lucasfilm planned out the three-movie arc from the very beginning. I like that The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi feel like distinct films, each following themes and threads that these two different filmmakers sparked to. Personally, I enjoyed the creative hand-off between Abrams and Johnson. The resulting film, The Rise of Skywalker, was similarly divisive, as Abrams brought the story back around to some ideas he had percolating while making The Force Awakens – specifically owing to Rey’s parentage. He had to finish a story he started, but one that had taken some alternate routes in its middle chapter – routes that Abrams wouldn’t have necessarily gone down. So when Abrams signed on to take over Episode IX after Trevorrow left the project, he had yet another unenviable task – albeit a completely different one. The Last Jedi was a critical success, but was divisive among some diehard fans owing to some of these decisions to veer left when it looked like Abrams was plotting a course to the right. In Johnson’s case, that meant following certain threads that Abrams built (like Rey’s confrontation with Luke Skywalker) and dropping others (like Snoke). The idea being that each director would build on what the previous filmmaker had crafted, leading to a sort of creative hand-off from one director to the next. Abrams – co-writing the script with Lawrence Kasdan after Michael Arndt wrote the initial drafts – pulled it off, not only providing a satisfying conclusion to Han Solo’s arc, but also making the world fall in love with Rey, Finn, Poe, BB-8, etc.Īs Abrams was working on The Force Awakens, Lucasfilm wanted to get the next two films in the sequel trilogy off the ground and thus hired Rian Johnson to write and direct Episode VIII and Colin Trevorrow to co-write and direct Episode IX. Indeed, The Force Awakens had the unenviable task of introducing brand new characters that fans would want to follow while also servicing fans’ desires to see old favorites back on the screen.
It took some convincing on then-new Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy’s part to get Abrams to agree to sign on, and in doing so Abrams said at the time he was excited about the idea of creating a foundation from the ground-up, from which other stories might grow. When he was first approached about tackling Episode VII, he turned it down. Abrams was never supposed to direct more than one film in the Star Wars franchise.
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