What we know about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

From the moment he walked on screen in The Force Awakens, some Star Wars fans felt like they already had a handle on Kylo Ren: he was obviously a good guy.

Or at least, he was going to wind up that way by the end of the trilogy. The original trilogy ended with Darth Vader’s redemption, so logically, Kylo Ren’s story would end that way, too.

In a way, Star Wars has ended again. But it’s never really going to end. The “finality” of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a joke; this film wasn’t even the last Star Wars adventure many fans saw in 2019, since The Mandalorian’s season finale trailed the movie’s release by a week. But Skywalker does wrap up the trilogy of new movies that were first announced when Disney bought Lucasfilm back in 2012. No further numbered “episode” movies that add onto George Lucas’ original nine-film arc are expected to materialize in the foreseeable future. This puts Star Wars in the unusual position of having drawn to a close three separate times, with three separate trilogies.

Plenty of franchises have promised an ending, then continued anyway. But even at its most cynical, Star Wars isn’t exactly Friday the 13th in the 1980s, advertising a final installment, then releasing another sequel a year later. Though Star Wars has had multiple TV and movie spin-offs, with more on the way, the core of the series is those three trilogies, each separated by a decade or more, all of which were intended to tie up loose ends in their respective third installments: 1983’s Return of the Jedi, 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, and now The Rise of Skywalker. Few film sagas get this many cracks at designing a satisfying ending.

Everybody and their mom is pouring over fan theories about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker this holiday season. But in that frenzy for information, eager fans have accidentally provoked the debunking of a much, much older fan theory thought to have been canon.

It all has to do with a single scene in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and two panels from Darth Vader #25, the finale of Charles Soule and Giuseppe Camuncoli’s run on the Marvel comics title.

Rise of Skywalker may be Naomi Ackie’s first big screen Star Wars role, but it’s not her first time playing in the Star Wars universe. Like many people her age, Ackie grew up dueling with lightsabers on playgrounds, the saga part of a bigger, shared imagination that she is now literally stepping into as one of the stars of the hugely anticipated finale, Episode IX.

Ackie brings a fresh face to the Star Wars universe and to screens in general. It was only a few years ago that she launched her acting career, appearing in Idris Elba’s directorial debut, Yardie, and on British television series like the dark comedy The End of the F***ing World.

The Rise of Skywalker touted a marquee cast: Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega returning as the core team. Billy Dee Williams back as Lando Calrissian. Carrie Fisher resuming her regal role as General Leia Organa thanks to the magic of Star Wars deleted scenes. Keri Russell, a J.J. Abrams favorite since the Felicity days, under a Boba Fett-like mask to play Zorii Bliss. The list goes on — and on and on and on.

Star Wars is the kind of property where name actors don’t mind filling small but important roles. Take Lord of the Rings and Lost star Dominic Monaghan, who shows up as a Resistance fighter who kinda sorta knows how the Emperor came back to life. Then there are the straight cameos: In Rise, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and longtime franchise composer John Williams both pop up in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them moments, just because.

One of the most important steps along the road for any Jedi is creating their own lightsaber, and in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, our hero Rey finally gets that chance. This is the first time in the Star Wars films that we’ve seen a character construct their own lightsaber, rather than doing it between sequels, so it’s fitting that Rey’s lightsaber has a particularly rare feature. But just like everything Jedi-related, even this rarity is steeped in Jedi history.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.]

The story of Luke Skywalker — how he struggles with fear and anger, grows up and into himself, and finally takes the reins of his own destiny — is intimately known by Star Wars fans. The hope was that the sequel trilogy, and the final turns in The Rise of Skywalker, would give the same depth to Rey, a character crafted to be his successor both as a Jedi and as the lead of a genre-defining blockbuster franchise.

Fans have focused with laserlike precision on the question of who Rey’s parents are, a focus that raged on undaunted by the answers provided in The Last Jedi. Now that The Rise of Skywalker is here, we can finally look at Rey’s journey in its entirety, and see how its final installment definitively answers the question The Force Awakens proposed: Do Rey’s parents matter? And what was the story of Rey about in the end?

Whether you loved or hated Rogue One, there’s no denying that the digitally recreated Peter Cushing was a shock. Digitally de-aging Carrie Fisher for a Leia cameo at the movie’s end was one thing; digitally bringing a person back from the dead crossed a threshold.

Following Carrie Fisher’s death in 2016, a year before the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the question of how to handle Leia’s unfinished storyline became a particularly concerning one, with the uncanny images of Rogue One still on fans’ minds. Fisher had finished shooting her scenes for The Last Jedi, but hadn’t completed some dialogue re-recording in post-production, which meant that director Rian Johnson had to stitch her previously recorded lines together. A single scene — that of Leia flying through space — was created digitally; the rest was all the real Fisher. So where did that leave Leia’s arc for The Rise of Skywalker?

“The dead speak!” begins the opening crawl of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. “The dead” is Emperor Palpatine, who has begun broadcasting across the galaxy, puzzling everyone who was pretty sure he didn’t survive his fall in Return of the Jedi. How did he come back to life? J.J. Abrams’ second sequel offers few answers, allowing years of Star Wars storytelling do the heavy lifting (if you know where to find it).

[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.]

George Lucas has not made a Star Wars movie since Revenge of the Sith, but that hasn’t stopped him from imagining where his franchise might have gone. As long as there’s been a Star Wars series, Lucas has talked openly, even after selling Lucasfilm to Disney, about how his version would have wrapped up. The story of the Skywalker Saga, which will end in just a few weeks with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, has been in the planning for the better part of 50 years, and for most of those, the only person that could see the whole picture was George Lucas.

According to Mark Hamill, the first he heard of a proposed sequel trilogy was all the way back in 1976, on the set of the first Star Wars. Sitting in the desert between takes, Lucas told him that he planned 12 movies in this series, and that they’d film Episode 9 somewhere in 2011, when Hamill was the right age. And since then, it seems, Lucas never stopped planning those sequels. The filmmaker has kept the details of his future films under wraps over the years, but in 2012, when Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney, he finally started to open up about what Star Wars would have looked like if he remained at the helm. Here’s what could have been.

For nearly half a century, the Star Wars saga has captured the hearts and minds of audiences. Now, with The Rise of Skywalker, the ninth episode in the Skywalker Saga, heading to theaters, the time has come to close the book on Star Wars as most people know it. But how do you say goodbye to something that will never end?

Chris Terrio, who in 2013 took home an Academy Award for his script for Argo, then went on to help craft Zack Snyder’s vision for Justice League, was hand-selected by J.J. Abrams to work on the final chapter. The task was wondrous but daunting: The Rise of Skywalker had to deliver a story greater than any individual’s imagination, while also leaving room for the galaxy to continue on in some capacity. A new set of Star Wars films is set to begin in 2022.

The final trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is here. And while writer-director J.J. Abrams loves to shroud his blockbusters in secrecy, the 2:20 spot gives eagle-eyed fans plenty to chew on. The Emperor appears to be back. The Reylo fans have enough fodder for 60 days of nonstop shipping. There are space horses!

And that’s just on the surface. After combing through the frames, here are the Star Wars Easter eggs, references, and potential plot beacons we picked up from the new trailer. If you’re going in clean-ish, then beware of speculation and possible spoilerage.

If you really, really want to see the ninth mainline Star Wars film before everyone else, you’re in luck. AMC Theaters is offering a Star Wars marathon, showing all eight films before Rise of Skywalker, which means you can see Episode 9 a full HOUR before everyone else. That’s right, baby, you’ll be able to see just what happens to Rey, Finn, Poe, and the evil guy a full hour before the public.

The full marathon starts on Dec. 18 and will last 27 hours and 21 minutes. Relive Luke’s shapeless poncho, Anakin’s boy band hair, and Lando Calrissian’s ‘stache. See Jar Jar Binks, the Ewoks, and Chewbacca on the big screen! Return to iconic lines such as “No, I am your father” and “I love you/I know” and “Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.”

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?

No one would blame you if you didn’t. Maybe you missed the tale in Revenge of the Sith because you were reeling from the bubble ballet visuals or the blue George Lucas cameo, but the scene describing the Sith Lord’s fate is worth revisiting in light of the Emperor Palpatine’s involvement in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

After debuting at D23 this weekend, a new featurette for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has dropped online.

As promised, the big shock in the footage is the reveal of Rey (Daisy Ridley) cloaked in a dark robe, holding two red lightsabers that snap into a Darth Maul-esque double-bladed configuration. It’s tempting to compare her wardrobe change with that of Luke (Mark Hamill) in Return of the Jedi, in which the character’s new all-black wardrobe helped symbolize how perilously close he was to succumbing to the Sith emotions of fear and hatred, but Luke never wielded Sith lightsabers the way Rey does here.

Disney and Lucasfilm unveiled a new featurette for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker at D23, and it sheds some light on the conflict of the film and how Emperor Palpatine’s presence comes into play. The featurette has yet to land online, but here’s a quick summary:

Starting with a loving retrospective on the original and prequel trilogies, the featurette shows some of the previously seen The Rise of the Skywalker footage, along with new scenes: glimpses of Naomi Ackie’s character flying with Finn, followed by more lightsaber battles. Before the end, Rey and Kylo battle it out on wreckage drifting on the ocean planet we saw in the first Rise of Skywalker trailer, with Darth Vader’s breathing ominously in the background.

There’s a striking image sitting at the end of the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker teaser trailer: The Death Star, broken and defeated, rising out of an ocean. But what’s the Death Star doing there? We might be able to figure that out, thanks to the long, convoluted false starts that eventually became The Force Awakens.

At least as far back as May 2011, George Lucas was thinking about retiring. In June 2012, he hired Kathleen Kennedy, a seven-time Academy Award-nominated producer and executive, as co-chair of Lucasfilm. They started to get Lucasfilm’s house in order.

The first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was unveiled at Star Wars Celebration on Friday and, while it’s filled with reveals and juicy hints about what may be coming, it left us with more questions than answers.

Here are just a few of the things we’re left wondering about after watching the trailer a few times.

The Star Wars Celebration panel for Episode IX blessed us with many things. In addition to the long-awaited title (Rise of Skywalker) and the much-anticipated teaser, we got first looks at Billy Dee Williams reprising the role of Lando, tons of StormPilot teasing, and sneak peeks at concept art and new characters.

And, of course, a new Star Wars film means new creatures — aliens and droids alike. Director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilms President Kathleen Kennedy showed a slideshow chock full of creatures. They’re all aliens never before seen in a Star Wars film.

Today, there was only one bright center of the universe, and it was in Chicago, as Lucasfilm debuted the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (as Episode IX is now officially titled), giving us our first look at the last numbered Star Wars movie for what might be quite some time.

When we last left our heroes — Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, and the rest of the Rebels — they were outmatched, outnumbered, and nearly without hope. Here’s the biggest moments from our first look at Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and everything we can glean about the epic finish to the Skywalker Saga.

Ian McDiarmid returns to Star Wars as the sinister Emperor Palpatine for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The actor and the character were the surprise reveal at the end of the teaser trailer shown to conclude today’s panel at Star Wars Celebration in Chicago.

The trailer, which depicts a showdown between Rey and Kylo Ren, ends with Episode IX’s full title, and then the evil, contemptuous chortle for which McDiarmid has become known since 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy have debuted the first concept art from, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The art for Episode IX first shown off during the film’s official panel at Star Wars Celebration 2019.

Throughout the panel, the guests, which included Abrams himself and some of the main cast, kept mostly quiet about the plot of the movie. But Abrams did reveal a single piece of concept art from early on in the film, and teased that The Rise of Skywalker would be a movie about the whole resistance crew getting together to go on some kind of mission.

The first trailer for Star Wars: Episode IX — which we now know is titled Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — is here. Director J.J. Abrams, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and the cast of the final film in the Skywalker saga unveiled the trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker during a panel at Star Wars Celebration on Friday.

Episode IX will pick up years after the events of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and the remaining rebels of the Resistance have not only survived the onslaught from the evil First Order, but have reinforced their ranks. They’ll face Kylo Ren’s First Order forces, which are intent on wiping them out. They may also face an old foe, based on the new teaser, which shows wreckage from the Death Star and the ominous laugh of Emperor Palpatine.