Leaked Rise of Skywalker art hints at what might have been

An art book detailing the making of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s has concept paintings drawn from an early version of the film. The scenes are rumored to be from an early script draft written by Colin Trevorrow.

The book, Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, is due to release on March 31. A fan on Twitter posted images of several of its pages on Thursday. Many of the concepts seem to reference ideas from Trevorrow’s script, which leaked out earlier in the week and whose details have since been independently verified by several outlets.

Two of the pages show Kylo Ren, evidently on Mustafar, discovering a Sith Holocron that Palpatine had left for Vader. Another tweet shows Kylo Ren standing before a hideous, multiple-armed monster on another world; apparently this is Tor Valum, the Sith master who trained Palpatine and will train Ren.

Other pages show concept art that seems to directly reference events actually shown in The Rise of Skywalker, such as Rey and Kylo Ren’s duel amongst the Death Star debris on the churning seas of Exegol.

Trevorrow and Derek Connolly were both given writing credits for The Rise of Skywalker even though their script was not used. Trevorrow is best known for writing Jurassic World, but Lucasfilm executive producer Kathleen Kennedy was said to be unhappy with what he turned in back in 2018. An official statement at the time said only that Trevorrow/Connolly and Lucasfilm had mutually agreed to go their separate ways.

Update: With the images igniting more conversation about his version of the script, Colin Trevorrow took to Twitter to suggest that none of the images that appear in the upcoming Art of The Rise of Skywalker book are based on his draft of the film, though he suggests many of the artists who produced the work also worked on his version of the film. “Credit where credit is due,” he insisted.