Colin Trevorrow confirms that a lot of that leaked Episode IX stuff was from his Duel Of The Fates
The dead spoke (!) last week, when a long set of details, purportedly taken from Colin Trevorrow’s unused script for Star Wars: Episode IX, suddenly appeared online—and were, by many space movie fans’ reckoning, superior to the version we ultimately got. (The Baby Yoda always being greener on the other side of the Force, as they say.) (They don’t actually say that.) Now, Trevorrow—who’s always spoken sparingly of his removal from the project back in 2017, reportedly over conflicts about that same script—has piped up on Twitter to confirm that at least some of that material was accurate to his version, most notably a set of concept art that accompanied the leak:
Among other things, Trevorrow confirmed that his version of Episode IX would have been titled Duel Of The Fates, in reference to the song that plays during the climactic duel of The Phantom Menace. Meanwhile, all of the other images—which also depict what looks to be some version of “Dark Rey,” and an image of Leia talking to BB-8 that mirrors the famous shot of her kneeling in front of R2-D2 in the original Star Wars—lines up with what the leaked rundown revealed about Fates. The most notable parallel is the shot of Kylo Ren facing off against a “phantom Vader,” which would have, according to the leaked documents, been a key element in this total failure to find redemption (or smooches) by the movie’s end.
Trevorrow did quibble with one point, though: Despite R2 clearly having been dinged up in one of the paintings, the director denied that he had any intention of killing the Good Droid off. “I’d never kill R2,” Trevorrow wrote. “He just took a bad hit. Happens to all of us.” Which is probably about as close as we’re ever going to get to a public “Boy, getting fired from that movie fucking sucked, huh?” from the Jurassic World 3 director.