Last week, an account called “Remake The Last Jedi” appeared on Twitter, soliciting funds for a remake of The Last Jedi without any vaguely defined “poor storytelling” or “pointless diversions” in it. The person or people behind the campaign are “raising money” for the project on their website, by which we mean collecting names, email addresses, and pledge amounts. No actual card numbers. Because FANS would never make up email addresses to fuck with other FANS, thank you very much Rian Johnson:
As of this writing, that fund has collected $33,328,740 very real dollars, which will absolutely be collected at some indeterminate point. (Hell, we chipped in “$10,000".) Whoever’s running the Twitter account also claims to have a team of producers ready to fund all $200 million of this thing, which, sure.
All that being said, we will give this adorably naive idea this: It’s relatively harmless compared to other anti-Last Jedi campaigns we’ve seen. The creators claim that they like the characters of Rey and Finn as they were introduced in The Force Awakens, they just thought they were “one dimensional” and “boring” in The Last Jedi. They also say that they even have a heroic, “badass” part for Kelly Marie Tran—who was driven from Instagram earlier this month by abusive, bigoted “fans”—in their remake. (Carrie Fisher will also be there, somehow.) Instead, their ire is directed at The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson, who responded on Twitter:
But what about the fact that Disney and Lucasfilm, you know, own the rights to these characters, and could sue anyone who made an unauthorized Star Wars movie into the ground long before it was ever completed, let alone opened in the theaters in which the campaign seems so confident it’ll play? From what we can tell, the Dread Pirate Kennedy and her minions will have no choice but to approve the script, cobbled together from a bunch of emails, once they behold the dazzling adequacy of its creation:
“Forgive us, we were jealous of your superior Star Wars knowledge and the purity of your fandom, which was burned out of our blackened hearts long ago,” they will wail, dropping to their knees in awe. “Truly, creativity is best achieved by random people with no prior experience dropping scene suggestions into a gmail inbox. We are humbled by your wisdom, and grateful to have been steered back onto the path of righteousness by this script, which ends with ‘Luke Skywalker, who is young again somehow, flies in on his X-wing and shoots all the bad guys while making ‘pew pew pew’ noises.”
We’ll let Seth Rogen ask the rest:
Bless their hearts.