Star Wars: The Last Jedi might have been a major critical and commercial success for Lucasfilm, however, the sequel to Star Wars: The Force Awakens quickly became a divisive entry in the Star Wars franchise with a minor but very vocal group of fans expressing outrage over the film's attempts at subverting fan expectations and its supposed misuse of legacy characters.
Others, however, couldn't help praise the film for adding depth to the mystery of the Force and for taking the Star Wars franchise to a new direction.
Now, as Star Wars: Episode IX slowly approaches its release date, fans can't help but wonder how it's going to take off after The Last Jedi.
Speaking in an interview with the Fast Company,The Force Awakens and Episode IX director JJ Abrams talks about what it's like to take on a film after Rian Johnson's controversial entry. Though Episode IX comes with its challenges, Abrams doesn't look at choices The Last Jedi as something that needed to be fixed in his film. Instead, he looks at Episode IX as part of a legacy.
"I had some gut instincts about where the story would have gone. But without getting in the weeds on episode eight, that was a story that Rian wrote and was telling based on seven before we met. So he was taking the thing in another direction," the director explained.
"So we also had to respond to Episode VIII. So our movie was not just following what we had started, it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies," Abrams went on, "While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run was an enormous challenge."
It's definitely interesting how Abrams mentions "big picture things" and "larger ideas" that were all "conceived decades ago." Could Abrams be trying to bring in new threads to Episode IX or could he be planning to finish the threads that he left in The Force Awakens like the Knights of Ren?
Let's wait and see.
Star Wars: Episode IX premieres December 20, 2019.
Read: Star Wars: Episode IX Rumored To Include A Scene Between Anakin And Rey 'Like A Horror Movie'