Disney is extremely confident in Rian Johnson’s vision for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and critics praised the movie. However, the initial fan response has been mixed, with the movie currently holding a 56 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
In fact, it is the lowest rated audience scored of all Star Wars movies. Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is 33 percent lower than the film’s Tomato-meter score and, thus, the biggest divide between critics and audiences for a Star Wars film. As if that wasn’t low enough, the audience score continues to plunge and is now at an astonishing 56 percent, thereby garnering the film the lowest Rotten Tomatoes audience score in Star Wars history.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly after a screening of The Last Jedi, the movie’s director, RianJohnson, explained that his movie’s main point: Rey’s parents are not important, Snoke is dead and Luke is so tired he disappeared. Now, JJ Abrams has to complete the story in the next movie.
“I can’t speak to what they’re going to do. And there’s always, in these movies, a question of ‘a certain point of view,’…But for me, in that moment, Kylo believes it’s the truth. I don’t think he’s purely playing chess. I think that’s what he saw when they touched fingers and that’s what he believes. And when he tells her that in that moment, she believes it.”
So what is next? Thanks to Disney’s Laughing Place, Abrams has reportedly pitched Disney’s CEO Bob Iger and Lucas film in the story. Details outside of the meeting have not been released.
Abrams very successfully relaunched the franchise in 2015 with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and, after taking a little break, he was courted back by Lucasfilm for Star Wars 9. This happened after Jurassic World director, Colin Trevorrow, left the project over creative differences. The draft of the script he and Derek Connolly were working was scrapped. So Abrams, along with Chris Terri from Justice League, are looking for a way to wrap up the trilogy. At the stage, not much as been said, but Abrams had this to say in an interview with the BBC earlier this year.
“Well, it’s certainly something that I’m aware of now working on Episode IX, coming back into this world after having done Episode VII. I feel like we need to approach this with the same excitement that we had when we were kids, loving what these movies were. And at the same time, we have to take them places that they haven’t gone, and that’s sort of our responsibility. It’s a strange thing, Michael’s worked on things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek and Star Wars, and these are the things of dreams. Yet we can’t just revel in that; we have to go elsewhere.”
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