Luke Skywalker Died Because Of Disney’s Poor Planning
The Last Jedi annoyed the Star Wars fandom in many ways, but its chief sin in the eyes of some fans was killing Luke Skywalker. Regardless of exactly how he died, audiences couldn’t help but ask the obvious question: why kill him in the first place? Sadly, in an old interview, director Rian Johnson revealed that he killed Luke Skywalker to make things easier for The Rise of Skywalker writers despite knowing nothing about that film, meaning that this Jedi’s death mostly came down to Disney’s poor planning.
Making Things Easier For The Next Guy
So, what did Rian Johnson say about Luke Skywalker’s death, and why does it have us mad at him all over again? In a previous interview, the director was hit with the obvious question of whether he wrestled with how to kill Luke or if what we saw onscreen was the plan from the beginning.
Johnson admitted to debating the matter long and hard, ultimately deciding to remove the iconic character from the board ahead of the next movie.
According to Johnson, “I want to be totally clear I don’t know what they’re doing” with the script for The Rise of Skywalker. Despite this, he was worried “about the number of characters we have on our plate going into the next movie.”
He decided to write Luke Skywalker’s death into The Last Jedi because “it just vaguely seemed good to me that putting Luke in another realm could open possibilities for his possible involvement in the next one,” which he felt was better than Luke “just being another character that had to be juggled into the plot.”
Johnson Was Clueless
Johnson didn’t claim that this was the only reason for Luke Skywalker’s controversial death scene in The Last Jedi, but it sounds like a big part of his decision was the motivation to make writing the sequel easier.
That would be more forgivable if he was going to actually be writing or directing said sequel, but he went out of his way to point out that he had no idea what was going to happen in that film, which highlights (for what feels like the thousandth time) Disney’s insanely poor planning of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.
Disney Should Have Had A Clearer Idea
It’s no exaggeration to say that Luke Skywalker remains the face of Star Wars, and his death should have been carefully considered and properly placed within the context of a tightly-planning trilogy.
Instead, Disney made the utterly insane decision to let individual directors and writers create completely separate films, resulting in The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker being as disjointed as they are disappointing.
We really can’t emphasize this enough: Rian Johnson killed the most iconic character in Star Wars because Disney didn’t bother to plan much of this trilogy after paying George Lucas $4 billion for the rights.
The Last Jedi Isn’t That Bad
Taken on its own, The Last Jedi is a better movie than its critics claim: the cinematography is beautiful, the action sequences are kinetic, and the humor is (mostly) welcome.
The problem is that it feels nothing like what came before or what came after, and Luke Skywalker’s death being shoehorned in due to Disney’s lack of planning leaves a bad taste in our mouths that no amount of green milk can wash out.
The same company that pioneered the modern cinematic universe with their intricately connected Marvel movies couldn’t bother to even outline three Star Wars movies before rushing them to theaters, one at a time.
