Honestly, I just wanted to put a wet Kylo Ren here. Image : Disney/Lucasfilm

The Writer’s Guild of America has settled on exactly who will be getting credit for writing in the upcoming last film of the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. And the credits include a couple names you might not have expected to see.

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As reported by Collider, the writing credits decided on by the WGA will include the typical “Based on characters created by George Lucas” attribution as well as a story attribution that names four writers: Chris Terrio, JJ Abrams, Derek Connolly, and Colin Trevorrow. Those last two names come as something of a surprise. As fans might remember, Connolly and Trevorrow were the original creative names attached to Episode IX long before it gained the Rise of Skywalker moniker. However, those plans were changed when Trevorrow (Jurassic World, The Book of Henry) was ousted from the project under circumstances that have remained fairly opaque, and Abrams and Terrio were brought in.

What these credits mean, so far as the unfolding story of the behind-the-scenes drama of getting this film made, is somewhat unclear. The WGA’s decision could be including a lot of factors, from vague story ideas that ended up being reused to basic contractual obligations that saw the pair credited even if none of their ideas were utilized in the final product. As Collider notes in their writeup of the news, though, Abrams sure did make it sound like, in past interviews, his team was starting over from scratch, saying in a Fast Company interview, “You’ve got two years from the decision to do it to release, and you have literally nothing... You don’t have the story, you don’t have the cast, you don’t have the designers, you don’t have the sets.”

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What this doesn’t mean, however, is that Trevorrow and his collaborator necessarily contributed anything that made it into the final script as such. Which might be comforting, considering the highly questionable merits of The Book of Henry are rumored to have had something to do with his removal from the project. But it does mean that Trevorrow and Connolly will be getting residuals, which is certainly a nice bonus for them.


The Rise of Skywalker comes out... next month?! December 20th.

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