Rian Johnson wanted to test Star Wars: The Last Jedi while he was making the movie, but the secrecy surrounding the franchise made that impossible.

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In the bonus features on the home release for Johnson's latest movie, Knives Out, the filmmaker revealed the test screening for Knives Out went better than he could've imagined, sparking a wish that he could have done the same for The Last Jedi."[The Knives Out test] was like a party in the theater, it was really fun. It was like the first time I was like ‘Oh wow, this actually plays. This is good,'" Johnson said, according to Screen Rant . "Which is really nice and that’s something on Star Wars, you can’t test Star Wars movies for a lot of different reasons. I’ve always hated test screening, and when we were making Star Wars, at a certain point in the process you’re like ‘God, I would give my left arm to put this in front of 300 people in Burbank and just see how it plays.’"As Screen Rant points out, it's anyone's guess what the test audience response might have been, or what changes might have resulted in the final cut. Review aggregator Metacritic indicates a sharp divide between critics (with an average score of 85 out of 100) and general audiences (with an average score of 4.3 out of 10). Johnson also recently heaped praise on The Rise of Skywalker , a sequel that has also divided fans and is currently one of the lowest-scoring Star Wars movies on Rotten Tomatoes Johnson is now an Oscar and BAFTA nominee after Knives Out was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at both ceremonies. He lost both awards to Parasite. He is now set to work on a new trilogy of Star Wars movies that will move "beyond the legacy characters " but is planning a sequel to Knives Out first. For more Star Wars news, find out the revelations contained in the Rise of Skywalker novelization and learn about the new era being explored in The High Republic

Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN who is more excited for Knives Out 2 than anything Star Wars at this point.