SPOILER ALERT 

Disney’s new movie, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, sparked a large controversy between whether the movie was a successful end to the trilogy or whether it failed to end the famous Star Wars saga. 

The movie became the third highest grossing film of 2019 and spent three weeks as the top movie in the box office. However, despite initial financial success, the revenue dropped dramatically from the first to second weekend at a rate of 59.2%, and this only continued to worsen according to Forbes. 

Many Star Wars fans became critical of the movie when examining the plot holes, odd scenes, and unanswered questions. In fact, the Rotten Tomatoes rating is just 53% as of January, 2020. 

Scenes such as the kiss between Rey and Ben, the scenes of Leia as a Jedi, the scene of Leia dying were admittedly confusing and a bit off putting, but the major problems arise in the form of plot holes. 

Since C390 was built in a time where Sith language was not forbidden, why would it not be blocked from his programming? 

Since when have people been able to heal others with the force? Since when has this been a thing?

Why are there so many new and unexplained characters? Fans will never get to see their lives play out.

Why was the connection between Rey and Ben never fully explained? Why can they suddenly travel through space via the force?

Why is this now a scavenger hunt to find Exegol? Why is this movie all of a sudden National Treasure?

Why does Luke all-of-a-sudden know that Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter when he previously did not know who she was when she first showed up on his planet?

Where did this weird Sith choir appear from? How does Palpatine know how to transfer his power? Why did he not just stop shooting the lightning so that he didn’t toast himself? How did he even live in the first place?

Have they always been able to lightspeed skip? Why did they not do it more? They call it “dangerous,” but nothing serious happens to the characters.

These are just a few examples that have been questioned by fans, but there are many others as well. This led fans to wonder how JJ Abrams let all of these plot holes and strange scenes exist. 

Then the conspiracy theories started. 

Fans have created a massive conspiracy that this cut of the movie was not JJ’s original cut. The movement started after a fan posted on Reddit about what a “source” at Disney had told him about the movie. 

“JJ’s original early November cut was 3 hours 2 minutes long. In January, JJ suggested that they turn this into two films. My source told me this well before Terrio mentioned it in an interview a couple of days ago. When Disney said no, JJ was content with making this 3 hours long. Over a period of 9 months JJ started realizing that one by one his ideas and whole scenes were being thrown out the window or entirely altered by people who have “no business meddling with the creatives,” the Reddit post claimed. 

The main point of the post was to provide evidence that the user had a friend who worked on the movie and could see that this was not Abrams’ vision for the movie. The author claimed that Disney did not want Abrams to join forced with DC (he had just been contracted to direct a new movie for the franchise) as DC is a potential threat to Marvel, thus, they purposely tried to make Abrams seem like a poor director. 

“JJ is very successful at bringing franchises back… WB wants Abrams for some DC projects…Their [Disney’s] goal is to make JJ look bad to potential investors/shareholders. My source mentioned this shortly after the premiere: ‘The TROS we saw last night was not the TROS we thought we worked on.’ JJ was devastated and blindsided by this. He’s been feeling down over the last 6 months because of some of the ridiculous demands Disney had that changed his movie’s story. While the scenes were shot, a lot of the changes were made in post-production and the audio was rerecorded and altered. My source said they’ve never seen anything like this happen before,” the Reddit post said. 

Abrams even “jokingly” said in an interview that the movie was not good. It seems as though, despite financial success, many hardcore fans and workers from the movie are upset with the grad finale to a 42-year-long story.