Warning: Serious Spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi ahead.
Fans raised a great many questions following their first viewing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. What’s left of the resistance? Is that Rey’s real heritage? Does green milk taste better than blue?
An important question raised concerns the mysterious Knights of Ren, a group of Force-powered students at Skywalker High that embraced the dark side. It was explained that under the leadership of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), the Knights served Supreme Leader Snoke. And yet, the Knights were nowhere to be seen in The Last Jedi. As a matter of fact, the group wasn’t even mentioned at all.
Director Rian Johnson has now explained why the group didn’t make it into the film during a recent interview with the Empire Film podcast. It was in fact planned for from the beginning, so don’t get your hopes up for a deleted scene with the group.
“Truth is, I just didn’t see a place for them in the movie,” he says. Looking at the story he told with The Last Jedi, Johnson says the “only place the group might fit in is during Kylo and Rey’s fight with the Praetorian guards after the death of Snoke”. However, he thinks that would have would have “fundamentally changed the scene”.
“I guess I could’ve used them in place of the Praetorian guards but then it would feel like wasting them because all those guards had to die,” he says. “And if Kylo had some kind of connection to them it would’ve added a complication that wouldn’t have helped the scene.“
Fear not, just because they weren’t included in The Last Jedi doesn’t mean we’ll never see the Knights of Ren. With JJ Abrams returning to direct Episode IX, he could very well bring them back into the story–especially now that Kylo has taken over as the Supreme Leader.
Star Wars: Episode IX is scheduled to reach theaters on December 20, 2019. The next Star Wars film heading to the big screen is the Han Solo standalone movie, set to arrive in this May.
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