Disney and Lucasfilm are keeping much about Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker under wraps for now, but an intriguing comment from someone key to the production may have told us exactly how long the movie will be.
This week, the Academy of Scoring Arts held a “score study” of legendary composer John Williams’ work on 1993’s Jurassic Park. Williams’ brother and frequent collaborator, Don Williams, spoke about John’s career at the event and even touched on his latest project – scoring Episode IX. Williams revealed that his brother has “135 minutes worth of music to write, so that kind of tells how long the film is.”
Don – who’s a veteran studio percussionist – went on to add that Williams’ score will be “top to bottom.”
“It is top to bottom music. We’ve done four days and we just scratched the surface. I think we’ve got something like 34 minutes in the canon at this point.”
So, can we take it that The Rise of Skywalker will be 135 minutes in length? It’s possible, as The Force Awakens also clocked in at 2 hours and 15 minutes. The Last Jedi, however, was significantly longer at 2 hours and 33 minutes, so you might expect the closer to the trilogy to be even bigger. Then again, director J.J. Abrams may like the slightly trimmer runtime he had for TFA and want to replicate that.
Unfortunately, we can’t say for sure right now as there could well be some parts of the movie that might not require any scoring. Still, Don Williams’ comments do seem to heavily suggest that this is the exact runtime of the film, or near enough. I suppose what we can say is that it won’t be any shorter than the length he mentions.
In any case, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will have to pack a lot into its runtime, however long it is, what with it having to wrap up the Sequel Trilogy as well as the entire Skywalker saga as a whole. And we’ll find out whether it succeeds or not when it hits theaters on December 20th.