After all the hype, all the build-up and over 40 years’ worth of expectations, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has finally landed in theaters, and the general consensus is that the movie is… okay. Director J.J. Abrams has been open in the past about how he knew that the ninth and final installment wouldn’t please everyone, but now that the finished product is finally out in the world, the filmmaker seems to be coming in for more criticism than ever.
When it comes to a franchise as popular and beloved as Star Wars, there’s virtually no way that Abrams would ever be able to win. After all, this is a story that has been ongoing since 1977, and when Rian Johnson dared to rock the boat with some changes to the established mythology in The Last Jedi, it was greeted with backlash the likes of which the series had never seen.
It must also have weighed in Abrams’ mind that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy isn’t one to suffer fools, with Star Wars having cycled through an alarmingly high number of creative minds in recent years, with reports that the studio was actively looking to limit the input that they received from the people they hired to spearhead their projects set in a galaxy far, far away.
In a recent interview to promote the long-awaited release of The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams himself cast doubt on the idea of working with either the Star Wars brand or Lucasfilm in the future, seemingly making it clear that his time on the franchise is definitely over.
“Maybe I’ll go back. No, I’m done. I’m done. This time I know. I can feel it. I can feel this is it. I always knew, when we were doing Episode VII, there were certain things that I felt, for me, and I was never supposed to do this movie, I would need to see at the end of this trilogy, at the end of these nine films. And then Kathleen Kennedy called and said, ‘Would you come on?’. One of the attractions was, ‘Ooh, I actually get to do these things,’ instead of backseat, ‘I wish, I wish.'”
You can understand where Abrams is coming from, especially when you consider that his Bad Robot production company has signed a first-look deal with Warner Bros. that runs up until 2024. There was no way that he could win when it came to The Rise of Skywalker, and now that the movie has been released into the wild, there’s little reason for him to continue working under the Lucasfilm banner.