Between the 16th and 20th of December, several Disney era Star Wars movies found themselves trending as fans revisited each respective sci-fi epic on the anniversary of their release. The Force Awakens got a pass for being the one to relaunch the franchise after a decade away from our screens, Rogue One was praised as arguably the finest entry of the Mouse House’s entire tenure, and The Last Jedi unsurprisingly split opinion down the middle once again.
For every social media user posting in support and celebration of Episode VIII, there would be another tearing them down for daring to view the divisive blockbuster as anything other than a stain against the good name of Star Wars. In fact, so much conversation and debate has flowed around The Last Jedi that it still seems hard to believe it only hit theaters three years ago, and the discourse is clearly far from over.
One person who most definitely isn’t a fan is writer Alan Dean Foster, the prolific author who’s written novels for some of the biggest brands in the industry including Star Trek, Transformers and Terminator, while his association with Star Wars dates back over 40 years. In a recent interview, Foster admitted that he was so unimpressed with The Last Jedi that he wrote a treatment for Episode IX just to make himself feel better.
“Episode VIII was out, it was a done deal. And I went and saw it, and I thought it was a terrible film. I thought it was a terrible Star Wars movie, and there’s no need to go into why because every fan already has. I thought, ‘How can this be retconned? How can we fix as much as possible from Episode VIII in a proposed Episode IX?’. And I wrote a partial treatment for that, attempting in that storyline to explain a lot of the really silly things that happened in Episode VIII. I did that for the fans. I never expected Disney to do anything with that.”
If you were to ask Foster, he’d no doubt say his version of Episode IX turned out much better than J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker, which tried to retcon The Last Jedi and tie up the Skywalker Saga at the same time, but just ended up as a bloated and disjointed disappointment.