10 Movie Origin Stories We Almost Got

Among the many things fans complained about in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was the film's bizarrely casual approach to Emperor Palpatine's (Ian McDiarmid) revival as a zombie-puppet...thing.

Rather than make the basically expected effort to explain his resurrection, the film doesn't do much more than tell the audience, "He's the most eviliest magical wizard that's ever lived - deal with it!"

However, one of the film's editors, Maryann Brandon, explained shortly after release that The Rise of Skywalker's laboured editing process included ditching much of the explanation for Palpatine's revival.

"It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal. Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with. [There was] a little more information about it, what was keeping [Palpatine] alive, but it seemed to go off topic.

There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn't want to clutter the film up with things you didn't need to know."

Ian McDiarmid later stated that an earlier script also confirmed Palps to be a clone, before this was cut from subsequent drafts:

"It's interesting because at one point the script had a line in that first scene with Adam [Driver] when he says 'You’re a clone.' And I said in that original script, which is no longer with us, 'More than a clone. Less than a man.' Which seemed to me to sum it up really."