10 Shocking (But Believable) Theories About Star Wars: The Last Jedi

In the late 1990s, the Star Wars hype was off the charts. The first new entry in the series for over a decade and a half was about to launch and no other film could compete with the fan mania it was generating. Say what you will about The Phantom Menace, but the pre-release publicity it drummed up was unprecedented.

Fast-forward another decade and the anticipation around the latest Star Wars movie is once again through the roof, but this time, it's justified. JJ Abrams may have played it safe with 2015's The Force Awakens, but the film did enough to repair the franchise's tarnished reputation and make the brand cool again.

It also posed burning questions for its incoming sequel The Last Jedi to address, and the intrigue surrounding the next instalment almost matches the hype. What's the deal with Snoke? Will Kylo Ren find redemption, and who are Rey's parents?

Questions like these have the fans speculating like crazy, and many of them are devising their own theories to address them, because having to wait until December for official answers is just too unbearable.

Many of these DIY theories are crazier than the Leeds United team of the 1970s, but in some cases, they're almost plausible too.

Leia fans have good reason to fear for her safety ahead of The Last Jedi. Not only has Carrie Fisher's tragic passing made her exit from the saga an inevitability, the movie's trailers have depicted her in mortal peril.

Between footage of Kylo Ren attacking his mother's ship, that ominous "kill the past" voiceover and confirmation Leia will not be resurrected via CGI, the Internet theorists can be forgiven for predicting that her days in a galaxy far, far away are numbered.

It makes sense that Snoke will order Kylo to take out his mother in a move that would see him descend further into darkness, but on close scrutiny of the trailer footage, there's no guarantee this is Leia's death scene.

For starters, her son appears to hesitate while preparing to carry out his attack, and while inner conflict didn't stop him from ramming a Lightsaber into Han Solo, there's no reason why his moral compass won't spin in the other direction this time. The chances are, if this scene really was the last stand of a Star Wars legend like Leia, they would have kept it a million miles away from the trailers.

Kylo's mother may even be his path back to the light, which isn't to say she will survive The Last Jedi. The fact they won't be conjuring a CGI Carrie Fisher to film any additional scenes for the sequel trilogy suggests her story may be reaching its conclusion, and she isn't the kind of character you can quietly retire.