Star Wars Episode IX: Duel Of The Fates - 10 Things We Learned From Colin Trevorrow's Leaked Script

But would it have been better than The Rise of Skywalker?

by Ewan Paterson
Star Wars Duel of the Fates Colin Trevorrow
Lucasfilm

THE DEAD SPEAK! Colin Trevorrow's old Star Wars Episode IX script supposedly made its way over to Reddit this week, courtesy of YouTube user Robert Meyer Burnett. What makes this one so special? Well apparently it's true. Both The A.V. Club and now The Playlist have corroborated the leak with their own sources, and while there are discrepancies between certain write ups, all signs point towards this script as being legit.

So it's true. All of it.

What makes this particular leak so juicy (apart from the fact it's apparently real), is the fact that the Episode IX we got ended up being such a divisive film. JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio seemingly endeavoured to go out of their way to ignore everything Rian Johnson did with The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker suffered because of it. Now, with talk of a discontented cast and behind-the-scenes trouble, the production process behind Episode IX has fallen under a microscope, with fans and critics applying intense scrutiny to a film that was clearly plagued with issues from the start.

There's no overstating the task Trevorrow had going into Episode IX. He was capping off the entire Skywalker Saga, not just the Sequel Trilogy, and the untimely passing of Carrie Fisher in 2016 forced him into a complete rewrite, with Leia having supposedly played a major role in Episode IX's original draft.

Eventually Trevorrow left and Abrams replaced him, but the Jurassic World director's version of IX, ostensibly titled Duel of the Fates (a callback to John Williams' famous track for The Phantom Menace), sounds mighty fascinating. So, here's everything we learned from the leaked script, including just how much it differed from Abrams' version...

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.