No Major Leia Scenes Were Cut from The Last Jedi

Rian Johnson has been out promoting Star Wars: The Last Jedi and now that the movie is out in theaters, he keeps getting asked about scenes that were cut from the movie, especially any involving the late Carrie Fisher. As it turns out, Johnson has revealed that there are many scenes that did not make the cut and there is apparently a lot of good stuff, not just “people walking down hallways,” as Rian Johnson put it. Unfortunately, it appears that all of the good footage of Carrie Fisher made it into the final cut.

Rian Johnson recently spoke with Inverse where he revealed that there’s a wealth of material that will end up in the deleted scenes portion of the Blu-ray release. But when asked about more footage of Carrie Fisher, Johnson confirmed that there was nothing significant cut out of The Last Jedi. Johnson explains.

“There weren’t any big scenes. There were smaller scenes that, structurally just ended up falling away. Same as there were with any of the other characters. But there wasn’t any big and significant.”

It seems unlikely that any of the deleted portions will be used for Star Wars 9, which is a shame. It just means that J.J. Abrams is going to have to get pretty creative when figuring out how to address Carrie Fisher’s death.

While it’s sad that we probably won’t see any unused footage of Carrie Fisher in Episode IX, it is comforting to know that nearly everything that she was in got used in the final cut of The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson also revealed that he spoke to J.J. Abrams about additional footage of Carrie Fisher, but there’s hardly anything left over from The Force Awakens as well. Lucasfilm has promised not to use a CGI version of Fisher, so it will be interesting to see how J.J. Abrams tells the story with her gone.

Since Rian Johnson has confirmed that there was a lot of footage that didn’t make it into the final cut of The Last Jedi, several fans have asked about the inclusion of a director’s cut of the movie. Johnson says that the final cut of The Last Jedi is complete and the best version, so he will not be adding a new cut to the Blu-ray version of the movie. The lack of a director’s cut just shows how confident Johnson is with his first Star Wars movie.

While the overall reaction for The Last Jedi has been positive, there’s quite a few fans who are angry with the movie for one reason or another who were hoping for a director’s cut to satisfy their criticisms. Regardless, the Blu-ray edition of The Last Jedi will more than likely come out in the spring, following the trend of the last few movies, so we’ll have to wait and see what didn’t make it into the movie. You can read more about what Rian Johnson had to say regarding deleted scenes featuring Carrie Fisher courtesy of Inverse.