**Spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi within.**
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the longest Star Wars movie ever made at about 2.5 hours, and that’s without all the stuff that Director Rian Johnson eventually had to cut to make the movie manageable. He’s already stated that the original version of the movie was (“well”) over three hours long and that we’d see some of that in the home video release, and now we know just how much to expect—and it’s a lot.
In his original comments, Johnson mentioned that, though he believes the movie itself is better without them, a lot of what they wound up cutting was material that he really liked, and as you might extrapolate form how many minutes were cut, it’s more substantial stuff than your average special features perks. As he told it, entire sequences were cut from the movie, and now he’s let Collider in on just what some of those “like actual real scenes” might entail.
For starters, there’s a whole portion involving Finn, Rose, and Benicio Del Toro’s DJ sneaking around Snoke’s ship, and there’s also another Finn/Poe scene where Poe is catching the former Stormtrooper up on events during his post Force Awakens recovery. To be honest, we’ll take any and all additional Finn/Poe time—all the time and forever—especially after that “Finn, naked, leaking” moment, but that’s not all.
There’s a full training sequence with Rey and Luke, with Rey going through some kind of trial, and “a big emotional scene between the two of them” to cap it off. I’ve only seen the movie once at this point, but if I remember right, Luke tells Rey that he’ll teach her three lessons about the Force/being a Jedi, but only part one of his lesson plan is made explicit. He wasn’t all that happy with the way part one turned out, so maybe that’s why he abandoned his Force syllabus, but it could be that, in the overstuffed original cut of the movie, he actually continued teaching, and Rey was the one who truly cut things short when she ran off to face Kylo and Snoke.
You can read about those scenes in greater detail in Collider’s interview, but the big theme of what Johnson (and Editor Bob Ducsay) had to say was that “there’s a bunch of really fun stuff” coming our way in the 20+ minutes of deleted scenes they’re planning to include. I know you didn’t expect to get out of a 2.5-hour movie wanting even more of it, but here we are.
(via Collider, image: Disney/Lucasfilm)
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