Star Wars: Episode IX Just Brought in the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Writer for Rewrites

Star Wars: Episode IX is still a fairly long way off, with The Last Jedi set for this December and the Han Solo movie to come somewhere in between, but Disney and Lucasfilm are already hard at work making sure that the grand finale of their new trilogy meets our expectations. To that end, it looks like they’ve brought on a new writer to revise Director Colin Trevorrow’s script.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Jack Thorne,the writers of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play, is being brought on as a “fresh set of eyes” for rewrites on Star Wars’ final chapter. While it’s still early, and Trevorrow’s script no doubt already needed changes after the loss of Carrie Fisher, it’s hard not to see this as part of the bigger picture of Trevorrow’s most recent film, The Book of Henry—his only big release aside from Jurassic World so far—being widely panned.

Even if that’s not the reason—or the only reason—a new writer was brought on, it’s certainly comforting to those who were worried about how the movie would turn out based on Trevorrow’s past work. (Jurassic World, while inarguably successful, certainly had its flaws.) It’s hard to say now, and we may never actually know how much the script will change due to Thorne’s involvement. However, Rian Johnson is the only credited writer on The Last Jedi, and writing The Force Awakens was always a collaboration between Director J.J. Abrams and longtime Star Wars writer Lawrence Kasdan, so the decision to bring in an outside writer to rework the script on IX sticks out a bit.

It’s reminiscent of shakeups during the production of Rogue One, as well as the recent, mid-shooting swap of directors on the Han Solo movie, although fixing issues during pre-production has a much better chance of smoothly fixing any issues.

(via THR, image: Disney/Lucasfilm)

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