SPOILERS AHEAD: This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you want to read our spoiler-free review, click here. The rest of you, read on… but know that you have been warned.
For the last couple of years, we’ve been inundated with rumors about what would take place in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Some sounded ridiculous. Some sounded... possible. Now that the movie has finally been released, we know the truth, and the truth is that the majority of these rumors were complete crap. Here are some of our absolute favorite rumors that turned out to be bullshit.
Luke Is A Villain
This was the big one. This was the grandaddy of The Force Awakens rumors. The reason that nobody had seen Luke Skywalker in the lead up to the movie was because seeing him would show the truth. Luke Skywalker had turned to the Dark Side. This could not have been further from the truth. Luke had not embraced The Dark Side. Instead, he was in hiding because of his failure to prevent another from doing so.
Luke Is Really Kylo Ren
This one is an offshoot of the previous rumor, but it still deserves its own conversation. In this version, the reason we never saw Luke Skywalker’s face was because it was always covered by the mask of Kylo Ren. This one never really made sense because we knew Adam Driver was playing the role. That would have been a level of misdirection the world had never seen before. That would have been too much even for J.J. Abrams. Who Kylo Ren was, was still a reveal, and it was a good one, but it wasn’t Luke.
The Movie Will Open With A Severed Hand, Holding A Lightsaber
This one was so popular that we eventually saw multiple rumors confirming it. They were all wrong. In one version of a "leaked" script, the hand and lightsaber are found by Finn and Rey, in another by Max von Sydow’s character. The fact that we saw these slight variations made the basics seem more plausible. Details can change due to the rumor changing hands, or simple script revisions, but the fact that we kept seeing the same plot point over and over again made it seem likely. Not so much.
Finn is the Son of Lando Calrissian
This one felt like a case of Star Wars racial profiling. A toy description on Amazon was reported to include the information that Finn was the son of Lando Calrissian. To be fair, we don’t know that he isn’t Lando’s son, but this information was certainly not relayed in this film and nobody is talking about spoilers for Episode VIII yet.
Luke Has a Son
For some reason, according to early "spoilers," every actor in the bloody movie had to be playing the child of another character. This was the case for Luke Skywalker as much as anybody. This particular rumor claimed that Domhnall Gleeson would be playing the son of Luke Skywalker. The actor is in the movie, so they got that much correct, but instead he’s playing a General of the First Order. He’s not a defector from the resistance, and he’s not Luke’s son. He’s a guy who brainwashes kids to turn them into Stormtroopers. Quite the opposite.
Luke is Protecting a Sith Tomb
Reason Luke Skywalker is missing #4,912 was that Kylo Ren was trying to find and open an ancient Sith tomb, and that Luke was protecting it to prevent that from happening. While we still don’t actually know all the reasons for Skywalker’s self-imposed exile, Han Solo believed he had gone looking for the first Jedi Temple, so pretty much the exact opposite of a Sith temple. We accept rumors inside the film before we accept the ones in the real world.
Emperor Palpatine is the Ultimate Power
This rumor from last year seemed more than a little unbelievable at the time. It turns out the reason why was because it was. While The Force Awakens was going to have its own new list of bad guys, the word was that the power behind it all was going to be the one who had always been in charge, Emperor Palpatine. Instead, we were introduced to Supreme leader Snoke. While Snoke certainly has a general "Emperor" vibe going on, he’s most certainly somebody very different.
Captain Phasma’s Character Description
Before we knew the name Captain Phasma, we knew Gwendoline Christie had a role in The Force Awakens. We knew she was a soldier in the First Order. We knew she wore shiny armor. That’s where the truth stopped. She’s described as having facial scars and a military style short haircut. It’s unknown how anybody would know this since she never takes her helmet off in the film. She’s also described as wielding a lightsaber as well as having the ability to cloak herself. We assume that was some confusion over the fact that she wears a cloak.
The Movie Would Focus on the Solo Twins
Way back in early 2014, the casting rumors already were going strong. While fans were still coming to terms with the fact that the expanded universe was being removed from continuity, the word came out that the story would focus on a pair of twins, who would each take different paths as they learned The Force. This then turned into the idea that the twin children of Han and Leia from the novels would indeed make the transition to the screen. A nugget of truth actually came from this idea, but not much more.
The Movie Would Contain Flashbacks
When Star Wars needs to tell you the story of what came before, they produce entire films. They’ve never included flashbacks. There were two separate rumors that told us that the new movie would. One claimed that Robert Boulter would be playing a young Luke Skywalker, while another said that Billie Lourd would be playing a young version of her own mother as Princess Leia. Boulter’s not in the movie at all, while Lourd plays a Resistance officer with only a brief bit of screen time.
This poll is no longer available.
