Warning: potential spoilers for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: Episode IX are ahead!
While the Star Wars franchise takes as many opportunities as it gets to introduce new worlds and expand the galaxy far, far away, there also also select planets that are also revisited from time to time. 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn't feature any of these familiar locations in favor of putting the characters both new and established on fresh terrain, but with Star Wars: The Last Jedi coming later this year and Star Wars: Episode IX in 2019, there's still plenty of time for this latest trilogy to bring back some of these recognizable worlds. In fact, a new report claims that Tatooine, Endor and Mustafar will be featured before the sequel trilogy has concluded.
Star Wars News Net is reporting that the above three planets, which were seen in either the Original or Prequel trilogy (or both), will be re-visited either during Star Wars: The Last Jedi or Star Wars: Episode IX. To clarify, they're not saying that Tatooine, Endor and Mustafar will necessarily be featured in the same movie, but the three worlds will allegedly be brought back before the sequel trilogy has finished. Along with name-dropping the planets themselves, the report also provided some details on why these worlds are being included. Let's start with Tatooine, where both Anakin and Luke Skywalker grew up.
Compared to the other two planets, there was barely any information provided about Tatooine, other than the fact it will appear in at least one of the upcoming main Star Wars installments. However, the article did note that the desert planet could be the same world where we saw Luke Skywalker touching R2-D2 in Rey's Force vision during The Force Awakens. Tatooine is the most recurring of the Star Wars planets, appearing in five of the theatrically-released movies (six if you count the animated Clone Wars movie).
Next, we have Endor, which was home to the second Death Star's shield generator in Return of the Jedi until Leia Organa, Han Solo, their Rebel allies and the Ewoks destroyed it. Supposedly Endor's inclusion ties into Kylo Ren's personal journey and how he's trying to emulate his grandfather, Darth Vader. He'll specifically be looking artifacts connected to Vader and the Sith order in general.
Finally, there's Mustafar, which was introduced in Revenge of the Sith and briefly revisited in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As with Endor, the reason moviegoers will be taken back to the lava world has to do with Kylo Ren, and that we'll specifically return to Darth Vader's castle, where the Sith Lord was getting some much needed time away from his Empire duties on Rogue One before Orson Krennic interrupted his vacation.
Of all the planets the next entries of the Star Wars sequel trilogy could revisit, Tatooine, Endor and Mustafar are among the more intriguing choices. Apparently the inclusion of these worlds is connected to the parallels between Luke Skywalker and Kylo Ren's respective character arcs. With regard to Luke, it's also mentioned at some point the Jedi Master came across something that "puts into question everything he thought he knew about the Force, and now he's set on recovering knowledge and practices of the ancient Jedi to restore the Order following its destruction at the hands of the Knight of Ren. Yeah, there's a lot to take in here, but rest assured, if we learn more about these three worlds and how they fit into the future of Star Wars, we'll report on it.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on December 15, and Episode IX will follow on May 23, 2019.
