Star Wars Celebration is finally under way and that means we're getting our first real details about Star Wars Episode IX. Stephen Colbert hosted the Episode IX panel and, while there is so much that he can't ask, he did ask director J.J. Abrams about how the movie will start off based on how The Last Jedi ended. Abrams confirmed that the new film will pick up some amount of time after The Last Jedi, and also that all of our heroes will be working together throughout the film. According to Abrams...
The movie doesn't pick up immediately after the last film. Some time has gone by and what I’ll say is that in this movie, and you can tell by that picture is the very beginning of it, but this is an adventure that the group goes on together.
The picture in question is the one up above, that was shown during the Episode IX panel. It shows all of our heroes, Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewbacca, and C-3PO and BB-8, all together outside the Millennium Falcon. This will be where the story begins. Wherever it goes from here, these characters will apparently all go together.
All of the Star Wars saga films saw significant time jumps between episodes. The one exception being Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That movie picked up immediate following the previous entry. Now we know the last film in the arc will be a return to the previous form.
The other thing that has been interesting about the current saga has been the way main characters have been separated. Rey, Finn, and Poe, spent pretty much all of The Last Jedi doing their own thing, but even beyond that, Rey and Poe had never so much as met until the end of the last movie. For fans who liked the dynamic between Rey and Finn, or Poe and Finn for that matter, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we will get to see them all together again. But now we'll get to see how Rey and Poe work together. for the first time.
More than that, all three of these characters will apparently have already spent some time together when Episode IX begins, so we'll see these relationships after they've already begun to form.
The original report was that Episode IX will pick up one year after Star Wars: The Last Jedi which is certainly enough time for a lot of things to happen on both sides of the war between the Resistance and the First Order. The Resistance was on its last legs in the previous film. Has it been able to rebuild in the interim?
The same amount of time has passed for the First Order, who knows what it looks like after a year under the sole leadership of Kylo Ren.
As a fan of all these new characters, it's exciting to know that they will see this story through to its conclusion together. But who knows what state they will be in when the movie actually begins.
