There's a lot that happens in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The movie is absolutely relentless in its pace as both heroes and villains are pretty much constantly searching for something. The film goes to many different locations, meets a wide variety of new and old characters and as soon as they finish with one thing, it's off to the next. There's just a lot that happens in the movie, so much, that you might wonder if there's even more out there that we haven;t seen. It seems that, at least as far as the action goes, that's not really the case.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is available for digital purchase right now and while it has a collection of great special features, one thing it doesn't have is any deleted scenes. It turns out that, at least when it comes to the film's action, that's because there simply aren't any. Rise of Skywalker stunt coordinator Eunice Huthart recently told ScreenRant, that, unlike other films she's been part of, nearly all the action that was shot for the movie was used in the movie. According to Huthart...
I've done movies where I'd say 60 percent, 65 percent or 70 percent of our action makes the film. I'd say on the whole, probably 90 percent of what we shot action-wise made the movie.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker includes a massive documentary feature nearly as long as the movie itself called The Skywalker Legacy. Eunice Huthart is one of the major players in the doc, and she's an incredible presence. It seems everybody on the set loved her and she was as enthusiastic about making the movie as anybody there.
It's maybe not too surprising that most of the action that was filmed for The Rise of Skywalker made it into the final cut, there's simply a lot of action in the movie. While we were all expecting a climactic battle between Rey and Kylo Ren, we actually saw multiple fights between the two, as well as one with them fighting side-by-side. It's hard to imagine what other action there could be. Odds are that whatever got filmed that wasn't used are simply elements of the action sequences that we got.
This piece of information would seem to help debunk the idea that that there is another, significantly different, cut of The Rise of Skywalker which J.J. Abrams had been forced to change. If that had been the case, there likely would have been significantly more unused action footage. Unless we want to believe that the entire 10% of unused footage is a completely unused action sequence.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was met with mixed reactions upon release, but the action in the film is difficult to criticize. There are some absolutely epic lightsaber battles that are among the best in the franchise.
