The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy Storyline That Sadly Never Panned Out
The Star Wars sequel trilogy was meant to be a bit different than the final product that came out. Originally, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was "Star Wars: Duel of the Fates" written by Colin Trevorrow, but Trevorrow was cut from the project and replaced by J.J. Abrams, hopped back on the franchise train after writing and directing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Trevorrow's script was thrown out for the most part, with Abrams doing a complete rewrite from the ground up according to Yahoo! News.
Here's what we got in the series cap: We find out that Emperor Palpatine has been alive and plotting this whole time instead of being all dead from Vader throwing him into the Death Star's reactor like we thought. He's been in charge of the First Order, using lab-grown puppet Snoke as an avatar. Rae and Finn and all those lovely Resistance members spend the majority of the film looking for a kind of Sith GPS, known as the "Sith Wayfinder," that will point to Palpatine's location. They find the Wayfinder and the shadow Emperor, Kylo Ren is redeemed, and Palpatine is defeated. Yay!
Fans got an exciting, if controversial, ending to a long story in Abram's version of things, but there was a storyline in Trevorrow's script that would've made the final installment just a little bit cooler.
Finn was initially meant to play a bigger Star Wars role
Finn (John Boyega), the former First Order stormtrooper and current rebel against all things bad, started out in the Star Wars sequel trilogy as a major player in The Force Awakens, but his story arc was pushed to the side and his importance squished by the time the series wrapped up. This wasn't meant to happen in Trevorrow's original script. Instead, Finn was supposed to have a major heroic storyline of his own that would've separated him from side characters like C-3P0 and Chewbacca.
We see a hint of this storyline come to pass while the "good guy" crew is searching for the Sith Wayfinder in the old Death Star. The gang runs into a group of First Order deserters led by Jannah, and Finn eventually joins them in the big horse charge on the Sith home planet later in the film, but that's about it. In Trevorrow's version of the story, Finn was supposed to go full-on revolutionary. He and Rose Tico were meant to lead an uprising of First Order rebels in a kind of class war that would've made Karl Marx a proud Star Wars fan as they free the capital planet of Coruscant from the First Order's influence. The soldiers in the First Order are conscripted, and many of them, like Finn in Episode VII, don't want the job. They're as much captives as they are soldiers, and Finn was going to set them free.
"That image of Finn with the blue flag, and you have the AT-ATs lined up with tribal marks, and the stormtroopers take off their helmets. That would have been sick," Boyega tells Yahoo! News. Apparently, we're not the only ones who wish the storyline got the chance to play out.