Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi“ has been released into the world and the bold, daring, and sometimes divisive ‘Star Wars’ movie, is just destroying at the box office. And while there was the surprise element of the film charting low on the Rotten Tomatoes audience score—some of which may have been trolling—the film earned a glowing A on Cinemascore, so there’s pretty much nothing to worry about if you’re an invested fan. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” grossed $104 million from Friday and Thursday night previews and is expected to open to around $215 million for its box office weekend—a figure that would land it as the second highest opening weekend gross of all time after, you guessed it, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (third would be “Jurassic World” at $208M). The film is going to be a smash success. Hitting a billion should be no problem – it’s just a matter of how high the film can go.
Meanwhile, despite most journalists talking to “The Last Jedi” cast before they saw the film, director Rian Johnson and his longtime producing partner Ram Bergman (“Brick,” “The Brothers Bloom,” “Looper”), have thankfully been doing some post-release interviews as well. I spoke to Johnson and Bergman about ‘Jedi’ yesterday and there’ll be some really interesting spoiler talk from that interview after the New Year (embargoed for now), so if you’re a big “Star Wars” fan and want to know some of the decisions that went into some of the more daring, surprising and challenging moments of the film, you’ll want to stick around for that. In the interim, what I can talk about are the plans for the Blu-ray release. Unlike previous “Star Wars” films which have been relatively lean on deleted scenes, Johnson promises what sounds like a fairly sizable treasure trove for ‘The Last Jedi.’
“There’s soooo much stuff we had to cut out of this movie,” he admitted. “The movie is better for it, but some of my favorite stand-alone scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. So there’s going to be really a lot of really—I’m going to sound like I’m selling Blu-rays here, but there’s going to be a lot of really extensive deleted scenes that are included as extras on the home video. I’m excited for folks to see them.”
I pointed out that it’s a bit rare in a “Star Wars” movie to have meaty and extensive deleted scenes, to which Johnson replied, “Yeah, that’s true. I don’t know why this process was different, but we had a lot of really good stuff that got trimmed away for the sake of the whole film during the course of cutting.”
Deleted scenes don’t always capture the original vision, which of course, morphs over time and throughout editing – where a film naturally transforms and evolves. I asked Johnson if he would be keen on seeing the full shooting script released – not only is he game for it but he suggested that there are a lot of ways that the movie is different from the final product on screen.
“I definitely would think we would put the full shooting draft out there at one point,” he said. “I did that with ‘Looper,’ with my other movies. As opposed to when they publish scripts after the movie’s out where they do the conformed version where they basically just rewrite it like so it’s like the film—which I’m sure they’ll do for this—but I would really love at some point if they put out the original shooting draft so people can see the stuff that got cut, stuff that got rearranged, the stuff that got adjusted in rehearsals, etc. I always think, even just from a film school point of view that’s always really interesting to see.”
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is in theaters now. More from this interview soon.