There is a temptation to assume that Princess Leia, and by extension Carrie Fisher, who played the Alderaanian Rebel leader in four movies across more than five decades, belongs to all of us. For those who grew up with the fiery bun-headed teenager in 1977’s Star Wars, her youthful image is burned so deeply into our cerebellums that we can recall her countenance in an instant.
As the late actor was given to mentioning whenever she felt like embarrassing George Lucas – her venomous 2004 congratulatory speech at the Star Wars creator’s AFI lifetime celebration springs to mind – the film-maker did in fact “own” Fisher for decades, as part of her deal to appear in the original space opera trilogy meant that his company Lucasfilm retained her image rights. “Every time I look in the mirror I have to send you a cheque for a couple of bucks,” joked the actor and comic in her famous roasting of Lucas at Hollywood’s Kodak theater.
Now Disney, which presumably inherited those rights when it bought Lucasfilm for $4bn in 2010 and embarked on a new Star Wars trilogy, has to decide how fully to use them in the wake of Fisher’s distressing death in the final days of 2016. A new piece in the Hollywood Reporter suggests Leia, reimagined as a general in the Resistance against her estranged son Kylo Ren’s nefarious First Order during the events of 2015’s The Force Awakens, was due to play a major role in the two films that will complete the new triptych, Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII and Colin Trevorrow’s Episode IX, out in December of this year and 2019 respectively.
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Above: Golden age … Carrie Fisher in 1977’s Star Wars. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Rex/Shutterstock
Leia’s key scenes are reportedly a meeting with her long-lost brother Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and a showdown-of-sorts with Adam Driver’s patricidal Ren, which promises to be a family reunion to make Skywalker’s father-and-son battles with Darth Vader look like breakfast with the Brady Bunch. The Hollywood Reporter’s sources suggest Fisher was due to play a greater part in the events of IX than she will do in VIII, scenes for which were shot before the actor’s death.
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Source: The Guardian