This may make it hurt all the more that director Colin Trevorrow’s Star Wars: Duel of the Fates was not the movie that came out, but the director has confirmed that the leaked concept art floating around the web is indeed real. Also, he notes that he’d never kill R2-D2 and that the droid just took a bad hit like many of us do, possibly referencing his removal from the series after his film The Book of Henry flopped hard.
Yes, this is from Duel of the Fates. But I’d never kill R2…he just took a bad hit. Happens to all of us. https://t.co/ekGMRUdV2g
— Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) January 24, 2020
The concept art landed not long after the screenplay that Colin Trevorrow developed for the ninth mainline Star Wars film crept up online. The director was removed from the project and replaced by J.J. Abrams, who delivered the underwhelming The Rise of Skywalker to us. Since then both the concept art and screenplay have been championed by fans as a more intriguing and suitable end to the trilogy of films that Disney developed. Of course, we’ll never know which movie would have turned out better since Trevorrow’s film will never release.
The art and the screenplay line up pretty well, sharing many of the same beats, including Rey wielding a dual lightsaber, Kylo Ren dueling with Darth Vader in a cave, and an emotional scene between C3PO and R2-D2. The plot revolved around Kylo receiving training from the creature that trained Palpatine and the Resistance searching for support for the final battle with the First Order. It also kept Rey’s lineage as an unimportant factor and focused in on the gray areas of the Force and the balance between light and dark.
