Rian Johnson Has Casually Revealed The Meaning Of ‘The Last Jedi’ Title

Marketing big-budget movies is an art form unto itself with several dedicated professionals working diligently to position massive projects in a way that gets the most bang for the corporate buck that is backing them. You can see that in the synergistic trailer release for a Disney-owned Star Wars film during the Disney owned ESPN’s Monday Night Football last night and in the deliberate way that trailer was cut — revealing some small details while opening up a whole new batch of questions.

The title of that new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, has led fans to theorize about its meaning since it was made public. Everyone wanted to know if the title was singular or plural and who, if singular, it was referring too. Vanity Fair even did an article around that fascination with teasing answers from producer Kathleen Kennedy and the film’s writer/director, Rian Johnson. More marketing/promotional engineering — all done in good fun and in service to preserving the curiosity and mystery. Until…

Surely, Johnson inspired chaos in the halls of power over at Disney as their best-laid plans were undone by a single tweet right? (Hey, welcome to 2017.) At this point, it’s hard to tell. Maybe he was just having a little fun by cutting to the quick with this one thing or maybe this was all a clever part of the effort to promote the film and squeeze just a little more coverage out of a trailer reveal that has taken over social media and digital media over the last 12 hours. We are, after all, writing about Johnson’s tweet right now and Johnson’s method of delivery is probably giving that tidbit a little more play than had it simply been revealed in the Vanity Fair piece.

×