At two and a half hours long, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is already the longest Star Wars movie ever made (even though the prequels may feel like they last forever). Even at that length, it sounds like writer and director Rian Johnson still had to take a ton of great stuff out to get the movie down to that size, as he revealed to Collider in a recent press junket.
“We had a long movie from the start,” Johnson said. “It was well over three hours, the first cut. It’s much better at two and a half than it was at over three, but it was a cut that I put together that was where we started. It was probably like three hours and twenty minutes.”
Bloated movies have started to become a bit of a concern for movie execs, as witnessed with movies like Batman v Superman. Even good films like Blade Runner 2049 have taken hits at the box office due to the perception that they’re too long. But on the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got movies like Justice League which may have been edited to death in order to hit an arbitrary two-hour run time. Fortunately, it sounds like The Last Jedi was cut down to exactly the length it needed to be.
But don’t expect a Lord of the Rings style extended edition to come out some day.
“I’m really not into that,” Johnson said. “I feel like the cut is what it is because it’s the best version of the movie. So the director’s cut is the movie that’s coming out in theaters. And all the deleted scenes, no matter how much I love them, they came out for a reason, and it’s all for the greater good of the movie itself. So you can watch the deleted scenes on their own, I think that’s the way to watch them.”
Great, and here I was thinking that December 15th was going to be a long time to wait. Now I really want to see this giant pile of deleted scenes, and who knows how long it will take before The Last Jedi makes its way to home video?