(Spoilers ahead for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” in case you’ve managed to make it this long without seeing the movie and yet somehow still care about the movie being spoiled for you.)
It’s not a given that the home video release of “The Last Jedi” will include a batch of deleted scenes — “The Force Awakens” came only with a handful on inconsequential cut scenes, and “Rogue One” had none. Fans will always hope, but there was certainly reason not to.
The latest edition of “The Star Wars Show,” however, should grant some confidence that whenever “The Last Jedi” hits blu-ray and streaming platforms (probably in April) it’ll come with the good stuff. Hosts Andi Gutierrez and Anthony Carboni showed off a little featurette of sorts teasing the novelization of “The Last Jedi” — which still has not been released — in which director Rian Johnson and author Jason Fry discuss how the book will have a bunch of new scenes that were never written for the movie, and will also restore some scenes that were shot but eventually cut. And as they’re talking we get about a 9-second glimpse at one of those deleted scenes in a sort of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment because nobody in the video actually mentions that they’re showing you something new.
The scene in question comes at about the 3:55 mark. I’ve cued the embedded video above to that time to make it easy for you.
What you’re seeing there is a portion of a scene that has been reported on before (by slashfilm): the so-called third lesson that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gives Rey (Daisy Ridley) on Ahch-To before she leaves to get back to the war. In the scene, as reported previously, Rey sees the village where Luke has been living seemingly on fire and wants to rescue Chewbacca and the local caretakers. Luke tells her it’s the work of bandits who regularly harass the village, and that Rey should just let it happen or else they’ll just return with a larger force in the future — something about a true Jedi keeping the balance.
But Rey doesn’t listen, and she rushes off to the village only to discover there aren’t any bandits. Chewbacca was just having some kind of party with a bonfire. Then Rey yells at Luke for lying and says, as we see in the video, “That old legend of Luke Skywalker that you hate so much — I believed in it.”
In the video we get a few small peeks at that sequence, with Rey sprinting toward the village and smashing through some kind of barrier, then delivering that line to Luke’s face.
The fact that they’re showing this footage right now, through official channels — “The Star Wars Show” is a product of StarWars.com — means it’s likely that at the very least we’ll get to see this segment in full when the home video release hits in a couple months. And, hey, if they’re including other cut content in the novelization then they’ll probably have more than just this, too. So that’s something to look forward to.