After a strangely quiet 11 months since “Solo: A Star Wars Story”, details are finally trickling out about “Star Wars Episode IX,” including, at long last, the film’s actual title.
Ready for it, padawans? The official title of “Episode IX” is: “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”
So there you go. Update your templated copy accordingly.
The title dropped this morning alongside the film’s enticing first trailer — which you can and should watch here — on the first day of Star Wars Celebration 2019, which takes place all this weekend in Chicago.
Director JJ Abrams has been plugging away at “The Rise of Skywalker” for almost two years, but so far, we’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. What we do know, however, is that pretty much everybody from “The Last Jedi” is coming back — Daisy Ridley as Rey, John Boyega as Finn, Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, Adam Driver as Kylo Ren, Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico, Domhnall Gleeson as General Hux, and so on. They’ll be joined by some new faces, including Keri Russell, Richard E. Grant and Dominic Monahan, with Billy Dee Williams returning as Lando Calrissian for the first time in this new Disney era of “Star Wars” after Donald Glover played the character in the prequel “Solo.”
Also, it sounds like Emperor Palpatine, played by Ian McDiarmid, is also coming back.
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” left the good guys in a rather dire situation — the Resistance was almost completely wiped from the face of the galaxy, and the survivors numbered so few they all could fit into the Millennium Falcon. We’ll see how they get out of this fix — and how the heck Skywalker could rise when, so far as we know, all of them are dead, when “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” premieres on Dec. 20.