Many unfortunate souls who have ventured to the movie theaters these holidays not believing the Rise of Skywalker could be the affront before God, Satan, Odin, and Sol combined left theaters with mostly negative reactions to the movie, but also a distinct feeling that it could have been divided into two movies.

A general sentiment amongst even its supporters was how the Rise of Skywalker had to pull double duty fixing the mistakes from Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi and thus felt as if two movies had been crammed into the runtime of a singular movie. Confirming this in an interview with Awards Daily Rise of Skywalker co-writer Chris Terrio confirmed they would have rather divided the movie into two separate movies, before blaming the entire fiasco on George Lucas.

“If there were a way of doing it, splitting it would have been my dream. We could have written these characters forever. There was so much backstory that had to be left by the wayside. I wish that we could have that, but George always said it was nine movies. That was the natural size of the saga, and so, other than a few initial discussions, we never really advanced that conversation. Of course, as a writer, it breaks your heart to leave stuff on the table that you think would have given the story more depth and nuance and give the characters more to do. Speaking for myself and not on the part of the studio, I do wish there could have been a Part 1 and a Part 2.”

There is one small tiny problem with that statement indicating it was George Lucas’s fault. George had no creative control over the direction of Star Wars. This was made abundantly clear in Iger’s Memoires along with numerous press statements. Lucas’s role at the company was purely consulting with Kathleen Kennedy having the creative control and Bob Iger being the one to have the final say.

Throughout the interview Terrio makes it quite clear it was Kathleen Kennedy who made the decisions as to how long the movie series was going to be.

“Both actually. Kathy Kennedy and Michelle Rejwan had a clear plan for where they wanted things to end. They had clear plans about certain narrative marks they wanted us to hit. They also gave us a lot of freedom within that.”

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“Well, I can’t speak to Kathy’s overall intent. That was certainly discussed and was discussed before I ever came on. Kathy had this overall vision that we had to be telling the same story for nine episodes.”

After going through the interview saying everything was part of “Kathy’s plan” to then turn around and blame George Lucas who everyone knows doesn’t have decision making powers is absurd as it is enraging.

It wasn’t enough for these people to take beloved characters and destroy their legacy. Nor was it enough to simply turn the Skywalker Saga into the Palpatine Saga while in the process destroying everything people who enjoyed the new trilogy liked. Now after their identity politics pushing and bad writing has caused a 59% drop off at the box office they’re looking to blame the one man who after being screwed by Iger, Kennedy, and Disney stepped back in and attempted to fix The Rise of Skywalker.

Perhaps one day the Lucas cut will be released to the public and we’ll be able to see how much more talent he has salvaging their train wreck of a script than they ever had with complete creative freedom. ‘Till then we’ll have to endure the audacity of these hacks attempting to pass blame for their failure onto Lucas and everyone else but themselves.