Kelly Marie Tran played a key role in
Star Wars: The Last Jedi and by the time the movie ended, Finn had a new love interest and the franchise had its first female lead who was a woman of color. Unfortunately, many "fans" took their frustrations with Rian Johnson's creative decisions out on the actress and she ultimately left social media as a result.
In the build up to the release of
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the character of Rose Tico begun to vanish from merchandise, and it's since been revealed that she had only 76 seconds of screentime in the Skywalker Saga finale.
Now, screenwriter Chris Terrio has claimed that the limited footage available to them featuring Carris Fisher's General Leia Organa is why Rose's role was ultimately reduced.
"One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to," he claims.
We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together. As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for."
"The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose," Terrio concludes.
There's a lot in The Rise of Skywalker that feels like it was done in response to the backlash to The Last Jedi, and it's not hard to find countless articles out there listing all the ways it essentially undoes that movie. Either way, the treatment of this character - whether you love or hate her - is appalling and it's hard to say whether this explanation really cuts the mustard.
What do you guys think?