star wars

In what may turn out to be one more giant hardship for 2016, troubling reports are coming in that Star Wars legend and all-around icon Carrie Fisher may be in critical condition. Fisher reportedly suffered a “massive” heart-attack aboard an airplane, and has been rushed to the hospital.

Even if you’re not the biggest fan of CGI actors returned from the dead, you probably had to appreciate the ways that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards tried to bring the events of Star Wars: A New Hope more directly into his film. In several key sequences, Edwards was even able to feature unseen footage from the original 1977 film, causing fans to wonder where that new footage came from (and why they hadn’t seen it before). Are there entire archives of unseen footage that Lucasfilm has been hiding from fans for all these decades?

The following post contains SPOILERS — both real and fake ones that got shared online — for Rogue One.

NOTE: The following post contains SPOILERS for Rogue One. Mostly, though, it contains spoilers for things that aren’t in Rogue One.

One of the biggest questions we were left with at the end of The Force Awakens, aside from “Do you think Luke makes his own organic soap out there on that space island?” was “Who the heck are Rey’s parents?” It’s a question that won’t be answered in the Star Wars universe until Episode VIII hits theaters late next year…unless you’re a real smarty-pants like Daisy Ridley.

The long countdown to the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on December 16 has at last hit the ten-day mark, and with buzz now at a nearly deafening roar, each day has demanded fresh preview material to keep the hordes of fans docile. It’s like an advent calendar, but instead of delicious chocolates and trinkets symbolizing holiday cheer, we get fragmented, context-free snippets symbolizing the insatiable will of America’s pop-culture mavens. It’s the reason for the season, and by “it,” I mean “the inability to allow one’s self to be pleasantly surprised by a blockbuster.”

Over the past couple of years, policemen have fallen pretty far out of favor with the American people. The U.S. police force is in dire need of a little PR management, something that shows their sense of humor and gives a more human, relatable slant to the boys in blue.

We’re just about a month away from Disney’s biggest gamble on the Star Wars universe. While odds are good that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will do well at the box office  —  projects this big rarely fail to find their audience  —  there must be a little anxiety in the hearts of Star Wars fans and Disney executives alike. The studio has made some pretty big financial investments in their upcoming slate of standalone Star Wars stories; if Rogue One disappoints in its opening weekend, it could be seen as a shot across the bow of Disney’s future slate.

Joss Whedon may have disappeared from social media (for a time), but the Avengers director and TV icon is back in more ways than one. Not only is Whedon back on Twitter, but he’s working on a new horror film set during World War II, and — despite his self-admitted exhaustion from working with Marvel — he’s ready to direct another big franchise film. Ideally, he wants to make one of those big Star Wars movies.

When an actor expresses interest in returning to an iconic role, I always wonder whether the actor needs the movie more than the studio needs the actor. Ron Perlman, for example, has spent years talking up his interest in another Hellboy movie, despite it being fairly obvious that the studio had no real interest in getting that project off the ground. So when Ewan McGregor told reporters last year that he would come back for an Obi-Wan Kenobi standalone movie, I wondered: does this make sense for everyone involved? Or was McGregor just doing the Hollywood equivalent of jumping on a trending hashtag?

Ever wanted your own personal Sith Lord to do thy bidding? Need an astromech droid to record your day-to-day dalliances for the Galactic Empire? Both of those things can be hard to track down, but lucky for you, we just so happen to be giving those exact things away. That's right, you can take home your very own R2-Q5 Imperial Astromech Droid and Return of the Jedi Darth Vader sixth-scale figures just because we like you. Sure this Darth Vader won't actually be able to Force Choke anyone that's giving you the business, but you can pretend he is. That's close enough, right?

Any Star Wars fan knows that nobody speaks as bluntly about the franchise as Carrie Fisher. While Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill might be counted on for the occasional funny soundbite or bit of interesting backstory, if you really want one of the Star Wars actors to lay their chips on the table, it’s Carrie Fisher you need to listen to. The actress and writer possesses one of the most acerbic wits in all of Hollywood and has never shied away from trying to spin her sense of humor into backdoor Star Wars cannon.