On September 5, 2017, Lucasfilm issued a brief statement confirming that Colin Trevorrow would no longer be directing Star Wars: Episode IX. The statement cited “creative differences” — the standard Hollywood euphemism that can mean anything from a genuine artistic impasse to a complete breakdown of professional trust — and was accompanied by a reciprocal statement from Trevorrow himself that was notably gracious, notably brief, and notably devoid of the specific detail that everyone reading it immediately wanted.
| Quick Facts | Details |
|---|---|
| Director Hired | Colin Trevorrow — announced June 2015 |
| Project | Star Wars: Episode IX (eventually The Rise of Skywalker) |
| Departure Announced | September 5, 2017 |
| Time on Project | Approximately 2 years, 3 months |
| Official Reason | “Creative differences” — joint Lucasfilm/Trevorrow statement |
| Key Figure at Lucasfilm | Kathleen Kennedy — President, Lucasfilm |
| Trevorrow’s Script | Duel of the Fates — co-written with Derek Connolly; leaked online 2020 |
| Damaging Film | The Book of Henry (June 2017) — 23% on Rotten Tomatoes |
| Replacement Director | J.J. Abrams — returned to complete the sequel trilogy |
| Final Film | The Rise of Skywalker (December 2019) — $1.074 billion worldwide |
| Trevorrow’s Retained Credit | Story credit on The Rise of Skywalker; donated residuals to charity |
| Fan Verdict (post-leak) | Majority of Star Wars fans preferred Duel of the Fates over The Rise of Skywalker |
The announcement was the most high-profile director departure from a major franchise in modern Hollywood history. Trevorrow had been attached to the project for over two years. He had been publicly identified, repeatedly and prominently, as the man who would conclude the sequel trilogy that The Force Awakens (2015) and The Last Jedi (2017) bracketed. His name had appeared in press releases, on production listings, in interviews with cast members who described him as part of the film they were preparing to make. And then, eleven weeks before principal photography was scheduled to begin, he was gone.
Understanding why Colin Trevorrow was fired from Star Wars requires examining four overlapping factors — none of which, in isolation, fully explains the outcome, but which together produced a situation that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy apparently concluded was unresolvable.
How He Got the Job: The Jurassic World Moment
To understand the firing, it is necessary first to understand the hiring — because the logic that gave Trevorrow the Episode IX job in June 2015 is directly related to the logic that took it away in September 2017.
When Lucasfilm announced in June 2015 — simultaneous with the global promotional campaign for The Force Awakens — that Trevorrow would direct Episode IX, the announcement was received with widespread surprise. He had directed exactly one theatrical feature at that point: Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), a $750,000 Sundance comedy-drama that had grossed approximately $4 million at the box office and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. The gap between that credential and the responsibility of concluding the most commercially and culturally significant film franchise in history was, objectively, enormous.
What justified the hire — in Kathleen Kennedy’s assessment and in the logic of the broader industry — was Jurassic World. The film had opened on June 12, 2015, just weeks before the Episode IX announcement, and its opening weekend had broken the all-time domestic box office record with $208.8 million. The film would go on to gross $1.671 billion worldwide. Trevorrow had demonstrated, in a single film, that he could manage the specific combination of demands that franchise blockbuster filmmaking requires: large-scale visual effects, ensemble cast management, the emotional language of a beloved existing property, and the commercial instincts to deliver an audience-satisfying result.
Kathleen Kennedy had used exactly the same logic in hiring J.J. Abrams for The Force Awakens — a director whose Star Trek reboot had demonstrated franchise competence — and Rian Johnson for The Last Jedi, whose Looper had shown science fiction intelligence within budgetary constraints. The pattern was consistent: identify filmmakers whose smaller work revealed the qualities the franchise required, then scale them up.
In Trevorrow’s case, the scaling worked once. The second time, it didn’t.
The Book of Henry: The Film That Changed Everything
In June 2017 — approximately two years into Trevorrow’s work on Episode IX — Focus Features released The Book of Henry, a film he had directed from a script by Gregg Hurwitz. Trevorrow had made the film during the development period of Episode IX, presumably as a creative outlet during the long pre-production phase that large franchise films require.
The Book of Henry starred Naomi Watts, Jaeden Martell, Jacob Tremblay, and Sarah Silverman, and told the story of a genius child who discovers that his neighbour is being abused and constructs an elaborate plan to address the situation — a plan that involves, among other elements, his mother being guided through the execution of a targeted killing via an instructional cassette tape he has pre-recorded. The film’s tonal ambition — attempting to blend family drama, thriller, and emotional melodrama within a single narrative — was, by the near-universal assessment of critics who reviewed it, fatally mishandled.
The reviews were devastating. The film currently holds a 23% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics describing its tonal shifts as jarring, its narrative logic as strained, and its emotional manipulation as counterproductive to the genuine feeling it was clearly attempting to produce. The Hollywood Reporter called it one of the more “spectacularly misjudged” studio-adjacent releases of recent years. Multiple reviews specifically noted the script’s structural problems — a significant observation given that Episode IX was still in script development.
The timing was critical. The Book of Henry opened in June 2017. Trevorrow’s departure from Episode IX was announced in September 2017. The three-month gap between the reviews and the announcement is not coincidental. Within Lucasfilm, according to multiple industry sources who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair, and other outlets in the months following the departure, the Book of Henry reviews accelerated an existing set of concerns about Trevorrow’s creative judgment that had been developing independently of the film itself.
The film did not cause the firing on its own. But it removed the runway that a director in a difficult creative relationship with a studio needs in order to survive that difficulty. When the trust is already strained and the most recent evidence of your judgment is a 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, the institutional calculus shifts decisively.
The Creative Clash with Kathleen Kennedy
The reported interpersonal dimension of Trevorrow’s Episode IX departure is, by the nature of these situations, harder to verify with precision than the factual timeline. What multiple credible industry sources reported, in the weeks and months following the September 2017 announcement, amounts to a consistent picture: Trevorrow was described, by people who worked with him or around him during the Episode IX development period, as difficult, arrogant, and resistant to collaborative input in ways that Lucasfilm’s working culture found incompatible with the franchise’s production requirements.
The specific language that circulated in industry reporting included descriptions of Trevorrow as someone who struggled to accept notes — the standard development process by which studios and producers provide feedback on scripts and a director either incorporates, negotiates, or pushes back against that feedback. In franchise filmmaking, particularly at Disney/Lucasfilm, the notes process is not optional and is not primarily a creative exercise; it is an institutional mechanism through which the studio protects a billion-dollar asset. A director who approaches that process as an imposition on their artistic autonomy rather than as a feature of the professional environment they have agreed to work within creates a structural problem that escalates over time rather than resolving itself.
Kathleen Kennedy — Lucasfilm’s president, a producer of extraordinary experience and institutional authority whose credits include the original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones series, the Back to the Future trilogy, Schindler’s List, and E.T. — is not a person whose production authority is easily challenged. Multiple sources characterised the relationship between Kennedy and Trevorrow as having deteriorated significantly across the development period, with the creative differences being as much about professional conduct and collaborative approach as about the specific content of the script.
Notably, Rian Johnson — whose The Last Jedi was in production during the same period — navigated a similarly complex creative relationship with Lucasfilm while delivering a finished film that, whatever its divisive audience reception, demonstrated that the institutional framework was workable. The contrast between Johnson’s navigation of the Lucasfilm process and Trevorrow’s inability to do so was not lost on industry observers.
The Script: What Was Wrong with Duel of the Fates?
The script that Trevorrow and Derek Connolly had developed for Episode IX — titled Duel of the Fates — was not publicly available at the time of the departure. Its existence was known; its contents were not. The leaked version that circulated online from 2020 onward allowed a more substantive assessment of what Lucasfilm had found problematic — though it must be noted that the leaked draft represents a specific stage of development and may not reflect the most recent version Trevorrow submitted.
What the Duel of the Fates script contains, and what distinguishes it most sharply from the The Rise of Skywalker that Abrams eventually made, includes several elements that credible reporting suggests Lucasfilm found concerning:
The script gave Finn a substantially larger and more politically grounded narrative arc — one that positioned him as the leader of a First Order stormtrooper rebellion, exploring the systemic nature of the film’s antagonist organisation rather than focusing the resolution on individual heroic confrontation. This was tonally different from the direction Kennedy and Lucasfilm wanted for the trilogy’s conclusion.
The script used Coruscant — the Republic capital city covered in buildings, familiar from the prequel trilogy — as a major setting, reintroducing a location whose associations in the broader Star Wars universe were primarily connected to the prequel era that the sequel trilogy had largely avoided referencing.
Most significantly, the script’s treatment of Rey’s parentage and identity — the central mystery of the sequel trilogy — resolved differently than The Rise of Skywalker‘s “somehow Palpatine returned” approach. Whether Duel of the Fates‘s resolution was dramatically superior is a matter of genuine debate; what is clear is that the two approaches reflected fundamentally different visions of what the trilogy had been building toward.
The institutional problem was not simply that the script contained ideas Lucasfilm disagreed with — development disagreements are normal and resolvable. The problem, according to industry reporting, was that Trevorrow was unwilling or unable to move the script sufficiently in the directions that Kennedy and Lucasfilm required, and that the notes process had reached an impasse that neither party could navigate past.
September 5, 2017: The Announcement
The official Lucasfilm statement on September 5, 2017 read: “Lucasfilm and Colin Trevorrow have mutually agreed to part ways on Star Wars: Episode IX. Colin has been a wonderful collaborator throughout the development process but we have all come to the conclusion that our visions for the project differ. We wish Colin the best and look forward to seeing Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in December.”
Trevorrow’s own statement was brief and dignified: “Making Star Wars has been the defining experience of my professional life, and I will always work to be worthy of it. I deeply believe in the character and humanity of this story and, with every decision, have been driven by a desire to make the best possible film. Regrettably, my approach and process wasn’t aligned with their vision for this project. I wish Disney and Lucasfilm the very best.”
What is notable about both statements is what they do not contain: no specific creative disagreements are named, no blame is assigned, and no detail is provided about the script, the timeline, or the nature of the professional relationship’s breakdown. This is standard in these situations — both parties have legal and professional incentives to maintain public civility — but the restraint in Trevorrow’s statement, given the circumstances, reflects genuine discipline.
J.J. Abrams was announced as the replacement director within days. His return to the franchise he had launched with The Force Awakens was framed as a stabilising choice — the known quantity returning to ensure the trilogy concluded with the commercial reliability that Disney required.
Duel of the Fates Leaked: The Fan Verdict
When the Duel of the Fates script leaked online in January 2020 — approximately a month after The Rise of Skywalker opened to mixed reviews and a muted box office performance by the standards of the sequel trilogy — the fan response was immediate and, for Trevorrow, largely vindicating in the court of public opinion.
The Rise of Skywalker had opened in December 2019 to the weakest critical reception of the sequel trilogy, a 51% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and a box office total of $1.074 billion — commercially significant in absolute terms but the lowest-grossing entry in the sequel trilogy and a figure that, against the benchmark of The Force Awakens ($2.068 billion) and even The Last Jedi ($1.332 billion), represented a meaningful commercial disappointment.
The Duel of the Fates script, read in the context of that disappointment, struck a significant portion of the Star Wars fandom as a more coherent, more emotionally grounded, and more thematically satisfying conclusion to the trilogy than the film that had actually been released. Multiple fan analyses noted specifically that it honoured the character work of The Last Jedi rather than reversing it, that it gave Finn the arc his The Force Awakens introduction had seemed to promise, and that its treatment of the Rey storyline was less reliant on retconning established sequel trilogy mythology.
Whether the Duel of the Fates version would have been a better film in execution — with the specific actors, the specific visual effects, the specific musical score — than the script alone can demonstrate is genuinely unknowable. Scripts are not films. But the fan verdict that the script represents a more satisfying creative vision than what The Rise of Skywalker delivered is sufficiently widespread to constitute a meaningful data point in any honest assessment of what the Trevorrow firing cost the franchise.
What It Means: Franchise Filmmaking and Creative Autonomy
The Trevorrow episode is, in the broader history of franchise filmmaking, one of the clearest illustrations of a structural tension that the modern studio system has not fully resolved: the tension between the creative autonomy that attracts talented directors to major projects and the institutional control that studios believe those projects require to protect their commercial value.
Disney and Lucasfilm had, in the years surrounding Trevorrow’s departure, experienced multiple high-profile directorial conflicts: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were removed from Solo: A Star Wars Story mid-production in 2017, replaced by Ron Howard. Patty Jenkins had departed an earlier incarnation of Thor: The Dark World. The pattern was not unique to Star Wars, but the concentration of these events within a short window created an industry narrative about Lucasfilm’s working culture that persisted for years.
The directors who have navigated major franchise environments successfully — the Russo Brothers within the MCU, Christopher Nolan within Warner Bros., Spielberg within his own producing empire — have done so by developing either genuine institutional alignment with the studio’s priorities or sufficient leverage to maintain creative independence within that alignment. Trevorrow, at the stage of his career when Episode IX arrived, had neither the leverage that comes from a sustained track record of commercial success nor, apparently, the institutional temperament to work effectively within the constraints that Lucasfilm imposed.
Conclusion
Colin Trevorrow was fired from Star Wars Episode IX because of a combination of four factors that, together, proved unresolvable: the catastrophic critical reception of The Book of Henry, which destroyed the creative confidence that Lucasfilm needed to maintain in order to trust his judgment; reported personal difficulties in the collaborative process with Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm’s development apparatus; a script — Duel of the Fates — whose vision diverged from the direction Kennedy wanted for the trilogy’s conclusion in ways that the notes process could not bridge; and the institutional logic of a billion-dollar franchise that required, above all, certainty — a quality that the preceding two years had failed to establish.
He handled the departure with public dignity, donated his story credit residuals to charity, completed the Jurassic World trilogy, founded Metronome Film Co., and continued working. The Duel of the Fates script, read by millions of fans after The Rise of Skywalker disappointed, became the most celebrated film never made in the Star Wars universe.
Whether the film he would have made was better than the film that was made is a question that has no definitive answer. That it would have been different — substantially, fundamentally different — is beyond reasonable doubt. In franchise filmmaking, different is sometimes exactly what the institution cannot afford. That is, ultimately, why Colin Trevorrow and Star Wars: Episode IX went their separate ways.
