Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker released in 2019 as was the final installment of the Disney Sequel Trilogy. What seemingly started as the revival of the Star Wars brand with Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm and the 2015 crowd pleaser Star Wars: The Force Awakens everything seemed on track. That is until a couple years in and it became clear Lucasfilm had no plan for the film series.

With 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi becoming one of the most device films is film history and often credited as nearly killing the Star Wars brand Disney scrambled to try and recapture the fan’s attention with Episode 9. But that production has to be one of the most disorderly in Hollywood history with constant re-writes and reshoots that nearly doubled the film’s production, causing the film to underperform at the box office. Not to mention the fact that the film’s first director was fired for “Creative differences”, something that seemingly happens frequently at Lucasfilm.

The original director of the film was to be Colin Trevorrow, known for the Jurassic World film series. The original concept was to be called Star Wars: Duel of the Fates, and was meant to try and find a satisfying ending to the story and work around the limitations ha had been given as he reportedly hated what Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi. He was let go but his script leaked online in 2020.

*An animated recap of “Duel of the Fates” courtesy of MrSundayMovies on Youtube

Recently a twitter user by the name of @hopeschmusical asked people if they thought the canceled Duel of the Fates would have been better or if they prefer what we ended up getting in The Rise of Skywalker:

Ok genuine question, what do you guys think would’ve been better: Duel of the Fates or what we got with Rise of Skywalker? pic.twitter.com/tEfZ7IdpWP

— hope (@hopeschmusical) February 7, 2022

The post made it to trending on the site and as of writing this post has over 8,200k likes and over 1,000 quote tweets. Multiple users replies saying that they would have preferred Duel of the Fates, while a number of users said they preferred The Rise of Skywalker despite its issues.

One thing that many people can all agree on is that “Episode 9” was a huge misfire. Not having a plan from the beginning and just passing each film from one director to another like passing the baton at a relay race is definitely not the best way to produce a multi-million dollar trilogy. And with the current state of Star Wars being the way it is it will most likely take years of hard work from people like Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau to earn back the good will of the fandom.

Would you have preferred Duel of the Fates over The Rise of Skywalker? Or do you like what we ended up getting? Or perhaps would you have preferred George Lucas’ Sequel Trilogy? Let us know in the comments section.