Footage of Carrie Fisher to Be Used in Episode IX Looks “Like it Was Shot Yesterday”

A giant Princess Leia-sized hole was left in the final Star Wars film when Carrie Fisher passed away unexpectedly a little over two years ago. Though she had completed her filming for Episode VIII, there were a lot of questions left hanging over the state of things for any future Star Wars movies.

Rian Johnson punted on the decision, leaving the character alive even after a brush with death in the film that could have easily been used to fix this rather messy situation. It's fitting, too, that he punted it right to cinema's greatest punter, J.J. Abrams, who has come back to close out the series, something he hasn't done before with his major franchise work. Typically he's the one asking questions with no intention of answering them, so it's nice to see him have to think on his feet, I suppose.

The good news is that Abrams shot enough footage of Fisher that wasn't used for The Force Awakens, leaving him with some options for the character of Leia this time around. Lucasfilm announced that they weren't going to digitally recreate Fisher the way they did with Peter Cushing for Rogue One, so this seemed like the best solution to the problem.

However, there was concern as to whether this would look natural, considering it was footage shot for another film. According to Comic Book Movie, Fisher's brother Todd stopped by Good Morning America to assuage some of those concerns and let us know that it's going to look perfectly natural...

“There’s a lot of minutes of footage. I don’t mean just outtakes. This is unused, new content that could be woven into the storyline. That’s what’s going to give everybody such a great kick. It’s going to look like it was meant to be. Like it was shot yesterday.

“We’re not allowed to talk about the details of anything,” he added. “But we’re thrilled at what’s been done.”

So that's good to know, at least this isn't some digitally created abomination that our brains will reject. While it's obviously not ideal, this is sort of them making the best of a bad situation. Star Wars Episode IX is out in less than a year, on December 19, 2019.