After iconic actor and activist Carrie Fisher’s untimely death last year, Star Wars was left with the sad question about what to do with her famous character, Leia Organa. During an event on Thursday, Disney CEO Bob Iger reaffirmed that the studio would not be creating a CGI version of the late actress for future Star Wars movies but said that the upcoming Last Jedi wasn’t being changed in the wake of her death.
“When we bought Lucasfilm, we were going to make three films — Episodes VII, VIII and IX,” Iger said during a talk at USC, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “We had to deal with tragedy at the end of 2016. Carrie appears throughout VIII. We are not changing VIII to deal with her passing. Her performance remains as it is in VIII. In Rogue One, we had some digital character. We are not doing that with Carrie.”
Disney famously — and somewhat controversially — resurrected Peter Cushing by using advanced computer generated imagery in order to bring back his steel-faced Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One. Disney had already said, pretty explicitly, that it would not be doing the same thing for Fisher.
Cushing and Fisher as seen in the original *Star Wars*.
The question of what’s going to happen to Leia’s character in light of this real world tragedy remains, but Iger’s comments are confirmation that The Last Jedi, which is due out in theaters on December 15, 2017, won’t be altered. Fisher’s final Star Wars performance will be unchanged, rather than altered in order to lay groundwork for what will presumably be her absence in Episode IX.
Elsewhere in the talk, Iger also revealed additional details about the plot of the Han Solo standalone movie, explaining that it would track six years of the smuggler with a heart of gold’s early life.
