'Star Wars 9' Trailer 3 Release Date to Bring a Violent Look at the Movie

Most Star Wars fans are still breaking down the D23 footage that revealed Dark Rey, “evil” C-3PO, and fueled tons of new theories, but last week, the British Board of Film Classification rated a third Rise of Skywalker trailer that’s more violent than any we’ve seen from the entire sequels trilogy.

For both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, the final trailer was released sometime in October before each film’s December release. There’s no reason to assume that The Rise of Skywalker will be any different, which means we’re due for another full trailer sometime next month. But the BBFC’s main purpose is to quantify the perceived maturity level of film content. More plainly, they’re sort of like the British version of the MPAA that rates movies in the U.S. as R or PG-13 or PG.

By the BBFC’s own standards, every single trailer previously released for The Rise of Skywalker — along with every trailer for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi — was rated PG. This upcoming “Trailer C,” however, is rated 12A. Based on what we can expect from Star Wars, this is probably for “violence,” “dangerous behavior,” or “threat and horror.”

There’s no way for us to know what’s in this trailer, but somebody over at the BBFC certainly thinks it’s the most gnarly Star Wars trailer they’ve seen in a very long time. We do know that it runs 2 minutes and 16 seconds. That’s the longest trailer yet for The Rise of Skywalker, longer than the longest Force Awakens trailer, but shorter than the longest Last Jedi trailer. So that’s pretty long!

The Trailer Track Twitter account claim this trailer is actually just the D23 footage that was supposed to play before screenings of It: Chapter Two, but various Twitter users report that this isn’t the case and the runtime doesn’t match up. Could all of this still be some kind of false alarm? Maybe, but we prefer to hope for a gnarly third trailer in the coming weeks.

When will this thing actually be released? Screen Rant theorizes that Disney will air it during Monday Night Football in October, and that guess seems consistent with the trailer release schedule of Episode VII and VIII. Star Wars fans should probably watch some football every Monday night for the next eight weeks just to be sure.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will be released in theaters December 20, 2019.