What Carrie Fisher’s death means for future Star Wars films

FANS were expecting that Carrie Fisher would reprise her role as Leia in the next two Star Wars films due out in 2017 and 2019. But what will happen now?

Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

CARRIE Fisher’s death has left a huge hole in the Star Wars galaxy, so where to from here?

The good news is that Fisher, who died at the age of 60 after suffering a heart attack, had already finished filming her scenes for Star Wars: Episode VIII, which is due out in December next year.

The upcoming film is the sequel to The Force Awakens, which became the highest-grossing Star Wars movie when it was released late last year.

Shooting for Episode VIII wrapped in July with the film’s director, Rian Johnson, documenting the last scene on Twitter.

Final slate of the final shot. VIII is officially wrapped. Cannot wait to share it with you all! -@rianjohnson pic.twitter.com/l4Apk0Ro4i

— Star Wars (@starwars) July 22, 2016

Fisher’s death will dramatically affect Star Wars: Episode IX though, which is due out in 2019.

The movie is in pre-production, meaning that filming hasn’t yet begun.

Fans were expecting that Fisher’s character, Leia Organa, would play a major role in the movie and that’s exactly what director Colin Trevorrow hinted at earlier this year when he said he couldn’t wait “to find new places that we can take those characters [Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa]”.

“They are icons, but they’re also people that have suffered tremendous loss and challenge over the course of all these films,” Trevorrow said to The Guardian.

“[Episode IX] is something that needs to honour a story that’s been told over a period of 40 years. I don’t want to ignore any of it, and I respect all of it. It’s something I think the fan base is going to embrace.”

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars.

Disney has a few options for how to deal with Fisher’s death in Episode IX:

● It could recast the character and get another actor to star as Leia

● It could rewrite the script and get another character to explain Leia’s absence

● It could use digital effects to recreate Leia, like the filmmakers did in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher 1977’s Star Wars.

Rogue One also digitally recreated the character of Grand Moff Tarkin, who was played by Peter Cushing. The actor died in 1994 but the character made an appearance by getting a similarly sized actor to wear motion-capture materials on his head, which then had Cushing’s face digitally transferred onto it.

The decision to bring Cushing back to life for the movie raised ethical questions, but visual effects supervisor John Knoll defended the move and said he didn’t think it would become a trend in future Star Wars films.

“It is extremely labour-intensive and expensive to do,” John Knoll said to The New York Times. “I don’t imagine anybody engaging in this kind of thing in a casual manner.

“We’re not planning on doing this digital recreation extensively from now on. It just made sense for this particular movie.”

Fans will have to wait and see how the filmmakers deal with Carrie Fisher’s death, but one thing’s for sure, the galaxy has lost one of its brightest stars.