An Early Draft of STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER Featured Palpatine Hiding on Coruscant

In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker we learned that Emperor Palpatine, in his clone form, was hiding on Exegol and building his Sith army for the Final Order. Well, it turns out that an earlier draft of the script told a story where the Sith ord was hiding out in the ruins of a Jedi temple on Coruscant.

This new bit of information came from the book The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The book reveals the following:

"Instead of finding his way to Exegol, in the early November 2017 version of The Rise of Skywalker story, Kylo Ren instead takes his shuttle to a desolate, ash-covered Coruscant, the once bustling city streets now overrun by giant wolves. Inside the abandoned Jedi Temple, Kylo takes a central elevator down to the temple's deepest level."

There, Kylo Ren explored the desolate planet and found Palpatine, who still resembled what we saw in the final film. It makes me wonder what happened to Coruscant between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker that would have made it fall into such ruin.

While it might have been fun to revisit Coruscant, in the end these little details wouldn’t have made the story any better. In the end, for their own reasons, the creative team decided to take the story to an all-new planet.