Disney Told THE BOOGEYMAN Director to Remove a STAR WAR Toy From the Film
During the development of the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Boogeyman, there was a scene in the original script that featured a toy lightsaber from the Star Wars franchise. Disney Studios wasn’t a fan of the idea, so they told director Rob Savage to remove it.
The story follows teenager Sadie Harper and her younger sister Sawyer, who are reeling from the recent death of their mother and aren’t getting much support from their father, Will, a therapist who is dealing with his own pain. When a desperate patient unexpectedly shows up at their home seeking help, he leaves behind a terrifying supernatural entity that preys on families and feeds on the suffering of its victims.
Sawyer has a fear of the dark in the story, and to help ease that fear she sleeps with a moon ball in her room, which is a light-up ball. Well, that moon orb was originally supposed to be a toy lightsaber. But, Sawyer is played by Vivien Lyra Blair in the movie, the same young actress that played Princess Leia in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. When talking about the moon ball Savage explained in an interview with THR:
“It’s a real thing that you can buy from Amazon. So we bought a few of them, cracked them open and put a light inside that we could control and dial up and down.”
He then went on to talk about the plan for the toy lightsaber and explained why Disney told him to remove it from the story:
“But the interesting thing about that, especially with the Princess Leia of it all, was that in the original script, she had a toy lightsaber instead of a moon ball that she would hold close to her in bed. That is what I used to sleep with as a kid, and the whole idea was that it was a knockoff lightsaber that started to fritz out when the creature was near and eventually shattered. And Disney, in all fairness, didn’t want an image in the movie of young Princess Leia with a sh*tty knockoff lightsaber fritzing out in her hand. So they said no and that we had to come up with something else, and so me and the production team desperately searched for kids’ toys that glow. And then we found this moon ball that we thought would be a great prop, and so we rewrote the scenes, which ended up being some of the scariest, best scenes in the movie.”
I get why Disney didn’t want to have the young actress holding a toy lightsaber, but I don’t think it would have been a big deal. Disney is so weird sometimes with how elements from their big franchises are used in other films.
Regardless, The Boogeyman is a great freakin’ horror movie and the way the moonball was utilized did make for some great creepy scenes. The movie is worth watching! It comes out this weekend!