ScreenCrush’s WookieeLeaks is a weekly roundup of everything Star Wars! From The Force Awakens, to the upcoming spinoffs and the TV shows, if it pertains to that long ago, far away galaxy, we’re covering it here, bringing you our expert analysis. This week, a rumored ending for The Force Awakens gets explored and images of a new alien character are revealed!

You Can Read All About the Ending of The Force Awakens (If That’s Your Thing)

There’s a massive spoiler floating around the internet concerning the third act of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. We can get to that in a minute, if that’s what you want to read about. But let’s build up to the big stuff with something harmless and fun that won’t upset anyone trying to avoid actual plot details.

First up, Mythbusters host and effects guru Adam Savage let it slip that visual effects master/dinosaur supervisor Phil Tippett did some work on The Force Awakens. Considering J.J. Abrams’ love of practical effects, this isn’t a surprise. However, fans will certainly appreciate the way his talents were apparently utilized. It’s a bit of an original trilogy deep cut:

We were talking to Savage about practical visual effects, and the fact that a lot of film-makers (like J.J. Abrams) are returning to practical VFX. And Savage mentioned that he’s friends with Phil Tippett, the creature designer from the original Star Wars trilogy. According to Savage, Tippett was brought back into the new film by J.J. Abrams, to recreate one iconic sequence from the first movie, in particular. “I got to go watch him shoot it,” says Savage. “It was so cool—the old school technology. The oldest school technology: his animation. And it’s beautiful.”

 

We guessed that Savage was talking about that animated “chess” game, with the weird creatures—and apparently, we guessed right.

So there you go. The Dejarik board (aka, holographic space chess) we saw in the original Star Wars is still on board the Millennium Falcon and it still works well enough to require Phil Tippett to animate it. Now that’s pretty cool.

And now we’re going to get into the big SPOILER that’s floating around. If you’ve been keeping up with each and every rumor that’s hit the internet, this one won’t surprise you at all. Still, proceed cautiously and if you don’t want to know anything, scroll down to the next section immediately. Even if the exact details here are wrong, the overall outcome could reflect what transpires in the final film.

In other words: SPOILER WARNING. Seriously. That’s all caps and everything. Now you know.

Anyway, in some real friend-of-a-friend style reporting, a new report claims that an actor present on the set of The Force Awakens witnessed the following:

He watched a scene being shot at Greenham common airbase in which Leia is sad and says ‘I don’t know how he will cope without him’, my source told me Han Solo dies, I quizzed him and he said he just presumed, I then asked who was she talking to, he said a couple of Wookiees but not Chewy, I asked him could you have meant that Chewy dies, he said that might of been the case, he didn’t know just that one of them does.

As far as we know, Chewbacca does not die in The Force Awakens. However, all evidence suggests that Han Solo doesn’t live to see the end credits, so Leia is probably referring to Chewie in that line of dialogue. So there you have it. We know someone dies and once again, we can safely assume that it’s Han.

If you really want to take a deep dive into spoiler territory, Making Star Wars has compiled every rumor and known story beat into a big list that spells out the entire third act of The Force Awakens. Read at your own peril.

New Characters and First Looks

This week’s big Star Wars news was all about director Rian Johnson seeking out the great Benicio del Toro to play a villain in Star Wars: Episode 8. Since del Toro turned down the villain role in Star Trek Into Darkness and accepted a villain(ous) role in Guardians of the Galaxy, who knows what he’ll do here! But we already covered all of this right over here, so let’s move onto other, niche-ier news.

That soundstage in the tweet below contains sets for Star Wars: Rogue One. From this angle, it’s difficult to see exactly what’s going on in there. They could be literally be building anything.

But then you see these photos snapped from a different angle and it starts to look like they’re constructing the Massassi Temple on Yavin IV, the sight of the secret Rebel base in the original Star Wars. Considering the time frame of Rogue One, this certainly seems plausible.

But let’s conclude all of this with something that you can actually clearly see without squinting. A batch of concept art from The Force Awakens made its way online, showcasing early designs for BB-8 and a handful of nifty new aliens. One of those aliens was drawn sitting the cockpit of an X-Wing, wearing the pilot’s uniform and everything.

It turns out that the X-Wing pilot alien made it into the final movie. His name is Bullhead, he’s a practical effect, and there’s an actual set photo of him right here. This is not only another astonishing on-set creature, it’s the series’ first non-human X-Wing pilot. In his 2009 Star Trek reboot, J.J. Abrams gracefully incorporated alien characters into every scene, never calling attention to them and simply letting them exist as part of a living, breathing world. It’s easy to imagine him taking that philosophy to Star Wars, where an alien now pilots an X-Wing because of course there would be alien X-Wing pilots. Duh.

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