Colin Trevorrow was reportedly fired from Episode IX for being “difficult”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Colin Trevorrow was announced as the director of STAR WARS: EPISODE IX over two years ago, but earlier this week, Lucasfilm parted ways with the director, saying that "Colin has been a wonderful collaborator throughout the development process but we have all come to the conclusion that our visions for the project differ. We wish Colin the best and will be sharing more information about the film soon." As seems to be happening all too often over at Lucasfilm, those dreaded "creative differences" have popped up once again, but Vulture recently spoke with someone who claimed to have direct knowledge of Trevorrow's behavior during the production of both JURASSIC WORLD and THE BOOK OF HENRY, which may have attributed to his dismissal from EPISODE IX.

During the making of Jurassic World, he focused a great deal of his creative energies on asserting his opinion. But because he had been personally hired by Spielberg, nobody could say, ‘You’re fired.’ Once that film went through the roof and he chose to do Henry, [Trevorrow] was unbearable. He had an egotistical point of view— and he was always asserting that.

During pre-production on STAR WARS: EPISODE IX, Trevorrow reportedly grew more and more "unmanageable" while taking "repeated stabs at multiple drafts of the script." Once THE BOOK OF HENRY was released to shockingly terrible reviews, rumours flew that Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy was going to "dump him because they weren’t thrilled with working with him anyway," with the executive adding that Trevorrow is "a difficult guy. He’s really, really, really confident. Let’s call it that." Hollywood certainly has no shortage of overly confident directors who have been labelled "difficult," but Kathleen Kennedy clearly didn't want a repeat of the Christopher Miller and Phil Lord debacle on the Han Solo movie.

“There’s one gatekeeper when it comes to Star Wars and it’s Kathleen Kennedy,” says a veteran movie producer, who has worked with the studio chief. “If you rub Kathleen Kennedy the wrong way — in any way — you’re out. You’re done. A lot of these young, new directors want to come in and say, ‘I want to do this. I want to do that.’ A lot of these guys — Lord and Miller, Colin Trevorrow — got very rich, very fast and believed a lot of their own hype. And they don’t want to play by the rules. They want to do shit differently. And Kathleen Kennedy isn’t going to fuck around with that.”

As always, take this information with a grain of salt, but I'm certain that we'll be hearing more about what went down as time goes on. Lucasfilm hasn't yet announced just who will be taking Colin Trevorrow's place as the director of STAR WARS: EPISODE IX, so let us know in the comments below who you would like to see bring the STAR WARS sequel trilogy to a close.

STAR WARS: EPISODE IX is still set for a May 24, 2019 release.