Thoughts after seeing it a second time:
First, I’d be doing a “paired” edit of TFA and TLJ, which breaks from what I wanted to do with my personal “saga” edits that I’ve so far refrained from talking about on here. The whole idea with my personal “canon cuts” was to edit each individual film in such a way that it doesn’t egregiously contradict the rest of the overall canon, so someone could pick out just one of my edits and slot it in with the theatrical/SE/whatever version of every other film without breaking anything, or use all of my edits but swap out just one of them with an official cut or a different fan edit, without any problems.
But TFA/TLJ breaks that idea completely, because of how I feel I have to handle the ending of TFA/beginning of TLJ.
So with that preface out of the way, here’s what I’m probably gonna end up doing:
- Use TFA Restructured as the basis for my TFA, cutting out some cringe-y humor here and there and some other nips and tucks. But that’s beside the point because this is a TLJ thread. I had to mention TFA, though, because I will…
- End TFA with the Falcon leaving the Resistance base, and…
- Open TLJ with the Falcon arriving on Ahch-To (from TFA’s ending). So the ending of TFA becomes the opening of TLJ. Continue through Luke and Rey’s meeting and stitch the Ahch-To stuff together so it flows as one scene, until Luke asks “Where’s Han?” Then…
- Shortened version of the Kylo/Snoke scene, but everything with Kylo’s helmet is gone. In my edit it will be implied that his helmet was never recovered from Starkiller Base. I paid attention to this scene during my second viewing, and after he takes his helmet off, you really never see it on the ground or anything for the rest of the scene, and no important information is delivered through Kylo’s voice-modulated mask, and any important pre-mask-removal Snoke dialogue can be reshuffled in the scene. This also means Hux is gone from this scene entirely.
- No Kylo elevator scene/mask destruction (as the mask was lost with SKB).
A little iffy on the sequence of events from here, but I think, like Neverar, I’d want to push the Resistance escape from D’Qar as far back as I could. Really, in the edit, I’ll be working backwards from the infiltration of Snoke’s ship by both Rey and Finn/Rose and see how it all shakes out from there.
Leia’s Superman bit will probably be cut, too, even though I didn’t have a massively huge issue with it myself. It’s easy to cut, though.
As for Canto Bight, a lot of it will be cut. I’ll definitely be going from the prison cell scene directly to the trio in hyperspace, with no CGI horse riding or any of that.
That’s all I’ve got for the moment beyond obvious little nips and tucks here and there.