Empire magazine has unleashed their November issue, which has The Rise of Skywalker as the cover story. So far, we’ve got a brand-new look at the Knights of Ren and a Rey-and-Kylo set of covers.
The separate Rey and Kylo covers will be on newsstands in the U.K. on October 3, and elsewhere… Afterwards. (I’ve never had much luck tracking these guys down here in the states in a timely fashion, so let’s just say… Eventually.) The Rey and Kylo cover by Paul Shipper is for subscribers.
We’ve also got a pretty interesting quote from director J.J. Abrams on following up The Last Jedi:
“I never found myself trying to repair anything,” he tells Empire. “If I had done VIII, I would have done things differently, just as Rian [Johnson] would have done things differently if he had done VII. But having worked on television series, I was accustomed to creating stories and characters that then were run by other people. If you’re willing to walk away from the thing that you created and you believe it’s in trustworthy hands, you have to accept that some of the decisions being made are not gonna be the same that you would make. And if you come back into it, you have to honor what’s been done.”
Empire loves to dribble out bits from their cover stories (From 2015: Our first look at poor Constable Zuvio) so look forward to more of that in the coming days.
Meanwhile, in another small detail out of the Force Friday publicity events from the other day, we got our clearest shot yet of the reforged legacy lightsaber on display at Pinewood, from @starwars socialer Michelle Buchman.
And yet more publicity artwork from Brian Rood. “Leading into designing this piece we came up with the idea of having two unique posters that would mirror each other almost identically,” he writes on his website. “Both images needed to work alone on their own as individual pieces of key art but when combined form an epic portrayal of good vs. evil…”