Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker effects artist reveals why a certain scene was cut

A Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker visual effects supervisor has opened up about why a deleted scene – featuring a monstrous character known as The Eye of Webbish Bog – was left on the cutting room floor.

“I think it maybe was too lengthy an explanation for something that [director J.J. Abrams] was able to explain in the movie much quicker,” Neal Scanlan told Collider. The scene, which was revealed in an official Star Wars novelisation extract last month, sees Kylo Ren on the hunt for the Sith Wayfinder and confronting a spidery Lovecraftian giant known as The Eye of Webbish Bog on Mustafar.

He added: “J.J.’s movies move very quickly, don’t they? And it was all part of Kylo Ren’s journey and I think he just felt that there was too much time being spent on something which he explained much quicker.”

But this wasn’t a scene relegated to mere concept art or first-draft spitballing – the entire scene was filmed and the creature even constructed by Scanlan’s team.

“That was a character that was designed very early on in the day,” Scanlan explains. “We were all playing around with this idea and talking about it and he did this drawing and J.J. saw it and went, ‘That is amazing’… So we actually did build it and we took it to a place called Black Park in the UK, which is close to Pinewood Studios, where we shot it in a lake on location, and that sequence exists.”

Unfortunately, the Eye of Webbish Bog didn’t make it into The Rise of Skywalker – and the sequence won’t be included in the upcoming home release. Even so, Scanlan hopes that “we can revisit that character in some way” in future. After all, there’s a huge prop lying about in Pinewood just waiting to come out and play…