Star Wars: The Force Awakens was primarily a coming-of-age story for Rey and Finn, tossing a desert-scavenging orphan and First Order deserter into the maelstrom of a galaxy-wide conflict. Each has their own path before them, but only Rey’s is explored in the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which is primarily framed around Rey’s training with Luke Skywalker. Finn is only shown once, seemingly in a medically-induced coma after getting his spine exposed by Kylo Ren. A new interview of Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, may not reveal Finn’s journey in The Last Jedi, but she does knock down of the most enduring fan expectations: Finn will not become romantically entangled with Poe Dameron in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
“We’ve talked about it, but I think you’re not going to see it in The Last Jedi,” Kennedy said to Spanish-language movie site e Cartelera (since this is a loose translation, her exact wording may have been different) when asked about a romance between Finn and Poe. Kennedy didn’t say anything to preclude a romantic relationship in Episode IX, so it’s possible The Last Jedi will maintain the ambiguous, will-they-won’t-they vibe of The Force Awakens.
The future of the Star Wars galaxy is at an inflection point. Between this year’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the upcoming Han Solo movie and Star Wars: Episode IX, the immediate future of the series follows a predictable course. The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy will find its end in 2019 and the anthology spin-off A Star Wars Story series will continue squeezing what blood they can from the old movies and characters. From 2020 on is a mystery, not just on a movie-by-movie basis, but in the larger narrative arc of Star Wars.
Whatever shape the Star Wars series takes, Kennedy says they’ll be absorbing feedback from the fans. “In the next six or eight months we will have some meetings about the stories that we develop next,” Kennedy told e Cartelera. “After 40 years of adventures, people have a lot of information and a lot of theories about the direction these stories can take and sometimes those theories are new ideas for us to listen to, read and pay attention to. The fans are as much masters of this franchise as we are.”
But while fandom might influence the future of the Star Wars series, the Poe and Finn shipping has yet to become a reality.
