Can you still keep Star Wars secrets in the age of Twitter?
One of the most famous film twists of all time came in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader revealed Luke Skywalker's true parentage. 35 years later, would the filmmakers be able to get away with a surprise that massive, since it would likely be spoiled on Twitter as soon as it leaked? "Everything is different, and I don’t even think of it so much as Twitter as it is the beast of the internet," said Kasdan. "The big thing is that you used to put out a trailer, and people would only see it if they went to the right movie. Now, you put out a picture and the entire world has it in five minutes! You put out a trailer, and there are 80 million views! A rumor or a spoiler can have 200 million views. That didn’t exist in the past."
Still, Kasdan said it didn't influence his scripting, and indeed, there are plenty of Force Awakens surprises still to come ... that is, as long as you didn't dig into a flood of spoiler-heavy images and secrets that were leaked over the past year, allegedly by disgruntled freelancers who'd been laid off last summer when the film temporarily halted production. Knowing how much Abrams values secrecy, I figured that leak must have been awfully painful for the production, but when I asked Kasdan how he himself felt about it, the 66-year-old just shrugged and smiled. "It’s incredibly painful in the world of keeping franchise secrets," he said, sanguine. "It’s not incredibly painful in the world."
