While it was pretty cool to see Emperor Palpatine return in an attempt to dominate the galaxy in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, his introduction did raise a lot of questions that weren’t answered and left some fans confused. Many of those questions involved Palpatine’s backstory. The movie really didn’t give us anything in regards to how he returned and managed to pull off building an epic fleet of Star Destroyers.

Well, it turns out that there were earlier cuts of the film that did explore the backstory of Palpatine! According to J.J. Abrams’ longtime editor, Maryann Brandon an earlier cut of The Rise of Skywalker actually explained the return of Emperor Palpatine after he seemingly died at the end of Return of the Jedi.

While talking to The Huffington Post during an interview, Brandon explained that the creative team went “back and forth” on how much Palpatine backstory they wanted to include in the film. In the end, they cut most of it:

“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal. Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with.”

Brandon went on to say that there was “a little more information about it, what was keeping [Palpatine] alive [but] it seemed to go off topic. There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on. I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know.”

The thing is, we did need to know! That information seemed like it would be super important to the story! After all, Palpatine returned after all these years and we have no idea how! There’s a whole story there a story that a lot of fans would have liked to see.

Hopefully, those deleted scenes end up being shared at some point with a home entertainment release. Do you think Emperor Palpatine’s backstory should have been included in the film?