UPDATED: Disney+‘s A NEW HOPE Inexplicably Alters The Greedo Scene Yet Again

We have no idea what they were thinking here.

By Nov. 12, 2019

(NOTE: Update to follow our original post)

Disney's long-awaited streaming service, Disney+, launched late last night, and so far the rollout's been sort of a mixed bag: on the one hand, you've got the first episode of The Mandalorian, which (by most accounts) offers Star Wars fans one helluva viewing experience; on the other hand, you may not actually be able to watch The Mandalorian, as outages for Disney+ are...well, take a look:

Unfortunate? Oh yes. Surprising? Not at all. Understandable? Y'know what, probably. Our guess is, they'll have most of these kinks worked out with a quickness (it simply won't do to have so many people unable to watch The Mandalorian), but fingers crossed on that front.

Meanwhile, Star Wars fans looking for a little non-Mandalorian action discovered something very curious upon firing up Disney+'s version of Star Wars: A New Hope: namely, they went in and altered the goddamn Greedo scene again. Here's what the new version looks like:

As you can see, this version of scene features a brief shot of Greedo saying something (sans subtitles) before Han fires, leading to a bizarre explosion that seems to be hiding a cut. The BMD staff watched this scene over and over, trying to make sense of what, exactly, we are looking at, and as of this writing we're still not entirely sure. We're also not entirely sure why anyone thought this was a good idea. Sure, non-Star Wars aficionados could very well watch this cut of A New Hope and never notice a thing, but surely Disney didn't think the Star Wars faithful was gonna let this one slip by...right? Surely they know who they're dealing with, right?

As of this writing, there's been no official word from Disney or Lucasfilm on Disney+'s updated version of A New Hope, but we'll update this post should they comment on the matter publicly. In the meantime: were you able to log into Disney+ this morning? What do you think of the above? Like, what are your best guesses for what happened here? Someone trying to bridge the gap between editions? Someone uploaded the wrong dang file? George Lucas monkeying around in Disney+'s back-end from the safety of the George Lucas Hacker Lair? Sound off in the comments below, and stay tuned for more on this one as the situation develops.

UPDATE: Well, turns out it was George Lucas. Lucasfilm just confirmed as much to Vanity Fair, and clarified that the change was made by the Star Wars creator even before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney back in 2012. Why was the change made? That's another question entirely! Anyone got eyes on George Lucas? We're curious what he was up to on this one!

Comments