How Credible Are Those 'Star Wars Episode IX' Trailer Rumors?

An account has popped up online purporting to know what this year's Super Bowl trailer for Star Wars Episode IX will be -- but take this with a grain of salt, for a variety of reasons.

The report, which is being widely circulated by usually-credible news and tabloid sites, talks about the trailer being longer than the average trailer, and notes that neither Luke nor Leia is featured in it.

Any or all of that might be true, but the source of the rumor is a vlogger named Mike Zeroh, who often makes bold declarations about Star Wars and rarely turns out to be right.

If you Google his name, once you get beyond his own social media and YouTube presence, one of the first entries in the search is a YouTube thread that asks, "Has anything Mike Zeroh ever reported come to fruition? Has he ever been right?"

A quick read through that thread will inform casual fans that the Star Wars fan community generally rates his original content as not believable. While Zeroh does report on genuine news from credible sources, nobody seems able to recall him successfully coming out with a "scoop" of his own.

The thread is full of comparisons to "SuperShadow," a fan who ran a prequel "spoilers" site for years which was in fact a mix of other people's news, speculation, and fabrication.

"Just like Super Shadow, he's so convincing (at first)," one fan in the thread explains. "He's very adept at mixing confirmed information with his wild speculation. I remember I had friends who actually paid the monthly subscription to Supershadow. Despite my pleas, they continued to pay because he was 'entertaining.' That's exactly what you get with Mike Zeroh. Pure entertainment."

Another popular observation is that some fans would rather read false "leaks" than have no new news.

There is no indication that Zeroh intentionally fabricates news like SuperShadow did, rather that the line between news and speculation is intentionally blurry in his videos, and that his unsourced scoops often seem to come from fans online rather than actual insiders.

Even beyond Zeroh, trailer description stories have a notoriously low batting average, especially ones written months before the trailer is expected to drop.

On the other hand, with Luke supposedly dead and Leia appearing in only a few scenes, it is certainly plausible that we will get a trailer that features neither of them.